Superman Through the Ages! Forum

It can be painful to admit, because we're all Superman fans that love the character, but what are some of the most jaw-droppingly clueless, conceptually divorced, and all-round WORST Superman stories ever told? It's very revealing to hear which fans believe specific stories do not work, because it reveals their personal tastes and preferences.

Here are mine:


SUPERMAN SPECIAL NO. 1 (1983) "Behold, the Ultimate Man" (Gil Kane)

Reading this from cover to cover, I'm positive there's not an original idea in the entire thing.

The tale is about a scientist that discovers a means to evolve himself upward until he acquires titanic mental powers. Isn't this the premise of something like fifty TWILIGHT ZONE episodes? What his gigantic new hydrocephalic head lacks in the ability to wear hats, it makes up for in the amazing superpower to do whatever Gil Kane needed him to do at any given moment, including creating tidal waves (somehow) and pulling out meteors from space. To quote SUPREME: "Watch out! His powers are so ill defined as to be virtually limitless!" But this begs the question: if the scientist is now so powerful that he can create volcanic eruptions and fire comets to the earth to distract Superman, why doesn't he just turn the blood in Superman's veins to Kryptonite or trap him in a field of stopped time?

The "evolutionary advancement" to gain superpowers is not the most original idea here (the High Evolutionary, Captain Comet, and X-Men after all, were all doing this before it was cool) but even this derivative concept was particularly tired here. The scientist advances himself through the future state of humanity and it's a guy with a giant head. Gee, how innovative. What's especially rich, though, is the fact he's described as "genetically perfect." When I think of perfect, I think of Michaelangelo's David. I don't think of creepily slim giant-headed hipsters with a stare like he just smoked a reefer the size of a highway flare. Later on, he takes another evolutionary advancement, his head increases to twice the size of the rest of his body, requiring a chair to move him around. If you're being derivative of the hypercephalic Mobile Organism Designed Only for Killing (MODOK) you've really cribbed off the bottom of the barrel.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that there was a moral there about how "man loses his humanity with too much intelligence?" Nope, never heard that one before.

Superman's solutions to problems are a snore. He escapes from the belly of a space monster by Spinning Really Fast to collect the anti-energy or whatever the hell, I really can't figure it out. And if you've seen Superman stop a volcano, comet, and hurtling asteroid one time, you've pretty much seen them all. None of it is worth mentioning.

Lissen up, son, because I'm only going to say it once: ARTISTS CAN'T WRITE. Well, not exactly true:  there's Jack Kirby, Eisner, and Jim Starlin and...oh yeah...NOBODY ELSE. Steve Englehart and Alan Moore started out as artists (believe it or not) but they were writers and talented professionals foremost. Gil Kane is a classic artist that deserves every bit of his legendary reputation but that doesn't mean he can write. Just because Alan Ginsberg was a great poet does not mean he would be a great cagefighter.

Yeah, there have been some shockingly terrible Superman stories, but this one was bo-o-oring.


Most Superman Elseworlds after 1990 (too many to individually single out, but especially the MAN OF STEEL 1997 annual where he's Mowgli, SPEEDING BULLETS, and that one whose name I forget that has Superman as a Sports Star)

Why is it the older "Imaginary Stories" worked but most recent Elseworlds don't?

The most interesting "What If..." type stories are ones that stem from ONE departure from reality. As in, "What if Superman was sent to Oa instead of Earth?" or "What if Superman married Lori Lemaris for real?" or "What if Superman came to earth with his mother?" The best ones even have a SPECIFIC point of departure from reality: Dr. Kim-Da was unable to reach the button in time, and so Superman stayed tiny and Kandor was re-enlarged on Earth. The interesting thing about playing the Imaginary Story game is to see how differently things went.

Other kinds of "Imaginary Stories" were interesting because they were a possible future that may or may not happen; it had the thrill of prophecy, of seeing the future. It combined the satisfaction and fascination with a kind of enjoyable speculation and conjecture about the shape of things to come; learning how things would eventually develop and affect the characters. This is why Jimmy Shooter's Adult Legion story was such a treat; it told us FOR REAL how things would happen.

Recent "Elseworlds" don't work because either they alter so much that they are totally unrecognizeable; there is no touchstone left that makes them the character it is supposed to be a variant on. The Elseworlds arc in Morrison's JLA failed because while the idea of Wally West getting a magic ring from a New God that covers him in jelly that gives him Superspeed...well, that's interesting, it is totally unrecognizeable as an alternate anything, feeling more like a rejected Morrison proposal for another character that he shoehorned onto Wally West.

In other types of recent Elseworlds, characters are "plugged in" to a formula, and the fact the characters are who they are is unimportant. It reminds me of those SIMPSONS episodes where they do Hamlet, but it's Bart as Hamlet and Lisa as Ophelia and Moe the Bartender as Claudius. The fact that Lisa is Ophelia adds nothing to the story; they're just doing Hamlet with SIMPSONS-style wisecracks, with no deviation. Likewise, when they do Superman becoming Mowgli, it not only is the 19th Century, and Luthor is a wealthy big game hunter. The fact the character is Superman does not change the JUNGLE BOOK plot.

Worst of all, there is a sense of inevitability about the Superman story. In the end, even if Superman had been a celebrity that used his powers to be a sports star, he puts on the glasses and becomes nerdy Clark Kent in the last panel. Superman and Lois always get together at the end. What's the point of an Elseworld if things become the same as we knew them before? It also stretches the plausibility; if Superman crashed in China, he'd probably have as his girlfriend a Chinese girl, NOT Lois Lane (maybe a... Ling Liu?)


DEATH OF SUPERMAN (Jurgens, other weasels)

I wrote a critique at length about what didn't work about this criminal and terminally unintelligent series. The only thing I can possibly add is that my criticism above is that Dan Jurgens is an artist that writes (question...answered).


Originally I wanted to add to this list "The Computers that Saved Metropolis" ACTION COMICS #509 (1980), which was basically a 28-page advertisement for Radio Shack/Texas Instruments computers. Okay, it had Superman talk about the history of computers for three pages in the most dry way imaginable (he gives out details about how many vaccuum tubes and capacitors ENIAC used, for godsakes) and the way the action stops for Superman to whip out his NEW, TRS-80 COMPUTERS!!! But it had the benefit of great Starlin art and Cary Bates script that made the whole thing cool and campy instead of outright manipulative. They got use out of Major Disaster, a great villain, and Superman's problem (requiring the kids to use the computers to help him plot super-stunts) is genuinely novel. As the Supermen of America pointed out, it's fun to watch little tots kick keyster (remember the Frog Brothers from THE LOST BOYS? Man, they should have gotten their own spin-off movie)

I'm not familiar with that Superman Special.  I may have read it, but it didn't register with me.  Possibly I never bothered to pick it up at the time it was released.
The Worst Superman story?  Probably the attempt to say Clark's glasses allowed him to hypnotize people into seeing Clark as looking different than Superman.  Even the slightest thought would find flaws in this theory.  They were trying to find a rational explanation for something totally irrational and it failed on all levels.

