Superman Through the Ages! Forum

What is your favorite period of Superman comics?

Writing-wise, the Bronze Age hands-down.

Art-wise? As much as the post-Crisis books have sucked, they've had some terrific artists along the way. Ordway, Gammill, Grummett, Jurgens, McLeod, Kitson, McGuinness, Mahnke, Wieringo, Reis, Lee, Bermejo, and Benes are all top-tier talents. If there was a way to mix their art with the quality of writing from the Bronze Age, I'd be a happy camper.

Weisinger...the myth maker.

Weisinger Era hands down.

The Bronze Age.

"An age where men and women wore their greatness as easily as they wore their clothing or their names..."

I voted for the Schwartz/Bronze era yesterday.

Interestingly enough, as of this posting, no one's seems to have even anonymously voted for the Byrning or the current era.

The problem here is there are two current eras.

The era of the various animated series and related comic books.  Kara In-Ze, Braniac being responsible for destroying Krypton, etc.

The era that is post-Birthright and is in a state of flux depending on how the new Supergirl turns out and is birthright canon

You can't eat a half-baked cake.  ;)

Indeed. Elliot S! Maggin was a big reason that I enjoyed the Bronze Age so much. And it wasn't just Superman who was written well in the Bronze Age, there were many other great stories and writers (from both DC and Marvel).

I think Weisinger era was actually more nuanced and inventive, as well as more consistent artisitically/continuity-wise.

Weisinger by a mile, followed by Golden Age, when super heroes were new, love the original idea of the Batman, Spectre etc...

The Bronze Age actually left me cold, its mixture of past continuity and watered down social relevence didn't meet either objective...

I almost picked the Bronze Age but I really enjoy those stories from the previous era more(58-70). Besides the Bronze Age is really just an extension of the Silver Age with more "relevant" storytelling (Marvelization). I grew up reading the B.A. books but when I started to seriously collect I found I enjoyed the 12 centers a lot more and those stories, for the most part, really stick in your head for all time.

KM

The continuity and seriousness of Superman was better in the Bronze Age.

Also, Julie Schwartz made it a point to establish where exactly Superman fit in a cohesive DCU.  Superman clearly wasn't just another super-hero but the super-hero and of truly legendary, mythological importance to the DCU.

Much as I love the work of Maggin and Bates, there's just no comparison to the explosion of ideas and myth-building in the Weisinger years: Kara, Krypto, Kandor, the Phantom Zone, the Legion, Bizarro, Brainiac, the Fortress, Lori Lemaris, the list goes on and on.  The incomparable art team of Swan and Klein, the wonderful scripts of Seigel, Schwartz, Coleman, Binder and Hamilton.  This was Superman's true Golden Age.

Much of what modern fans love about comics, whether they know it or not, started here.  The tragic, emotional Superman of Seigel's "Return to Krypton" and later tales laid the groundwork for the conflicted psyches of the Marvel line-up (especially Spider-Man).  The intricate, nuanced Superverse introduced the kind of dense, cross-title continuity that so delights mutant fans today, and so on.

Mort himself may have been a prize jerk, but the stuff his team put out was pure gold.  Everything since has simply been a reaction to it, whether streamlining it (the Bronze Age), deconstructing it (Byrne) or ripping it off (the modern era's given us new versions of Supergirl, Kandor, Nightwing, Brainiac, Terra-Man, Toyman, you name it. None of them an improvement).

I was going to post why I voted for the Weisinger Era, but Nightwing had already said everything I intended to.

I love the Julie Schwartz edited titles and almost voted for that era, but the Weisinger Era stands above it in my mind fir the reasons Nightwing stated.

Mort's the man. This is the period in Superman's history that I grew up with and I have the fondest memories of.

The Weisinger era. My favourite era for Superman, with it's inventive science fiction and fairytale elements. I also love the whole family dynamic with Superman, his kid 'sister', his dog, his girlfriend, his friends, even his allies (Batman and Robin). And yet, it is his remembering of his lost home-world, a world of considerable technological achievement and beauty, that adds a tragic element to the mythos.  :D The whole Superboy thing is great as well, which I still think could well work in today's comics. Superboy is like for me the saga of a small-town superhero taking his first steps into becoming the most renowned superhero in any universe, (in Crisis, even Kal-L of Earth-2 refers to Kal-El as the greatest hero of any of the heroes present).

Making my first post to this website, though I've been lurking here for a long while now...

