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..
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.
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.