The Elseworlds stories?  I rarely pick them up.  The original concept was to place characters like Batman in different historical times.  It seemed rather silly to me and I had no interest in them.  Batman in the Civil War?  Really.  The recent ones haven't improved much at all.  They were worse than most of Marvel's What If stories.  The first dozen so What If tales were interesting, but then they got more and more pointless.

As you pointed out, the original Imaginary Stories explored possibilities that the readers wanted to see or know.  Yes, more often than not these had disasterous consequences for the characters, but they were still fun to read.  The latter day Imaginary Stories, those not done by Mort Weisinger, were as week as Marvel's later day What If tales.  It seemed as if Mort understood what made an imaginary story interesting.  The Murray Boltinoff "Superman 10 years from now in a wheel chair can't walk or use his powers because he has a mental block" is a good example of how they can blow an imaginary story.

I'm certain there are dozens of other really bad Superman stories other members here can recall.  Especially if you start to include the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen tales as well.

SUPERMAN #180.

A trash story. I'm a Loeb fan, but this issue is really bad... Clark, Lois and Jimmy goes to Transylvania. Of course, if you go there, you must meet Count Dracula. There are a couple of interesting moments, i.e. when Superman and Lois, hypnotized by Dracula in different moments complain about recent events (Lois: "You left my father die to save Wonder Woman!"; Superman: "You left me alone after the Imperiex war!"). Last but not least, Ian Churchills art. Sigh.

"Critical conditions".

A four part crossover by Loeb, Kelly and others. A nice story, but it's too long (4 issue to show a travel into Superman's body) and bad, bad arts by Carlo Barberi and Duncan Rouleau. Worst Superman artists ever!

The Seagle/Mc Daniel run.

Except for the first issues... Ideas? What are them?

There are other bad stories in my library, but luckily most of the Superman books I have read are good. Let's face it, you cannot write a bad story with Superman!

Actually like Marvel's What If? Elseworlds has been all over the quality map but I agree that to a large degree that the efforts using Superman have been largely lackluster. Compare "Castle of the Bat" which took the Frankenstein story in a totally different direction to the effort with Superman as the monster which basicly rehashed the Novel.

Superman & Batman: Generations was a great redoing of the Silver Age with a darker tone to it but then came Superman & Batman: Generations II with made no sence and ended with the worst copout since Dallas.

You haven't been reading the new stuff have you?  :)

The Vanishing?  Superman subconciously kidnapped over 1 million humans off Earth and put them in the Phantom Zone.

Superman the porn star(with Big Barda)

What's worse is, it came out almost a few weeks before the DC COMICS PRESENTS ANNUAL NO. 2 (1983) that gave us Elliot S! Maggin's Superwoman.



I can't believe I forgot to mention Roy Thomas's SUPERMAN: METROPOLIS, where Superman Forrest Gump-style involves himself into the story. It was terrible. Some things are great on their own - fish sticks, peanut butter, ice cream. Please don't put them together, Roy. Really.

As for the WHAT IFs... while the one involving Thor leaving Avengers after the Hulk did was interest, or the "What If Wonder Man Had Lived?" story were really impressive, as was the Kurt Busiek-written "What if Charles Xavier became the Juggernaut?" For the most part they have been with wildly implausible premises involving forgettable storylines and popular characters, like "What if Wolverine was Lord of the Vampires?" Gag!



Nah. Coming down on the Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comics is a little like kicking your dog because he can't do calculus. Stories should be rated in terms of "what it is they set out to accomplish, and how successful were they in doing what they set out to do?" For this reason, I enjoyed very much THE SCORPION KING movie, whereas more ambitious films like the overlong, plodding, pretentious COLD MOUNTAIN can be judged as resounding failures. One has to adopt a proper mentality when seeing a film or reading a kind of comic book. There is a specific kind of mentality when seeing a Japanese monster movie, too: what makes one like DESTROY ALL MONSTERS! or GODZILLA VS. GIGAN successful is different than one would use to rank, say, ROSEMARY'S BABY.

Can Jurgens' entire career count as a "worst?"  :wink:

I dont follow the new ie modern series but was browsing when I saw the Transilvania ish Genis mentioned...and then you have Jimmy singing "Going Through the Motions" from the musical episode of Buffy and that horrendous art?????????!!!!!!!!!!-++

The real responsible is the new Zod, who stole the Vanishing machine.



One of the few Byrne ideas I didn't like. But, luckily, Superman didn't do any porn movie (Mr. Miracle stopped him)!

I think that's way too sweeping a generalization. There are plenty more artists who turned to writing and did at least a decent job at it. Just off the top of my head:

* Karl Kesel (Post-crisis, but still one of the best writers to work on Superman, IMO);

* George Perez;

* Frank Miller (I understand that people have problems with the kind of stuff he writes, and disagree with his usage of established characters, but I don't see how you can deny his ability);

Even Jurgens and Ordway aren't bad writers, IMO -- though the former isn't as good as he seems to think he is.

I think the real lesson here is that artists should not be automatically presumed to make good writers. They should have to prove themselves to the fans (and to the editors), just like anybody else.

Dave Gibbons isn't bad at writing, either.  And I liked Walt Simonson better writing and drawing Thor than I did when he just drew other writers' stories (except maybe Archie Goodwin's Manhunter).

Getting back to What If? for a second, my big problem with so many of those stories was that they all turned out so negative.  

What if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?  
They'd all die, that's what!

 What if the Avengers went to...
They'd all die!

Well then what if the X-Men...
Dead, dead, dead!

After awhile it seemed the bigger message of the series was, "Look, if anything happened at all different from the way we told you it did, you'd be really sorry, so stop asking already!"

For my taste, far too many Elseworlds take the same path.  The attraction for writers and artists seems to be that it's a way to do things with established characters that they couldn't do otherwise.  Which more often than not means, kill them.  Comics creators are a bloodthirsty bunch.

That said, I always liked What if #4 (I think), about Steve Rogers' life had he NOT been frozen in ice at the end of World War II.[/i]

Osamu Tezkua is an extreme example that disproves the idea that artists can't write.  One does not have a museum put up in one's honor for being mediocre.  :)

There was a Superman story that really irked me that John Byrne wrote.  It was in Action Comics Weekly.  He said that the Metal Men were plastic and that they did not have the rights that humans did(Byrne seems to have a hatred for the mechanical heroes), despite they got citizenship in the world in their last comic.  Superman told them: You are nothing more than machines.

ShinDangaioh, that's just more of Byrne's personal POV that he dragged over from his Marvel days re: the Metal Men.  Despite decades of great work from writers far superior to Byrne that firmly established the worth, humanity, and rights of artificial lifeforms at both DC and Marvel, Byrne resolutely treated those characters as toasters.

Recall the abominations he visited upon the Vision at Marvel.

