#also am i rereading war of the supermen again? maybe.

[mamawasatesttube]

superman: war of the supermen #4

truly i take my kon & kara crumbs where i can get them.

[davidmann95]

On one level hasn't Byrne's Superman been a smashing success? What other DC character has survived intact since 1986?

Well…I mean, this dude’s done pretty well for himself since 1986 too, I’d say.

I’d say considerably better, given that it was right around when Byrne revamped Superman that this guy beat him in the public eye now and forever, and people were generally satisfied enough with how he turned out that he’s stayed pretty much the same ever since with only a few tweaks - even the full reboot of the New 52 left him close enough to alone that it had to be retroactively established with Zero Year that anything of substance had been changed about him. Superman meanwhile went in the wake of Byrne’s reimagining from striding across the industry as a colossus, the undisputed most popular and lucrative superhero (and I’d say the most artistically successful as well up to that point other than Swamp Thing, the Spirit, and maybe Daredevil, between Moore’s work and Maggin’s novels), to a wistful kitsch afterthought at best, at worst a ‘mistake’ WB has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to correct. Obviously there’s much more to what went wrong there than Byrne’s work - I’ve written about it before - but dispensing with politeness for a second for the sake of directness? I 100% think John Byrne bears the blame for Superman’s diminished state over the years as much as any other one person alive. At minimum, he is the closest there is to an embodiment of the most destructive era for the character.

It’s a funny thing; Man of Steel was actually one of my first comics as a kid, and for years I really did love it. Superman was my favorite between picture books, the animated series and the Flesicher shorts my dad had on tape, and I guess that was the closest I had to a big, weighty story with him (it probably didn’t hurt either that my first version of his origin as a kid, The True Story of Superman, was based on it). Batman and Spider-Man eventually took the lead though, and when I really got into Superman again as a teenager and he really became my favorite character, and I reread that in light of what I had come to appreciate about him? It just left me cold. The middle chunk is still a solid little run of superhero adventure comics - even if they get a little checklist-ey - and they’re absolutely gorgeous between Byrne, Giordano, and Ziuko, but the beginning and end, how they establish him as a character, built a foundation I am absolutely willing to say has just not worked, even aside from Superman’s entire journey to heroism turning out to be “boy, I sure did ignore your moral lessons for the first 17 years of my life, mom and dad. I suddenly am The Best Person now though, so I’ll be Superman in arbitrarily-presented secrecy until I reveal myself to the world in plain streetclothes”.

I’ve talked plenty in chunks before about a lot of what didn’t work for me here, but hitting the high points:

* Streamlining the Superman/Clark divide to the point of near-nonexistence with a more ‘normal’ Clark makes sense in the abstract as a way of making him more down-to-earth and understandable, but in practice it removes an indescribable degree of character tension and definition, and also makes Clark relatively boring because he’s exactly like Superman but not doing Superman stuff.

* In an attempt at incorporating Christopher Reeve’s charming, all-loving take, one that hadn’t really been seen in the comics up to that point, Byrne settled on a guy with a decidedly limited emotional scope. While trimming out some of the neuroticism of the Silver Age version was probably a good move, what we ended up with was a Superman who, pleasant as he may have been, didn’t have much range to him beyond calm beneficence, affection, determined seriousness, and the odd moment of sadness/shock where appropriate. He may not have been outright stiff, but he definitely came off less as Your Cool Dad so much as just The Dad. Nice, but not really charming. He’s got a sense of humor, but he’s not exactly down with The Kids™ either. Great coworker, standup Joe, but you couldn’t exactly imagine having much of a conversation with the guy.

* It scaled his world to exactly the wrong degree for an ongoing comics version of the character. I may be onboard with a cosmic Superman, but bringing him closer to square one for a total overhaul makes sense. But instead of taking the logical step of bringing him all the way back to near the Golden Age and having him fight ‘realistic’ threats again, he fought the same array of supervillains as ever. So you got neither the catharsis of a champion of the oppressed battling real-world ills or the awe of a godlike superbeing battling unimaginable perils from beyond the stars; instead he was a very strong (but not too strong, that’d be silly) guy in a generic city who fought bad guys and won, and never struggled too hard in that because again, he’s the clean-cut Superman, so you can never show anything getting too intense. Not that it’s impossible to tell satisfying stories with that setup, Mark Millar did great stuff on a similar scale in Superman Adventures with clever adventure stories, but in practice most writers took the easy out of regular villain brawls - an inevitability for something as long-running as comics with creators not being forced to push themselves in one direction or another - and it ended up a worst-of-all-worlds mix in that regard.