My vote is for the Bronze Age Superman; the Bronze Age for myself strikes me as the halfway point between some of the really goofy (though still fun) bits of the Weisinger-era stories and Byrne's, well, Byrne-ness (Supes sent to Earth as a fetus? Clark a top jock in high school?! Yeah, *sure* he was...). Swan, Maggin, Bates, Schaffenberger (on "New Adventures of Superboy"), all fun.

Bronze Age forever!

Actually, I especially liked the early Bronze Age -- circa 1970-1977. This was the heyday of Maggin and Bates, with an occasional Len Wein story (okay, okay, I even liked some of Denny O'Neil's stuff). These guys could always come up with an interesting problem for Superman to solve. And Julie and Nelson made sure they kept the continuity of the Silver Age without the silliness.

My second favorite era was the Silver Age, just because it was silly at times. My exposure was limited to reprints (in 100-pagers, Limited Collector's Editions, etc.), but they were great fun! Who can forget Zigi and Zagi? Or Superman in the Space Olympics?

Then there's the Golden Age! The early stories and art were pretty crude, but between 1942 and 1948 Superman was really cool.

Welcome to the boards, Johnny Nevada!

Given recent headlines, I was afraid you were no longer with us.  :wink:

Thanks, Nightwing. I'm sure Johnny Carson's Earth-One analogue is still doing just fine :-)

To be honest, was half-inclined to pick "Nightwing" as a screen name (since I use it on another web forum), but wound up realizing I needed something that someone probably hasn't chosen... the alternatives were: something to do with "Pinky and the Brain" (an episode called "Two Mice and A Baby" has the rodents reaching baby Kal-El's rocket first---and the opening sequence on Krypton/the episode itself makes it crystal-clear it's the Earth-One version the mice discovered), Bash Bashford, or Ducky Ginsberg (Clark Kent's college roommate, in the "New Adventures of Superboy" stories and "Superman: the Secret Years" stories I've been reading).

There isn't an actual "formally introduce yourself" post/forum somewhere, is there?

I love the post-Crisis tales by John Byrne. When i was a kid I didn't like Superman. Then, when i was 16, i bought an anthology containing a lot of pre and post-Crisis tales and I read MAN OF STEEL 1... I loved it. Byrne is my favourite artist/writer, and I really like his run on the Super titles.
During the last 2 years I have found a lot of Bronze Age issues in the Italian edition (from the late '70s). "Byrne Age"  is still my favourite period, but the Bronze Age Superman is very, very interesting, too... I like the stories by Maggin and Bates, they were really good writers. I'd like read new stories from them!
Sadly, in Italy their long run wasn't published very well: some issue was never published, and that period is not well known. For example, Editrice Cenisio (Superman's Italian publisher during the '70s and 'early '80s) didn't published the issues with the end of the Superman/Lois relationship, so the readers didn't know because Clark and Lana were engaged!
Now I'm buiying via Internet a lot of Bronze Age issues because I want have a complete collection of that great period.

Can I add a thing?
I think that Byrne could do a great work even with the original characters. Do you agree with me?

In my opinion, Byrne was (and still is, as far as I know) a good artist, but a mediocre writer. I liked the post-crisis Superman much more after other people took over for him.

Dan Jurgens isn't the best writer in the world. He's good at gimmicks that sell comics...in fact, all he really did was turn the old imaginary stories into "real" stories- the death and wedding. And Zero Hour was just plain awful...it was like "Look at me! I can do Crisis on Infinite Earths too! I'm cleaning house!"

There have been a lot of good Superman writers over the years, too many to name. I like Siegel, Maggin, Waid, Loeb...

My favorite Superman artists would definitely be Curt Swan, Tom Grummet, and Jim Lee, even though they haven't always worked with the best writers. I grew up with the Byrne Superman, but the more backstories I read I wish they would change the name of the Man of Steel miniseries to "Just Imagine John Byrne's Superman."

I don't think Jurgens is the world's best writer either. Sometimes I like what he comes up with, other times not. I did enjoy the death storyline, but not particularly for Jurgens' contributions -- the Cyborg Superman had a contrived origin and his defeat was a pretty horrible deus ex machina. I would rate him above Byrne (or at least above Byrne's work on Superman), but that isn't saying a lot. My favorite writer on the "new" Superman was Karl Kesel.

As for "Just Imagine John Byrne's Superman"... heh heh heh.