What he pulled with the Metal Men is pretty tame in comparison.  I don't think it was Action Comics Weekly yet when he wrote that Metal Men team-up.  He referred to some kind of polymer not specifically plastic for the basis of the Metal Men.  This was contradicted by what he actually showed in that very story: Gold/Mr. Ayou gave a 5 lb bar of himself as payment to Luthor's scientist to fix Tin.  It remained in gold form when it should have turned into the liquid polymer if separated from the controlling responsometer.  Moreover, that would have been pretty unethical to pay with something that really wasn't gold as it would be a form of counterfeiting. (OTOH, in my mind, the metal-emulating polymer should be far more valuable than gold or platinum, but that then raises the issue of the security of Magnus' technological secrets ... )

BTW, since it came up, it is noteworthy that he made his stand on androids not being truly alive as early as his MOS miniseries where his Superman has no qualms about destroying his Bizarro-duplicate citing it's just an android a step above a robot.

IMHO, two of the worst Superman stories were Byrne's Superman and the Spectre team-up in Action Comics (which makes absolutely no sense if you think it through), and his farewell storyline about the new Supergirl (which also has so many plotholes you could drive an aircraft carrier through it).

That was the basic premise of What If.  No matter what, it would have ended in disaster for the heroes in question.
I too liked What If #4.  It was one of the few in which it actually explored an interesting concept and saw it through.  
The Elseworld's stories has little interest in me.  Nowdays so many heroes undergo so many changes what's the point?  What is Superman and Lois got divorced?  Possibly they will (but more likely DC will reboot Superman again just to get him out of the marriage).

Details on the Spectre story ...

The Spectre arrives in Smallville to find its residents apparently dead due to the resident Manhunter's (Whitney's) machinations.  The Spectre emphasizes that his mission is now restricted to avenging the unjustly deceased instead of evil in general.  The Spectre senses something strange about these apparent deaths and finds the souls are in some limbo-dimension before being well and truly dead.  It's still possible to retrieve the souls and save them.  He sends Superman there and remains undetectable to everyone else sensing something is amiss.  It turns out this is a trap for Superman as Whitney appears in the fake death dimensional plane and tries to kill Superman there.  The Spectre appears and visits his vengeance upon the hapless Manhunter.

Problems:

(1) How was Superman supposed to fall into this 'trap' in the first place?  He has no mystical senses to perceive it, nor does he have the ability to travel there even if he could sense it.  Clearly, Whitney did not plan on the luck of the Spectre arriving esp. since he was evidently surprised by the Spectre's attack.  The story only works if the Spectre happens to come to Smallville, but then it doesn't work because the Spectre wasn't part of Whitney's 'plan' to kill Superman.

(2) If the Spectre now has such a limited mission, he should have left there pronto the instant he realized that the people really hadn't died.  No actual unjust murders = no friggin' reason for our Spirit of Vengeance to even be in Smallville.  He really had no reason to destroy the Manhunter nor be involved at all at that point.

Nearly everything I have read post-reboot was pretty much garbage, IMHO. Thankfully, for my sanity, I haven't read all that much and sold all the ones I did read on e-bay.  :D

All the Byrne issues were the worst and Dan Jurgens who tried very hard to out crap him.

I actually have that Superman/Spectre comic you mentioned CK, and I'm like the anti-Byrne...but it was a dollar, and I was bored, so I guess that's not so bad. :lol:

Oh, absolutely - Tezuka was a genius. Allow me to list a few other artists that can write: Scott McCloud, Paul Chadwick (author of CONCRETE) and Walt Simonson, whose THOR run was the most mindblowing since Kirby left (though Tom DeFalco's later use of the Tomorrow Man and the Thor Corps were equally interesting).

However, the reason they are so extraordinary as to be worthy of mention is that artists that write well are rare. And even the writers mentioned as good examples of artist/writers have never done work as good as when they were paired up with someone else. Sure, I like KAMANDI too, but it wasn't as mind-blowing and fun and written as smartly as FANTASTIC FOUR. Jack Kirby's art, without a writer to tell him what to draw, got lazier and more simplified; artists draw things that are easy to draw. George Perez's WONDER WOMAN was forgettable and imagination-free, removing most of the little elements that made Wonder Woman charming and changing her into a second-rate, inferior female Superman (why was so wrong with gliding and the robot plane, Georgey?). It was easily inferior to the work George Perez did with Kurt Busiek in JLA/AVENGERS and AVENGERS. But here's the thing: Perez's Wonder Woman didn't totally blow. The thing about dancing bears is, it's not that they can dance well, but that they can do it at all. And George Perez does deserve some credit for the fact that he was AWARE of his inadequacies and very wisely asked for a plotter (Busiek) to work with, when he was offered the sole position of writer/artist, something the arrogant and childish John Byrne has never been able to bring himself to do.

And for every Jack Cole or Tezuka, there are a thousand artists that use the prestige of their artwork as leverage to manipulate others into giving them a job they are not qualified to do. Byrne, McFarlane, Mike Grell, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, Chuck Austen, Howard Chaykin, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen (sorry, Erik, we've all gotten tired of your one-trick-pony): my God, it reads like a WHO'S WHO list of the mediocre. In fact, it's no coincidence that the period from the 1980s to the mid-1990s that had writer-artist singularities dominate comics, with writers viewed as unecessary to the creative process, were possibly the the deepest nadir that comics in their entire history ever experienced, and it is all entirely to blame on the arrogant presumption that someone good at art may also be good at a totally different field. Many cite problems with the manipulative gimmicry with the 1990s (variant covers, et.al.); comics have always been dependent on good-natured hucksterism, this wasn't the problem. The real problem with writer/artists is that the reason they were so common was because writing well, plotting, and characterization were skills that were no longer valued.

Excellent assessment as per usual, Julian.

FYI, the phenomenon you're referring to here is the Positive Halo Effect in psychology and sociology.  A single characteristic such as great physical attractiveness makes the person and those perceiving the person seem to have all sorts of other 'associated' supposedly related characteristics like charming personality, intelligence, good character, etc.

In this case, the overwhelmingly good artwork give the illusion that they can also write.

The Positive and even Negative Halo Effects (think fat or racial minorities here for examples) apply to any field of human endeavour I'm aware of.  I can't begin to tell you how many computer experts I've met who think they're also experts at everything else in the universe simply because of their narrow-field of expertise.

True Da Vinci's and other Rennaissance types are rare gems.

Re: Perez' (no, the other Perez) Wonder Woman, I think what was wrong with the robot plane was that it would've stood out like a sore thumb when the treatment of the Amazons was going for a strong Greek Mythological flavor.

Well, if we are going to open up the can of worms known as "post-Crisis Superman Stories" we will have lots of ammunition (about 100% of them qualify). :D

Of all the people who that last phrase could describe, Kirby would be at the bottom of the list.  At best, you could say Kirby got older.  But lazy?  Give me a break!  True, some of Kirby's best stuff was done inside a relationship with a dialogue-writer/co-plotter, but I don't think, outside of his very earliest work and some 50s work for DC and others, he ever worked much with scripts.

