SteamTeck writes:I would argue the original Byrne stories were actually pretty good and mostly upbeat until we hit the Legion fix stories. The problem is Byrne didn't realize what a mess later writers would make of his changes or the reprocusions of them..
Well, this gets back to the point I was making about the importance of starting things off on the right foot.
Jerry Seigel relegated Krypton to a couple of panels in the first origin story and all we knew was it was an advanced culture in the Flash Gordon mold..something cool and spiffy looking. It was only years later when other writers (and a returned Seigel) started filling in the blanks, as it were, and tried to flesh out the details; what kind of technology might exist on Krypton? What would Superman's father have been like as a person? How would an advanced culture deal with crime and punishment? And so on. What emerged, bit by bit, was an appealing culture we could admire and aspire to. Was that the objective from the beginning? Possibly not, but as the legend grew, writers and readers realized this was a cool place.
Byrne recreated Krypton as a dystopia. Like Seigel, he didn't dwell on it much...it was there, it blew up, end of story. But in order to get to that moment in "Man of Steel" #6 when Supes says, "I don't care where I'm from, I'm an Earthman now," Byrne stacked the deck and made Krypton the kind of place it was hard to pine for. Or perhaps more to the point, he tried to make Superman's arrival on Earth an "escape," a gift from father to son, a chance to live life more fully and satisfyingly than he ever would at home. Fair enough, but again other writers had to follow and in time they, too, would want to flesh out the details. What was life like on this Krypton? What kind of man was Jor-El? And so on. And the answers they got were very different from the answers pre-Crisis writers got, because the basic building blocks provided by Byrne were totally inverted from those given by Seigel.
So to my mind, there is no such thing as "minutae" when it comes to the Superman mythos, or at least not when it comes to his origin. However sketchy the details when you start out, they will over time be fleshed out and added to, and they will slop over into other aspects of the book until they are so entwined in the mythos they can't be ignored. Consider: the portrayal of Krypton post-Crisis affects the way Superman sees himself, the way he interacts with his foster parents, the way other aliens see him, and so on. It gave us the Eradicator, the Cleric, the new Fortress and tons of other trappings in the new legend. In various ways, the new Krypton has affected every facet of the new Superman.
Anyway, you're right: I don't think Byrne did consider the repercussions of his stories, which is why he was the wrong man for the job. He's good at playing with other people's toys...Jerry Seigel's, Stan Lee's, Jack Kirby's...but except for some FF stuff, I've always felt everything he ever did on any character at Marvel or DC should carry an "Elseworlds" label...maybe it's fun to read, but it should never be canon.