It occurs to me that this November will mark the 20th anniversary of the Death of Superman. It’s becoming somewhat disconcerting to reach the 20th anniversary of my personal cultural touchstones. Last year it was a musical potpourri of anniversaries, as Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and U2’s Achtung! Baby hit the 20-year mark. (As did Rush’s Roll the Bones, but most of you are probably scratching your heads and going “Who?” rather than be overcome by visions of dancing skeletons pseudo-rapping , so let us stick with things more culturally shared. But if you want to know what you’re missing....)
Something tells me the death of Superman won’t be as popularly commemorated as much as Nevermind or Ten was, although I’m sure DC will be trotting out commemorative editions and special issues a’plenty when the time comes. But what may be forgotten is that when Superman died, the media frenzy was astounding. News programs led with the stoy, magazines featured it on their cover. Superman’s death was treated as a cultural milestone equivalent to the death of a king or president. While in current times you can kill off Captain America and every article ends with placing bets on his eventual return, when DC announced Superman would die, the media pretty much believed the hype that one of the biggest icons in America had gone to that great big Fortress of Solitude in the sky. It was like the death of a celebrity long passed their prime--nobody realized just how important Superman was until he was gone.
I think it speaks volumes that the impact Superman’s death has had has more to do with the concept of killing off an icon as opposed to the story itself. Comics had killed off popular characters before—Darvel’s Elektra and X-Men’s Jean Grey are probably two of the best examples—but none of them were even close to the level of popularity of Superman, and given how successful the story was (in terms of sales; we’ll get to the artistic merits in a moment), the “event” would lead to all sorts of derivatives, many of which we’ll get to over the course of this blog. People don’t remember the story of Superman’s death, they remember the fact that he did die and then he came back. It became the death that launched a thousand similar ships, which makes the story of how he died superfluous.
Of course, a great death can still resonate, despite its temporary nature. (Just off the top of my head, you have Spock’s death in Star Trek II as being a great death that still holds its weight even knowing of Spock’s eventual return.) If the story itself had value, perhaps people would be a little more charitable in assessing its legacy. The problem with "The Death of Superman" is it’s clear the writers were working backwards, starting from the idea of killing Superman and then figuring out how to do it. The means become secondary to the ends, and that helps explain why Doomsday is a total cipher. I talked about this when I wrote about Action Comics’s contribution to the Death of Superman so I won’t get too far into it here, but suffice to say, when the killing mechanism is a thing devoid of personality, how do you expect the reader to be invested in the threat? Doomsday is essentially a force of nature, and since we’ve already seen Superman handily deal with hurricanes, erupting volcanoes and various natural disasters without breaking a sweat, why should we view Doomsday as any worse? We have only the writer’s literally telling us that he is, but nothing they show backs that up, because nothing Doomsday does is anything we haven’t seen a thousand times before.
All that said, I am inclined to be a bit more charitable to the story now that I’ve read another quarter of it. It’s become very clear that reading these stories out of order is more detrimental than I first thought it would be. Issue 497 of Adventures of Superman directly precedes Action Comics #684, and though I still think that issue was heavy on “telling not showing”, there’s a better sense of the escalation shown in Action Comics given what happens in this issue of Adventures. I think, once I reach Superman, I will actually read this whole crazy storyline in its intended order. Having now read half out of sequence, I’d be curious to know whether things do read better as a whole, or if the weaknesses I’ve seen so far are prevalent.
I definitely liked Jerry Ordway’s writing more than I did the last few issues, no doubt helped by there being no attempt at humor during this oh-so-serious story (although the Jimmy Olsen sub-plot of him being the daytime kid TV host Turtle Boy came close, and actually was kinda funny). But there’s still little to get excited about. Issue 497 opens up with Superman chasing Doomsday, after the killing machine pointedly did not kill anyone in the Justice League (he did beat the living crap out of them, but so did most serious villains; the early 90’s JL was a pretty lame bunch). In Action Comics, the threat of Doomsday was amped to the point that a mountain range was destroyed; here they just blow up a gas station, which seems to knock out Superman far more than a gas explosion usually does. Really, there’s dubious power-levels all around, as Superman is commenting on how winded he is, even though he’s fought off space armada’s without working up as much a sweat. At the end of the issue, when Superman says “I’ve still got to stop [Doomsday] and now I realize I have to do it alone.” it is so obviously contrived. The idea is he’s saying this because Doomsday trashed the Justice League and because Maxima got in the way of Supes trying to subdue Doomsday, which must mean Doomsday is too dangerous for anyone to face but him. The problem is: A) As I’m happy to reiterate: the then-current Justice League was made up of second- and third-stringers so they were hardly the best of the best in terms of Earth’s heroes, and B) while Maxima was supposed to be incredibly powerful, she was clearly a stubborn, pig-headed personality that doesn’t lend itself well to teamwork. Why the hell didn’t Supes call in the big guns like Batman, Captain Marvel, or Wonder Woman, to fight this creature? Oh yeah—because if he did there would have been a reasonable expectation that they could’ve collectively beaten Doomsday and then there wouldn't be any to-the-death finish for the Big Blue Boy Scout.
Ordway’s contributions to “Funeral for a Friend”—the storyline dealing with the aftermath of Superman’s death—are serviceable enough. It was actually quite jarring to see Lois Lane break down as much as she did, which makes sense given she just had her lover die in her arms. But the sequence where people try to use defibrillators to resuscitate Superman—and then need to jerry-rig a Kirbyesque machine to provide enough power to actually affect Superman’s heart—with various characters figuratively tripped over one another in trying to get the job done, read like an attempt at levity that just fell flat (once again showing that humor is not Ordway's strong suit). In the second issue is part of the whole “who stole Superman’s body?” storyline that took up the second half of “Funeral for a Friend” and it’s noticeably weaker because of the standard superhero shenanigans that such a plot requires. This shows how the Superman writers sorely misjudged their priorities. In a story about how the world would live without Superman, why is the main plot involving the kidnapping of Superman’s body? Why not show us how the world dealt with Superman-level threats without him? Why couldn't this story be used to let the supporting cast shine on their own, emerging from Superman's shadow as opposed to staying stuck within it?Given the wealth of supporting characters that show up in these issues--Inspector Sawyer, Detective Turpin, Bibbo, Supergil, Jose “Gangbuster” Delgado, and of course everyone from Project: CADMUS--surely some of them are well-developed character to carry the spotlight for an issue or two.
Next Issue: Well, I was planning on talking about this title's part in “The Reign of the Supermen” storyline but, not too surprisingly, I’ve written quite a lot already. So I’ll follow up in a few days with the final component to Superman’s Death and Return, wherein we ponder the 90’s incarnation of Superboy and wonder why is it not OK to tug on Superman’s cape, but staring at Supergirl’s breasts is entirely acceptable.
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