As for his Kamandi-period work, the Fourth World stuff is very well-plotted and written (albeit slightly off-kilter as you would expect from an idiosyncratic genius like Kirby), as is the 70s Marvel Black Panther and Captain America stuff.

In the fine art world, Kirby would be considered a major Folk Artist, even if his comics weren't also literature.

I agree with the rest of the cartoonists ("comic book artists" --really illustrators) on your list, Julian, with the exception of Chaykin, whose American Flagg (at least the first 20 issues) merits another look.  And I have a fondness for his Blackhawk miniseries as well.  Generally intelligent, sexy (in a gross, linear 80s way), professionally drawn comics.

American Flagg will be collected as a TPB by Image pretty soon so be on the lookout for that.

To me a Cartoonist is someone who writes and draws and creates their own comics, most of these people do not work for DC or Marvel and with good reason. People who only draw are not cartoonists, they are just hired hands. People who just write are not cartoonists, they are just writers.

Opinions are just that opinions, they are not facts nor do they even need to be true, they are just opinions.

Here is my opinion on this:

I also don't agree with Chaykin, Kirby or Larsen for that matter. Also maybe you only read mainstream stuff, but nearly every cartoonist in the Indies write and draw their own stuff and do everything else for that matter. There are tons of cartoonists that are great at both, they just do not do Superhero stuff. There was that amazing issue of Eightball with The Death Ray, but that all I can think of off the top of my head.

Comic Books are not all just about guys in spandex and capes, there is a lot more to comics than just that.

The characters are different, though.  

The Pre-Crisis Superman emphasizes the SUPER over the man.  
The post-Crisis Superman emphasizes the MAN over the Super.  

Post-Crisis, we get stories about a man, where even some of the better ones don't really feel like classic "Superman".  

IMO, in a vacuum, a lot of these man-before-super stories can work well.  The first couple seasons of Lois & Clark had some fine moments in them, as did Busiek's "Secret Identity" run.  Where these stories tend to break apart is interacting with the rest of the revamped DC Universe, which tend to call for more "super" interactions than "man" ones.  Superman toggles between a total wuss-boy (emotionally and|or physically) and a god, more to further the story the writer has in mind rather than to explore Supes' character in some sensible way (or even to be true to his character -- not every story needs character building :) ).  We need a better balance.  Is Clark the pet "demon" of Superman, or the tortured man totally at the heart of the cape?  Is Lois that pesky reporter or some idealized perfect love partner?  Does Superman get KO'ed by a dorky electrified manhole cover or Cheetah strangling him with her legs, or can he withstand the awesome power of a dark sun?

True story: I bought Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN so that I could say I'd read it and impress women.



Interesting factual points you raise, CaptainKal, thank you for bringing it to our attention. Do you work in psychology or some related field?

And that issue sounds godawful, too. The only Byrne story that I remember being good at all was the one that introduced the revamped Lori Lemaris - and that was only bearable because it was essentially a panel-for-panel remake of her original origin story. As always, with Byrne the Robert Heinlein-esque misogyny reins supreme: Lori Lemaris was competent and likeable, so naturally she had to DIE at the end of the tale. Though the detail about whales singing their love to the ends of time was a wonderful touch.



A character like Wonder Woman is big enough for various kinds of takes upon her; the mythological aspect is just one, and it may be successful. I for one, love how great and evil Mars/Aries became (he wears a mask because his face is the true face of war and would horrify any that look at it), or Diana's Wonderdome in Washington D.C. filled with harpies and pegasus. My problem with it, though, is that it compromises Wonder Woman's uniqueness if she flies instead of gliding, and is invulnerable (for one thing, why would she use her bracelets?) and doesn't have her bondage related weakness. It means she fights exactly like Superman does, and Superman is super enough for the both of them; characters benefit and are made stronger by uniqueness.

And I miss her half-sandals, half-high heels. I miss Amazonium. I miss her being called "the Amazing Amazon." I miss the Purple Ray. I miss those cute little Kangas that she rides on. This isn't Silver Age nostalgia (I missed most of that period, to be honest) but that stuff was just plain neat and unique and while George Perez came up with a lot of neat concepts, he did not create any ideas that were truly trippy and original enough to replace all these LSD-derived elements. I would not go as far as to say that George Perez's retooling of Wonder Woman was the clueless failure Byrne's revamp of Superman was; Perez got the character's personality very successfully, and his myth-centered approach at least had some internal consistency if nothing else.



I'll agree with you for no other reason than to give props to Kirby's underappreciated and great ETERNALS, MAN-MACHINE, and DEVIL DINOSAUR. Kurt Busiek once said (and I agree with him) that ETERNALS was weakened because Roy Thomas later established it as being in the Marvel Universe; Kirby's concepts there were too big. Now suddenly instead of being the inspiration for mythic deities, the Eternals were MISTAKEN for the real ones that actually exist. And then suddenly mutants go from a clear-cut concept to a murky afterthought. Ditto for MAN-MACHINE; he was better off as the only android that exists because if he's the fifth or so in the Marvel Universe, he no longer can be said to experience what he's going through for the first time.



I didn't mention any because criticising the Mike Carlin helmed stuff (to say nothing of, for the Love of God, BYRNE's work) would be like shooting a fish taped to the end of a gun.

I would NOT put any of the Jimmy Olsen issues on a list of Worst Superman comics. Personally, I prefer my flavor of Jimmy Olsen to be competent (though lacking common sense), instead of a dumb kid that swallows things he finds on alien spaceships and whatnot. Retooling Jimmy Olsen as "Mr. Action," a sleuth that solved gangster-related crimes, as well as Kirby's two-fisted approach with Jimmy as the buttkicking leader of the Newsboy Legion, made Jimmy more engaging, because his problem was that he was prone to biting off more than he can chew, instead of being stupid enough that one wonders if Superman saving him all the time is interfering with natural selection.

In reality that is NOT what What If  (http://www.comics-db.com/pages/Marvel_Comics/W/What_If____/) was about. In the Spiderman F4 stories they do NOT 'all die' - Sue leaves the F4 to become Namor's wife. In the story where the F4 get different powers  (What if v1 #6) Read soundly defeats Dr. Doom by taking over his body - this version of the F4 was not killed until the TimeQuake storylin some 25 (!) years later.

Though the What IF series did suffer from going down the othing would really be different path as demonstrated in What If V1 #7 Someone Else Had Become The Amazing Spider-Man? and What If V2 #10 the Punisher's Family had not been killed? there were the occational better timeline as in What if vol 2 #7 Wolverine became a member of SHIELD? (Sentinel program dies a quick death and the anti-mutant groups are politically neutralized)

Hello humans,

I totally hate ma comics.  Even authors don't seem to know where Superman's limits are.  If they don't know - how will I know when I attack Earth again?

