Action Comics 687 - 691

I’m back! And so is Superman! Or should I say: so are the Supermen! It’s the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline and it truly is raining Superman. Including the Definite Article, this storyline has five kooky characters claiming to be the Last Son of Krypton, and if I could work in any more consonance into this sentence, you bet I would.

Believe it or not, I’ve read these five issues three times, and each time I’ve enjoyed them less and less. I think I’ve figured out why. Part of it, clearly, is that I’m only reading a quarter of the story; since “Reign of the Supermen” carried through four titles, I’m losing 75% of the pacing and development. Here, more than with the previous two storylines, the problem with reading my collection alphabetically makes itself apparent. I can’t fairly judge the story without actually reading the whole thing. Am I being too stubborn? Perhaps. But despite the clear intent by the Superman creators to require people to read all Superman titles in order to read the whole story, writer Roger Stern stuffs in enough exposition to make sure anybody too stubborn to read the other titles can at least follow the plot. And the plot is essentially this:

In the aftermath of Superman’s death, four beings appear, each claiming to be Superman. In Action Comics, the initial spotlight falls on a being who can fly, can generate energy blasts from his fists, and wears a funky yellow visor. He also has a serious zero tolerance policy on criminals. Back when this story happened, he was known as “The Punisher Superman”, because he was dark and grim and did pretty much what the Punisher would do if he could fly and generate energy blasts from his fists. He would eventually be revealed to be the Eradicator, that fuzzy, fluffy energy construct that actually tried killing Superman a few issues back. But we didn’t know that at the time. We just thought it was DC desperately trying to be edgy and failing. Anyway, Eradicator Superman gets two issues to himself (issues 687 – 688) to establish his character and string the readers along the whole “which Superman is the real Superman?” tease, but then issues 689 – 691 are part of the massive twelve-part storyline in which Cost City gets nuked, Cyborg Supermen is revealed as a baddie, and the real Superman comes back and joins forced with the other Supermen to save the day. 

The problem is, the whole thing is clearly a matter of story over characters. The four Supermen aren’t particularly fleshed out, and you know they’re only there to tease out Superman’s eventual return anyway, so your investment in them is minimal. When Superman does return—his rebirth, fittingly, appearing in an issue of Action Comics—it’s handled so nebulously that you almost miss it. I get why: if the writers wanted to dangle the idea that maybe one of the current Supermen is the real deal, then they don’t want to make it that obvious that the real Superman is really Superman. 

But when Superman is resurrected, what does he do? Does he worry about Doomsday? Does he ask about Lois or his parents, or any of his friends? No, he asks his robot servants to turn on the cable TV so the reader can be treated to brief “the story so far”. This is the big moment fans have been waiting for? Superman returns and he’s decidedly . . . not super. Again, the only reason this is handled so anti-climatically is so they can have his big return-to-form during his final showdown with the Cyborg Superman. But if you’re going to kill Superman, surely his actual resurrection deserves to be something more than bursting from a big glowing cocoon and watching TV?

In fact, Superman is pretty much everything but Superman in these issues.  I can buy that he’s more serious than before, and I can believe that, having been dead, his super-powers are exceptionally weak. But when he and Steel do their Die Hard impression and infiltrate Engine City, we see Superman shooting it out with machine guns. Superman!  Using machine guns to fight! This is what the writers are reduced to? They don’t know how to write Superman without powers, so they give him some guns? If the whole point of killing Superman was to explore what he means to the world and what his place is in it, how could the writers miss the fact that using guns is diametrically opposed to the very thing Superman represents?

Superman is that ultimate ideal—a being who uses his extraordinary powers for the greatest good. Take away those powers and you should still have a being that is noble, compassionate, and selfless. Instead we have Superman mowing down alien baddies and trying to be bad-assed in the process. Granted, if you died and came back and suddenly found out that someone claiming to be you just nuked a whole city, I’m sure you would be pretty pissed off, too.  But then again, since this whole storyline is meant to show that there’s only one Superman, why is Superman behaving like everybody else?

The funny thing is, in 1993, this was the storyline that made me decide to keep collecting Superman. For the life of me I can’t figure out what the appeal was. Maybe, at 17/18 years of age, I really liked the idea of Superman using guns (a viewpoint that would, admittedly, put me in the same category as most 17/18 year old boys). Maybe I really am missing the proper impact of this storyline by not reading the issues in their proper order. If I did, I might better see the strengths rather than picking at the weaknesses. 

Of course, what’s also not fair is that I’m reading these stories with 18 years of additional hindsight.  (Oy, now there’s a scary thought: I am now twice as old as I was when I read “Reign of the Supermen” for the first time. Shudder.) While death was always a revolving door for comics, the novelty of a major character dying was still fresh in the ‘90’s. Sure, second stringers came and went at a writer’s whims, but killing off a top-selling, uber-popular character for more than one issue was practically unheard of until this storyline. By the 2000’s, killing off a well-loved character was standard practice but when Superman died, even though everyone knew he’d be back, there was a willing investment in seeing how it happen, because it never had happened before. If Superman was the first of his kind (meaning superheroes) his death was also the first of its kind and, for better or worse, the enjoyment of experiencing something like it for the first time can’t be repeated. At least, not for me.

Up Next: Superman’s back! The Status Quo (mostly) returns! Place your best to see whether the next batch of stories fare better in the jaded glare of my adulthood than this one. (Gee, with such a positive outlook, how could you not want to keep reading??)