* The soap opera approach of those years led to a ton of what’s commonly regarded as the dumbest stuff for the character, and I think led pretty directly to the neverending crossover setup that’s done so much to hobble him over the last decade. And when that approach ostensibly driven by emotional drama was paired with the reduction of internal conflict in Clark himself, I think the attempts at forcing that necessary conflict again while staying in line with how Byrne had established things ultimately led to a lot of the hand-wringing “What does it truly mean…for me to be…a…Superman?” moping of the last twenty years.

* Much like its years-later namesake, this version of Superman pushes a fairly hardline assimilation take on his relationship with his heritage where the place he came from was bad and wrong, and the climax of what emotional journey he has is embracing his status as a real human/American, which cuts out a lot of the idea of him as an alienated figure showing us to accept the strange and different. It also hasn’t particularly aged well in how blatant it is as an 80s Cold War metaphor: there sure is a lot of talk about how the Kents imagined the cold, isolationist, inhuman, deservedly-doomed-to-die place Clark came from might have been Russia.

* It’s the first set of Superman comics to start to internalize in a big way the idea that Superman, or at least most of the mythology of his world, is silly and dumb and need to be fixed, even as creators wanted to bring all the fun old stuff back, squaring that circle by way of making everything either tremendously more boring or infinitely dumber. A square world is stupid, Bizarro’s just a sad grunting Frankenstein who dies in his first appearance now. Invulnerable? That makes no physical sense, so he’s got a forcefield, that somehow totally explains it all. He’s gotta truly be the sole survivor of Krypton now, that’s heavy and realistic, but what about Supergirl? Well, she’s, ah, a fire-angel protoplasmic clone of Lana Lang from a pocket universe. Sure. Also Brainiac’s a carny possessed by/possibly hallucinating the classic villain. And later on, following in those footsteps, Krypto’s from a fake Phantom Zone Krypton, and Kandor has no Kryptonians, and there were no other Kryptonian survivors because of genetic manipulation by a nationalist Kryptonian supercomputer, and the Supermen Red and Blue were electric energy beings brought about to fight the Millennium Giants, and Toyman’s a pedophilic serial killer, and Zod’s a mutant dictator in power armor who absorbs red sunlight and may be in telepathic communion with the original character. Yes, all that’s dribbling fucking idiocy removing every ounce of charm from the basic concepts with almost surgical precision, but at least it’s all quite serious.

I know Byrne’s era has a ton of support - it’s an 80s soap opera comic, those tended to accumulate die-hard fans. I understand it was better from a craft perspective than its immediate predecessors, since the Superman titles had been intentionally kept in a holding pattern (except for Moore’s work) of simple adventure stories as introductory stuff for kids. I imagine the focus on his personal relationships did a lot for people, it introduced a handful of genuinely good ideas (Wolfman’s corporate baron Luthor ended up meshing well with the best of the established take, and him drinking in solar radiation over time to explain his changing powers was inspired, for instance), and this particular brand of smoothed-out clean-cut pleasant superheroism is easy to look back on as a brighter, lighter time. But it was a creative dead zone - just about every major beloved Superman story either came before this period, or after its influence notably started to wane. And boy did it wane: people have been trying to reboot away from this thing constantly, over and over again, restoring every old element Byrne and company discarded. There have been three major origin reboots in the last decade-and-a-half, each farther away from the last, with Mark Waid (one of Byrne’s loudest critics for decades) bringing back the conceptual baseline stuff Byrne had missed in Birthright, Geoff Johns bringing back all the Silver Age mythology he could, and Grant Morrison (who while appreciative of aspects of Byrne’s take, also commented it had a ��whiff of prefab plastic smugness”) pulling things all the way back to the Golden Age. And, with absolutely no caveats, Waid and Morrison’s word on Superman carries more weight than Byrne’s ever will. DC’s finally tried going back to Byrne’s version lately to grab on nostalgia dollars, and they’re even rebooting away from that next month less than a year after it began in earnest.

Obviously, Superman’s comics can only have so much impact on his public profile at this point. But Byrne’s ‘clean slate’ constricted possibilities and character, deadened the titles creatively for years, threw the line into a constant state of chaotic push-pull between creators who love essentially two different characters calling themselves Superman, and judging by how Superman’s lagged behind in other media since then, failed to inspire much in those charged with bringing his adventures to a larger audience, poisoning the brand far beyond the people still picking up his regular printed adventures. The film that did bring major aspects of Byrne’s vision to a larger audience in Man of Steel was…well, it was Man of Steel. Love it or hate it, there’s no argument to be made that the world broadly accepted it as an iconic, recognizable take on the character.

And that’s why, petty as it may be, I’ll always smile when I remember that Dick Giordano once pulled Byrne aside to explain to him "You have to realize there are now two Supermen – the one you do and the one we license.“ Still damn good art though.