JulianPerez writes:



Haha!  How'd that work out for you?  :lol: Unless they were all Goth chicks, I'm betting not so good.



Well we have to remember that Jimmy only got his own book because of the huge popularity of Jack Larson's portrayal on "The Adventures of Superman" tv show.  And that Jimmy was, it's fair to say, the kind of guy who made Jerry Lewis look like James Bond.  So of course the comics would follow suit.

I agree "tough guy Jimmy" was much more fun.  In fact I find I tend to relate to the human characters that inhabit a superhero's world.  I like Jim Gordon, Ben Urich, Jason Bard and sometimes Jimmy Olsen.  I really liked a character who was in a handful of Thor issues...can't remember his name but he was a Korean War vet.  It's always refreshing to see people with guts and moxy instead of perpetual victims screaming, "Save me!"  

Maximara writes:



I wondered if anyone was going to call me out on that.  I know that's how What if #1 went, in fact I wrote that and then changed it to keep things simple.  Maybe everyone doesn't die in every issue, but my point's the same; things always end up for the worse.  Yes, Sue runs off with Namor, and this is presented as a bad thing, a deeply affecting tragedy that forever shatters the "family" dynamic that always defined the FF, a life-altering blow to Reed, a heartache to Johnny and of course the end of Franklin altogether.  I came away with two messages: 1, it must forever be the Fantastic FOUR (if Pete comes aboard, Sue must go) and 2, altering the official timeline results in misery and gloom.

Likewise, having Reed take over Doom's body is not what I'd call an attractive option, even if it did result in victory.

I just feel that where DC's Imaginary stories often had an upbeat message ("There must always be a Superman" -- even if it's not Kal), the Marvel tales were often frightening and negative ("If you think your hero has trouble now, trust us-- it could always be worse!").

I think several things ruined "What If," which I must say started out as one of the most interesting concepts of my young collecting days (and one of the few Marvels I bought regularly).  First, the stories became predictable...as I said, few if any happy endings.  Second, the concepts became increasingly esoteric ("What If The Avengers Had Become the Pawns of Korvac?"  Kor-who?  Who cares?), inconsequential ("What if the FF Had Different Super-powers?") and unexciting ("What if the Thing and the Beast Continued to Mutate?").  And third, as it became a matter of editorial policy to turn characters' worlds upside down in the monthly books, there was really no need anymore for a What If book.

That said, some of them were fun.  I especially enjoyed "What if the Fantastic Four Had Not Gained Super Powers?"...the answer being, of course, "They'd have been the Challengers of the Unknown!" (sorry, Jack, your secret's out!).  Ironically, this one was written and drawn by John Byrne.  So my two favorite Byrne FF tales ...this one and FF 236...were about a powerless team.

Hey, Julian, you got part of your wish.  WW used her purple healing ray in JLA: WW3 (to help activate the super-human future potential of the whole human race), and recently in the OMAC related storylines (to heal Batman from Superman trying to kill him).

BTW, since the Metal Men's metal-emulating polymer was brought up, I believe that was Byrne's version of Marvel's 'unstable molecules' which he was applying to the Metal Men.

FYI, a very similar tech substance does exist now in reality.  It's called Wellstone/programmable matter that can dynamically alter their properties to mimic the chemical properties of any element and even some electron configurations that don't exist in nature.  Try Wil McCarthy's book Hacking Matter for more info.  This programmable matter fits Byrne's polymer and Marvel's unstable molecules very closely.

EDIT: I've included an FAQ link below.

http://www.wilmccarthy.com/pmfaq.htm

Getting back to the topic of worst Superman Stories

I agree about the Superman Special by Gil Kane - not the best Superman story ever.  I also didn't like the way every Superman issue for about a year before the 86 reboot was somehow Alien related.  

Personally I feel that the worst Post Crisis stories were the horrible Superman Red/Superman Blue arc which was down right awful.  

As for George Perez and Wonder Woman - that was the best part of the post crisis era - Wonder Woman was far superior in this era.  Except there were no Huntress back up stories anymore of course.

Superman making whoopie with Amazing Grace the first time he was on Apokolips was when I thought "man this Crisis revamp stinks!".  Is anyone else leery of bringing up "worst" stories for fear that some DC hack may try to top them?  I can see it now... Supes' child from a perverted union wheeled in to combat him.  Come to think of it, though, Alan Moore (decidedly not a hack writer) did the same thing with Tom Strong...

Frankly, Gil Kane's stuff looks good when compared to post crisis drek by "upcoming supestars".

And that partiular annual reminded me of an earlier Batman yarn (One of my faves) "The Man Who Quit the Human Race" about a man/mutant.

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/141/400/141_4_0000165.jpg)

One Superman comic I didn't particularly like was in ACTION COMICS #502 (1979) by Cary Bates, "Rise and Fall of the Star-Child."

It pains me to write this, because Cary Bates is such a great, great Superman writer and his work is terrific. And this story starts off with an equally amazing beginning: a meteorite crashes, which sends out brainwaves that only the high-powered minds of Kryptonians can detect. It lures Superman and Supergirl to the site of a crashed child in what looks like a glass version of a 12 sided dice from AD&D. Inside is - surprise! A baby! One the supercousins are asked to raise. The child, though intelligent and growing quickly, has no emotion.

Then, the universe once more, is attacked when a radio telescope draws the Galactic Golem out from his last defeat. Kara and the robot boy watch the screen as Superman tackles the Golem - only to find that Superman is weakened by the touch of the creature. Finally, Superman appears to be "killed:" left only as a smoking pair of pajamas! How could this be? The Parasite exits the Golem's body, having drained the Golem entirely.

At this point, I'm thinking, "Wow, Cary Bates hits another homer out of the ballpark with this one! What a concept: the Parasite uses a radio telescope to draw the Golem to Earth, merging his body with it so that their combined might would be fatal to Superman! And now it appears Superman has somehow been defeated and the only ones left are Supergirl and a robot boy to face a Parasite with the powers of both Superman and the Galactic Golem...and he was headed right for the fortress!" I was riveted to the comic page like it was epoxied to my face. The drama was as thick as cheesecloth.

And then it started to get lame.

It turns out the "Parasite" was really Superman in disguise all along! Not since "and he woke up and it was all a dream" was there ever an unsatisfying ending. Apparently, the robot had to absorb Supergirl's emotions at learning of Superman's death, so that he could go back and give his emotionless race emotions or something like that.

In conclusion, maybe Jurgens's super-stories may have been way, way worse, but this one betrayed a brilliant plot concept with a cheesy deux ex machina.

Again NOT true. Also in the matter of the F4 getting different powers as a
review (http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/reviews/110453487664812.htm) the story was pretty much a 'stadard' F4 story. You knew that if the story continued some event out of left field would occur and Sue would return and F5 would be back together. We have seen this sort of 'tramatic' event before and since and little really changes.



