Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Sorry Guys, I know this has probably been asked a thousand times, but i just recently found my copy of 'The Death of Superman', and i can't for the life of me remember what happens afterwards.  Like, I remeber that thousands of DC heroes come to Metropolis for Supe's funeral, and I rememer Batman taking care of the streets for a while, but anything else is a blank.  

How does Superman come back to life?

50 years later, superman is brought back to life as a robot. scientists brought him back to life. personally, i dont like the whole idea of superman being a robot but anyway, thats what happens.


                                 if you have anymore questions just ask,



                                                                                      The Rokyn

WHAT?? That never happen.

Please do not make stuff up.

You can find out what really happen here: http://www.supermanhomepage.com

Reports of Superman's death have been greatly exagerated.

Superman is a living solar energy battery. So, the Eradicator saved his body still filled with a few energy and put it in a machine that could restore his power.
Meanwhile, Pa Kent saved Kal's soul when he was dying for an heart attack. Jonathan survived, but there was no sight of his son.
Weeks later, the machines of the Fortress and this event made Superman back to life.
Superman knew the truth thanks to Dr. Occult.

Minor correction: The Eradicator used a Kryptonian Regeneration Matrix to help heal Kal-El's fatal injuries.  The matrix regeneration was assisted by the yellow solar energy environment of Earth.  The fortress drew upon extra yellow sun energy to help restore Superman and this nearly overloaded the fortress' systems if Kal hadn't been disgorged from the matrix.  Kal-El was well and truly categorically dead.  Only the Eradicator's matrix in the yellow sun environment which restored his body, and Jonathan's recovering Clark's soul in the afterlife made it possible for Superman to be revived.

(http://superman.nu/a/History/Today/exagerated.gif)

:s:

But in comic book time, he was dead for a very short amount of time. Less time than say...Hal Jordan, Green Arrow, Ras al Ghul, Jason Todd, or even Aunt May. So his death wasn't a big deal.

For him to have a funeral as big as he did was too much. Pre-Crisis, it would have made sense, because he was the first superhero. Post-Crisis, he was not the first "meta-human" and had been in Metropolis less than 10 years. And they should know by now that nobody stays dead...heck, none of Superman's villians did!

The storyline did  draw new fans to the Superman comics, who stayed until Zero Hour the next year.

I agree that the funeral was a bit too much.  In fact, I think the entire Death of Superman storyline was way overblown.  I'm still surprised some people thought he was going to die and stay dead.

Well, given the dark spiral the general comics industry was taking back then -- and still is today! -- it was believable that psychopaths like Lobo and Wolverine were the 'new super-heroes' and classics like Superman were then/now obsolete.  Killing off the Last Son of Krypton seemed in line with the drek the industry was inflicting upon us.

Well, I did. But I was also 10 years old, so that's my excuse.

Comics back then were all about brain dead gimmicks to sucker collectors who didn't even read the comics they brought into buying extra copies with idiotic covers, controversial story lines and of course meaningless comic book deaths that didn't mean anything since long time readers knew that no one ever stays dead in comics. The biggest of these gimmicks was of course the death of Superman, a story with some of the worst artwork ever, and some of the worst writing, and the worst villain of all time. It worked and DC made a killing and all those copies are worth now less than their cover price. The collectors moved on to other crap to buy, long time readers gave up after so many worthless gimmicks, prices shot up so that little kids could no longer afford comics anymore, and now most comics are struggling to even break even.

If only there were an Iron Age Fortress of Solitude Forum, Supermonkey's quote above would serve as the homepage text.  An excellent summation.

Does this picture help?

(http://www.geocities.com/ironmikethedj/RETURNOFSUPERMAN.jpg)

I think at this point, you shouldn't mess with the "S"

That is some hideous artwork. :l:

I thought that the plot line was a little "scattered" and needed a little more consistency in the storyline, but that's just me.  This was a big heavy book with really glossy pages.  I didn't trust the Cyborg version of him or the one with the yellow saftey glasses.  I think they really messed something up down at CADMUS.

To each his (or her) own. Overall I enjoyed the death and rebirth storyline, though I thought parts of it could've been better.

GOOD:

* Karl Kesel's writing. Karl is a great writer who can express a lot in just a few lines of dialog.

* The Man of Steel, a good new addition to the Superman milieu. (Though I think DC later botched it by making the guy a superhuman; his character works better as a sort of everyman, the guy with no special powers but who helps anyway out of personal responsibility and because somebody has to).

BAD:

* The Kryptonian Superman. Like most of Roger Stern's stuff, it moved at the pace of an asthmatic corpse. (That these parts were published in "Action Comics" strikes me as kind of ironic.)

* The ridiculous Deus Ex Machina ending.

As for the art, I liked Jurgens/Breeding and Grummet/Hazelwood, didn't care much for Guice/Rodier. Bogdanove/Janke, IMO, was kind of hit and miss -- sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

God, where to even begin on how clueless and thoughtless the Death of Superman maxiseries really was.

There's a specific moment when the badness of a concept just crystallizes. Remember the 1996 Godzilla movie? What was the exact point the lack of understanding the directors had of who Godzilla is really hit home? It had to have been when "Godzilla," when confronted by fighter jets, turns tail and runs away from them.

Godzilla doesn't run away from fighter jets.

Ditto here for Superman losing a fight to some random monster. Superman doesn't lose fights to big monsters. He's Superman.

What was worse was the lack of intelligence ascribed to Superman, who in every one of his good stories is shown to be clever and intelligent and resourceful and cunning. He couldn't think of a better plan than just sit there and trade blows with the monster (putting aside for the moment that Superman is supposed to be invulnerable)?

Here's one plan, and this is just off the top of my regular, non-Super Brain:

Why not just pick Doomsday up and throw him into orbit?

Or, have Superman lay his cape out on the ground, so that Doomsday walks over it, then, gather it together, and drag that into space?

Or use his Heat Vision to blind the monster temporarily with a flash and then trip it?

Or (and here's one plan from Alan Moore's SUPREME) trick Doomsday into digging until he's trapped at the Center of the Earth?

Or get two Justice League teleporter pads: set one up on Mars, and the other where Doomsday can be tricked into stepping on it?

And that's just off the top of my head.

What's worse, it seems, is that stupidity was an airborne virus that day: nobody else in the DC Universe thought of a similar plan. There's got to be at LEAST one telepath that can neutralize Doomsday mentally, so Superman's ultimate sacrifice wouldn't be required.

Even worse, the monster had no clear motivation. WHY did it destroy the city and attack mankind? We get no explanation. Maybe Doomsday had nothing better to do that day and wrecking cities is the big scary monster equivalent of going Cow Tipping.

Note: Dan "Electric Superman Was My Idea" Jurgens later retconned that the reason Doomsday went after Superman is because he was a Kryptonian. ...Right. And apparently Doomsday had heretofore unrevealed sensory power to detect Supes somehow from all the way in the Midwest? And if Doomsday COULD detect Superman somehow ("Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a Kryptonian") and pursued him, wouldn't Superman figure this out, and move himself to Antarctica, or at least somewhere that the fight would entail less collateral damage than say, downtown Metropolis?

And even Doomsday's potentially most interesting superpower, the ability to evolve a solution to defeat any foe, was handled incompetently by the writers (a superpower stolen from and more interestingly applied with Legionnaire Nemesis Kid). For instance, wouldn't it mean Doomsday, when facing defeat at the hands of Superman, would evolve into SOMETHING to deal with him - perhaps turning his body into Kryptonite, for instance?

And let's not forget the format of the actual issue: basically, several splash pages, making it the most I've ever paid for a coloring book somebody else has colored.