"Just Imagine John Byrne's Superman"

(http://instagiber.net/smiliesdotcom/otn/confused/fie.gif)

The point of "Just Imagine John Byrne's Superman," I think, is that it would've been like Stan Lee's version, i.e. a one-shot mini-series after which the regular continuity would have resumed.

Plus they both have the same thing in common.... they were awful  :l:

Hmmm ... now that I think about it, though, there were a lot of great Superman stories from Julius' era that are near and dear to my heart, too.

Although a lot of the coolest facets of Superman's universe were invented during the Weisinger era, I'm going to go with the Schwartz era. Nothing compares with Maggin's stories, IMO.

The Byrne/Jurgens stuff just doesn't hold up over time. When I was in my early-to-mid teens I was in love with the whole Death-and-Return arc. And then I revisited it a few years later, and I couldn't believe I had ever enjoyed it.

I felt the same way when I was younger. Looking back now, I can clearly see the flaws.

Actaully the wedding was a 'real' story before Jurgens did it. See the online comic "Superman Takes a Wife." (Action #484) writen by Cary Bates which has the 'original' Superman (Earth-2) finally marrying Superman.

During the Silver and more so in the Bronze age Superman's powerlevel had gone up and up and away. We even had a joke about  how powerful
Superman was during this period:

Superman saves a forgotten civilization in the Andromida galaxy, then moves a planet out of the way of a comet in Quazar 26 100 million light years from Earth, and finally saves Lois Lane from Lex Luthor all in 2.2  seconds.  "Slow Day" thinks Superman.

Superman was so powerful that magic and even Krytonite were appearing with annoying regularity. Byrne's reboot brought some badly needed fresh air to Superman. But things started to go haywire when it became clear that the Legion books were not going to reboot their history despite the fact LSH v3 #18 had left them a perfect out to get rid of Superboy and the whole 9 yards.

Then DC had it Legends crossover which shoved the LSH continuty problems in everybody's face. Then they had the LSH try and find out what was going on and so the Pocket Universe was created though Byrne had it an alternate reality while the Legion writers in typical blundering fasion had is a Pre-Crisis world the Trapper somehow saved (if history was rewritten their wouldn't be anything for the Trapper so save. He exists at the end of time not the beginning). Then the grim and gritty hits both books and aside for the few bright spots (like the early part of the Dominus saga) things basicly go south.

That's true. I hadn't thought of the Earth-2 Superman wedding...at that point he wasn't the "main" Superman, though...but you're right.

I have heard a lot of complaints about Superman's power levels. It's clear that Byrne was trying to return to the Action Comics #1 type of Superman. (Unfortunately for Superman fans, it seems that he read Action Comics #1 but didn't concern himself with much of the Superman legend after that, except Lana Lang.) But therein lies a problem. In the original comics, "nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin." Superman is the original, and he needs to be set apart somehow. If a bursting shell could penetrate his skin, that makes him no different from Wolverine, the Punisher, or Spider-Man. So to some extent, I think that Kal-El's power levels are always increased out of necessity. That is, after all, the difference between man and superman. Humanoids on Krypton are supposed to be much more highly evolved than us, or even the mutants that exist in some comics.

Lifting a car over one's head was sensational in the 1930s. Moving a planet is excessive, but I think there is a balance somewhere inbetween that favors a very powerful Superman.

Byrne's Superman was similar to Siegel's and Shuster's version: a man with empowered abilities.
A normal man can jump... Superman can fly.
A normal man can run... Superman can run at great speed.
And so on.

Silver Age Superman, instead, was too much distant from a normal man: can a man use superhypnosis or superventriloquism? Usually not. So, Byrne decided to make Superman an £empowered man (not divine like) again.

I like both versions, so I have not problems with this change.

Also the Silver-Bronze Age Superman was so powerful that to give him something to do you had him running into red sunrays, Kryptonite, and magic as if there was somesort of Anti-Superman Emporium around. Ay least the Golden age power of super facial muscles quickly disappeared as that would have really made the character even harder to handle.

The problem with this (common) argument in favor of Byrne's Superman is thus:

The Silver-Age Superman WAS Siegel's Superman. He wrote Superman until the last few years of the Silver Age, so it's not like someone betrayed his original vision and Byrne set it back in place. Byrne just got rid of it and went back to Action Comics #1, which Siegel had progressed 30 years beyond.