Well DC's Imaginary stories were not that upbeat. Lois Lane dies in at least two of them, there there is the one where Lex Luthor does not go bad he must exile himself from Earth because of the Gold K fever he got by curing Kal-El. Superman himself dies in one and so on.

Also it is unfair to comare DC's Imaginary stories to What If if for the simple fact they occured in two different eras of comics. The majority of DC's Imaginary stories were in the highly idealistic Silver Age (c1955-c1970) while all of Marvel's What If... have occured in the more darker Bronze (Volume 1) and Iron (Volume 2 and 3) ages. Another problem is that the Marvel Universe had always been darker than DC's. In A&E biography on Stan Lee someone commened about the angst that lies at the heart of many Marvel books:

'Here's Spiderman, 'My Aunt May has Alzimers. I don't have proper bowel movement.' Just once I would like to see them happy.'

Also I would like to point out that many item writer twist or forget a major plot device to make a What If turn out worse than the main timeline. Like the story where Peter keep the alien costume only to have it drain him dry. Ok why in the main timelin has it not done that to Brock? It is the same cooking of the plot the old 'what if Krypton had not exploded' stories was which had Kal-El still wind up in a Superman costume.

Someone's been reading a little too much Garth Ennis...

Tis' Really funny how Beppo always posts Biased anti-post supes $$$$$ and funny thing is he's a mod, of course they're bad by Pre-Crsis standards, you don't eat an apple and expect it to taste like an orange..

I did use to be one of the biggest post-supes bashers (well started as a fan then a basher and now a compromise) but there are other things in making comics rather than pleasing a hardcore market.

Super Monkey's been a fair moderator, I think. None of my posts have been censored, despite the fact I use lots of swear words and disagree with him nearly all the time (see the current All-Star Superman thread for a case of real disagreement). If he really was a ruthless tyrant of a moderator like you think, he'd have taken revenge on me by now for all those arguments he lost.  :D

As for your objection: if they started making coca-cola that tastes like a milkshake (and worse, a particularly nasty kind of milkshake, like honey and saspirella) I would say, "hey, what happened to the taste of classic coke?" I'd be upset, because I've loved the taste of coke since I was a kid. I'd be furious, because there are plenty of places where someone can buy a milkshake if they wanted one, that there was no need for such an action to be taken. Coke - a timeless, national institution of a beverage known all over the world - was "replaced" by a trendy, faddish craze for honey and saspirella milkshakes, and sales of the original, classic coke were shortsightedly discontinued forever, no matter how many billions loved it. It can never be replaced, though: when comedians on the Late Show make jokes about Coke, they mean a sparkly, crisp, bubbly sugar water instead of a frothy dairy drink. The tiny minority of defenders of the new honey and saspirella Coke would say, "this is no big deal, Coca-Cola has altered their formula on many occasions; the Coke that one is drinking now is not the same as the Coke one would buy in 1908. So, what's wrong with Coke's current milkshake incarnation?" Sure, Coke has varied their formula over the years; they now use high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it instead of cane sugar like they did back in the day. But it was always a cola, the heart of the formula (boiled caramel, vanilla extract, mint leaves) was intact. It was never, ever a milkshake.

I'm going to stop myself before I take this metaphor so far that I forget just what the hell I'm talking about.

Incidentally (and getting back on topic), if you want to see me go into further detail about the forces that made Byrne Superman an abysmal, dreary creative abortion without value or merit written by clueless, arrogant frauds, here is my review of "Death of Superman," possibly the most terminally retarded Superman story ever written (copied and pasted from an earlier post for your pleasure, natch):




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. Like one comics commentator posted previously: "What, they couldn't just tear off his helmet so that Professor X can mind-blast him?"

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.

I think that the real point of the Superman reboot was to provide a new starting point for Superman.  They felt that people were not going to read it unless they did something drastic like starting it over.
I'm not saying I agreed with this;  I in fact, don't.

But DC thought that was the solution to the falling sales.

I thinks simply by starting a new Superman #1 would have accomplished the same thing, without drastically altering the character.

New readers not knowing the entire backstory isn't a valid point.  In every character, new or old, we constantly learn "new" things about them and their past lives.  

It was a sales gimmick.  And they allowed John Byrne to do drastic changes to convince people that this was a different Superman.  That most of the concepts Byrne threw away have been brought back indicates how much DC erred.

For better or worse, I tend to agree with that...

I never read the Comic Buyer's Guide but now that it's a magazine I occasionally browse it at the bookstore.  I noticed that there is a long article on the 10 Dullest Silver Age stories, or some-such title, in the latest issue (Alex Ross cover).

List 'em! :D

CBG, eh?

If it was WIZARD doing the list, I would buy it only when my household toilet paper supply ran out. It must be hard, toiling as the underpaid publicity agents of comics creators, but, you know, somebody's got to do it. I for one, couldn't work there; after the one-millionth creator interview where he explains he's taking the character "in a completely new direction," I'd come to work one morning with a machine gun and a bunny costume.

The exact moment my contempt for WIZARD crystalized was when they gave a listing of all time great JLA stories - and I swear to God I'm not making this up - the top three were Grant Morrison's first arc, Mark Waid's JLA year one, and the first arc of the Aquaman-led team with Vibe and Gypsy (which my mentor Darren A. Madigan once called the "Aquaman and the Outsiders" JLA). And I think they also had one by Gerry Conway, too. What didn't they have, though? Anything by Gardner Fox or Steve Englehart.

In a way, I can sort of understand WIZARD's shallow list; why suck up to dead people when you can suck up to living ones?

I couldn't really read Superman's books after he turned into an energy being, and it was even worse when he split in two. Talk about a less than stellar "homage" to a pre-Crisis concept. But what really bothered me was how they were trying to change Superman. Why completely alter the most iconic super-hero to appeal to fans who won't stick around for the long run?

Aside from Wizard's questionable accuracy in reporting, they're also a flagrantly pro-Marvel/anti-DC publication.

I wouldn't put any stock in something from Wizard.

IIRC, Garth Ennis or some other pro dissed them royally during a public speaking appearance.  He even tore up a copy of the mag in front of the audience.

Example on bogus reporting: Wizard claimed J'Onn was going to gently mind-read Galactus in JLAvengers ... When issue #1 showed he was incapable of doing so for the less formidable Watcher, Uatu.  Needless to say, that bogus prediction never saw print.

Example of bogus Superman 'referencing': Wizard erroneously claimed Superman had an upper limit of lifting the Great Sphinx.  First, the actual reference in the DC Who's Who states the Great Pyramid which is much heavier.  Second, that same entry stated it was something he could easily do not that was his upper limit.  Third, he's grown much stronger since the early Byrned days.  But, hey, whatever turns the cranks of those die-hard Marvel fanboys ...

Actually, I think they're starting to become more pro-DC. They seem to change depending on what's popular with the majority--which, right now, is DC. Marvel still sells better but most fans I've encountered seem to prefer DC.

The electric Superman is what wrecked it for me also.  It's not about the long run anymore.  It's about how to make a quick buck.  It's not about the characters anymore either.  It's about catostophic events and who the publishers can get to write and draw it so it will sell.  It doesn't matter if the story is good or not.  It's who worked on it.  When the creators are done with that book and that story the fanboys will follow them to the next.

Perhaps I can explain why the electric Superman gets everyone's hackles up.

Superman isn't the X-MEN; he isn't hip or edgy. He's charmingly square. Electric Superman was supposed to be a "hip" update of the Superman concept. This is BY ITSELF is irritating for several reasons:

1) The idea that Superman, an "American Original," like Chevrolet cars and Coca-Cola, needs a drastic, "hip" revamp that is so severe he becomes unrecognizeable, is insulting to a character that has really, been shown to work fine just the way he is;

2) It attempted to summon the air of being a permanent change, but us comics fans that have seen it all saw right through that. It was a naked, cynical money-grabbing ploy for attention that the artists KNEW - they had to - was not going to be permanent, the comics equivalent of a kid screaming "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater. The comics equivalent of Madonna's "frank" films in the 1990s; attempting to shock everyone out of complacency ever so desperately, but was instead an obvious attempt to garner publicity that received only yawns from the jaded American public.

3) It missed the entire point of Superman, who is a timeless character.

4) It was used in lieu of things of substance that would garner positive attention, such as good art and storytelling.

Further, it summoned up a classic Superman Imaginary Story in name and imagery, which is disrespectful because the spirit of the story, or at least its imaginative power, was not preserved in the remake. Remakes of classic movies are judged much more harshly than standard films based on original concepts...as they should be. Films that are great create a legacy that should be respected, and so tackling them requires a piece of monumental hubris to even attempt. Notice nobody is Phillistine enough to make a "Casablanca II."

It also feels faddish and dated, with the shame of following a trend that felt like the most important thing in the world at the time, but looking back, is rather embarassing, sort of like a High School Yearbook photo with a mullet.

It was especially irksome because as it was "in continuity" Superman, there was nowhere you could go that you could get an alternative. Superman guest-stars in Aquaman? Guess what? He's ELECTRIC Superman! Oh, wait, what's that you say: Superman is in the Justice League, too? Well, guess which one the team's using!

And last but certainly not least, it was a terrible story, done at the worst period in Superman's history. it was a lousy, illogical anticlimactic story accompained by no intersting revalations that the writers had no idea what to do with, that finally was dropped in the background of a minor miniseries because the writers got bored with it and lost interest.

What really wrecked Superman for me was in two stories.

Superman killing the Phantom Zoners made me desert the supertitles.  Superman does not kill.  That blasphemously bad mischaracterization meant to me that the Superman I idealized had well and truly died in the Crisis.  This wasn't Superman but an imposter.  Byrne apologists claim he was being innovative, breaking new ground.  Well, he didn't hang around to deal with the consequences of his bad decision so that doesn't wash; more likely, he was poisoning the well for his successors.  Also, I'm sure I'm not the only fan who left for the same reasons.  Byrne brought new fans in due to his popularity, then he manages to diss fans by his stupid story idea which went too far to drive at least some of us away.  Even Unca Johnny isn't that stupid: He knew darn well he was going to reduce the fanbase with that story.

Superman's dying in the Doomsday storyline made me desert comics altogether.  I could always answer the critics who claimed comics promoted violence as a way of life by pointing to Superman to prove them wrong.  But when the ilk like Punisher, Wolverine, and Lobo are so vastly popular, but Superman's sales were faltering and they actually killed him, I could not in good conscience continue to support a comics industry that had grown so disconnected from my values -- Values that were formed in no small part due to the influence of those comics when they actually stood for values in my youth.

For role models, I looked to my parents and teachers and Rabbis.

For entertainment, I looked to fictional characters. I love Superman very much, but my enjoyment of a chauvanistic (though charming) hedonistic macho man like James Bond, the oily con-man Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison, or the manipulative trickster Sam in Roger Zelazny's LORD OF LIGHT, is unaffected by the fact that if I knew them personally, I would probably think them jerks. Not to get political, but I can enjoy watching RAMBO movies despite the fact Rambo represents a type of national attitude toward aggression that I despise. My enjoyment of Tarzan novels is not hindered by the fact that the characteristics Tarzan possesses, a willingness to do violence and adherence to the brutal Code of the Jungle, are really hardly admirable traits at all.

But I do agree with you - the period you're talking about, and the Death of Superman, which best typifies that very period, was ugly, not because characters are behave immorally, but because characters were rewritten into unrecognizeable, intellectually bankrupt creative abortions.  

If someone made a version of the Stainless Steel Rat where he was turned into the galaxy's greatest model citizen who never performed zany extraplanetary jewel heists but instead helped grannies cross the street, I would be filled with respect and admiration for the character, but I would be filled with murderous rage toward the writer that did this to one of my favorite science fiction series, a misappropriation of the reasons that I (and others) loved the Rat in the first place, namely his rascally ways and inability to stay out of trouble.  

(Part of the reason I also love the Rat is that the Esperanto translation done by Esperanto lover Harry Harrison, LA KORODIMUNA S^TALRATO, is the first book I ever read in Esperanto, so there's a degree of pride there, but I digress.)

But all the same, I understand what you're saying, CaptainKal.

Immoral behavior is unnacceptable in Silver Age characters not because of the deeds in and of themselves, but because it is wildly out of character and innacurate to how they have been portrayed as being, to the point where one wonders if the writers even know who the characters are. Superman doesn't kill. Ever. Period. Under any circumstances. Combine this with the marginalization of old-fashoined but imaginative superheroes by an irritating trend that was becoming ubiquitous, which appeals to the lowest common denomenator, that is as unoriginal and idea-barren as it is grotesque...and I feel exactly the same way you do, CaptainKal.

Superman did kill in the Sliver Age.

Just only "monsters". There were a few stories were he fought monsters that were even more powerful than him and he was forced to kill them.

But never, ever humanoids.

Yeah - there's a WORLD of difference between putting an atomic hobgoblin out of its suffering, painful beastlike existence given shape by the atomic bomb, and the actual, calculated and premeditated murder of a sentient being as with the Phantom Zone criminals.

Even Superman killing animals bothers me a little. Couldn't he do the humane thing and shrink them to tiny size and put them in his Interstellar Zoo?

Classic Sliver Age Superman Cover from 1965:

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/97/400/97_4_0000329.jpg)


Sweet gentle sliver age Superman  :twisted:

Well, yeah, but didn't he just trash a robot knight in that issue? :lol:

Of course! He was talking to a robot, you just have to love those super misleading Sliver Age covers :D

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/141/400/141_4_0000082.jpg)

Yeah, the flying Batman did very little flying in this issue, one instance of him being fitted like a kite...oh, wait, wrong story, he was supposedly surgically given wings then later thinks its a dream if I remember right...doh...

 8)

Actually, Superman did kill a handful or so of crooks and evildoers very early in the Golden Age.

I remember one story where Superman got involved in a (fictional) European war, and, if I recall correctly, hurled one warplane into an another, sending both crews to their deaths.

It's actually pretty easy to spot bad Superman stories. If the writers try to fundamentally alter Superman or make him "tragically cool" then the story most likely won't be good. That doesn't mean that Superman can't change the way he feels or be anything other than static (even the pre-Crisis Superman restored Kandor), he just shouldn't be turned into a different character, so to speak.

In the nineties, the Powers That Be tried to change Superman quite a lot: Long-haired Superman, Electric Superman, Electric Red and Blue Superman, ect.  Needless to say, all of these ideas failed. People know who Superman is and who he isn't.

DC Comics Presents  Superman and Supergirl.  Kal and Kara were doing their best to kill Mongul by casuing War World to overload the brain synapases in Mongul's brain.

At the end of the story For the Man Who Has Everything, Superman was going to drop Mongul in a black hole.

Jimmy Olsen and the Magic Totem, Superman tricked a Kryptonian criminal into killing himself.

The Superman from the Superman cartoon killed the Parasite by allowing the Parasite to drain almost all of his energy and the Parasite blew up from being overloaded.

The Superman from the Superfriends cartoon was faced with a hard chioice.  He changed time by tossing dampening rods into the core of the sun Rao when he accidnetly went through a time-warp and Krypton didn't blow up.  He went back to Earth to find it  devestated, because he wasn't there to protect it, and he returned and removed the dampening rods.  Krypton blew up and Earth was saved.  One way or the other, he was going to kill billions of people.

Try to explain the last two on the Superman doesn't kill stance.

Being dropped into a black hole would not have killed the pre-Crisis Mongul. He was practically as invulnerable as Superman.


Which Superman cartoon series was this? It can't be the Bruce Timm version since that Parasite is still alive and well.

As for the other examples, I haven't seen them. Perhaps someone else could address them?

The cartoon where Superman tricks the Parasite into killing himself?  It was the Filmation version of Superman that came out in 1965.  The companion series Superboy had Krypto flying around with Superboy.

Ah. I see. Thanks for clarifying.

I think the Byrne-bashing gets a little heavy-handed on this list -- I've become less enamored of Byrne's version of Superman as time has gone on, though I do think that some sort of reboot was necessary for the character (would anyone here have complained had BIRTHRIGHT rather than MAN OF STEEL had come out in 1986?) -- but yeah, SUPERMAN (2nd series) #22 has real problems. Besides the plot holes (which Captain Kal has noted), the execution scene seems particularly pointless. Why not just let the Phantom Zone villains die from the lack of oxygen on the dead Earth, if they're to die at all?

Byrne does it again:

http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=012038

 :shock:

Let's face it, most of the Superman stuff for the past 20 year (its been that long), have been bad.  The worst thing about them are

1- Story arcs that go on forever
2- too many characters who simply reprise all the pre Byrne reboot.  Even the original metallo was more interesting.
3- Lex Luthor was supposed to be smarter than Superman, not a Kingpin clone.
4- Clark and Lois.  I always had a soft spot for the Clark, Lois, Superman triange.
5- Elseworlds.  They all have the same plot.  supes is found by someone else.  Lex is dominating the Neighborhood, worls etc.  Supes stops him.  Sometimes he dies and inspires others.  Been there, done that!

I like Imaginary Stories better

Compared to the bronze age tales WHo Took the Suepr out of SUeprman and the Sand SUperman Saga which was done in ONE issue in the Iron Age comic 'Kryptonite no more"



Personally some of the character had to go. the Original Terra man with his flying horse was reidiculous and Byrne's version of Mxyzptlk was far more insteresting that the Silver/Bronze age version.



Given the way he was writen at times Homer Simpsom would have been smarter than Sueprman.



Ended in the Bronze Age on Earth-2; deal with it.


[/quote]

Actually the plots very much more than that. Like the one where Superman prevents the American Revolution from happening or the on where the wins the Civil War in short order. No Luthor to be found there.

Vartox takes the cake for ridiculous looking Bronze Age stuff.

Thanks for bringing this quote to my attention, SuperMonkey.

It's possible that the people whose work we despise are wonderful human beings that if we get to know them, would be wonderful friends. For all my distaste for Brian Michael Bendis's clueless, arrogant, glacially paced coloring books, there is no doubt in my mind that he is a loving father and kind to children and animals.

But isn't there a wonderful little thrill when you find out that someone whose work you despise is also a worthless, irredeemable horribly broken   oxygen thief who spends their days shunned by anyone with a soul?

Byrne is absolutely fascinating, in a car crash kind of way. Remember his belief that Christopher Reeve was not heroic at all? Remember when he said that "Latin women with blonde hair all look like hookers to me?" Remember when he said that New York looks better without the two towers? Remember the homophobic "Gayman" comic he did in his fandom days?

I'm gonna take a chance here and read between the lines...I'm sensing you don't like John Byrne. :P

Oh and that oxygen thief insult? Hilarious. :lol:

Today I remembered the worst story ever (in my opinion, of course). I removed it from my mind!

"When world collides", the Superman Family/DC Milestone crossover.

Argh.

" for tomorrow" to me is the absolute worst. I despair for Superman in the comics for the forseable future except for  for Simone and Byrne's Action and maybe "All Star Superman"

The post-Crisis screwed-up treatment of many Smallville folks just grinds me in ways that make my head hurt:

- Conduit / Kenny Braverman -- why?
- The Manhunters -- everyone in Smallville chipped -- ugh
- Pete Ross: Ruin -- 'nuff said

I'm sure Pete has been framed.

Doesn't matter.  Pete Ross was screwed up from the moment that they didn't have him stumble onto Clark's secret.  It would've been interesting to have Lana know but not feel that she could tell Pete, and Pete know but not feel he could tell Lana.  They resolve this as part of some nice story about trusting each other enough to get married (perhaps as a prelude to the Supes-Lois proposal, assuming they were fleshed out enough to get hitched), then Lana and Pete keep it secret the fact that Pete knows.  Lana can still hold a torch for our hero, but Pete knows this and they both can laugh about it.  And I'd love to see a frame like:  "Guys named Pete _should_ end up with the red headed girl who knows the secret.", as shown through some window pane with a spider on it.

 I couldn't agree with you more but it's just typical of how Superman's history has been handled recently.

Post Crisis Pete Ross is a pointless character.  His original theme and purpose was the best friend who secretly knew Clark's secret ID and helped him without his knowledge.

Exactly what role does Pete serve now?  He's just a bitter, jealous man who's mad at Clark for being so goshdarned All-American wonderful that of course his wife Lana prefers Clark and Pete was a distant second-choice.

Even Smallville the TV show had a better take on Pete Ross than that.