Disguising yourself as "Jordan Elliot" and living a normal life isn't a bad idea, but think of the message Superman is sending then! "If you ever kill someone, you deserve to die, and since nobody else can kill you, you have to do it yourself".
Or alternately, "if you kill someone, it's okay for you to choose your own punishment. Then you can disguise yourself and start a new life as someone else." Last time I checked, the FBI kind of frowns upon this practice.
I'll readily admit "Whatever Happened..." is easily Moore's weakest Superman story, but I don't have as much of a problem with the body count as you guys do. Indeed the whole aim of the story, from the "this is an imaginary story" intro to the "80-page-Giant"-like cover of the last issue, is to recreate the feel of the Silver Age, and some of the best-remembered tales of that era were the hand-wringing, tear-jerking, overwrought tragedies penned by Jerry Siegel, who wasted no opportunity to visit grief, ruin and destruction on the Man of Steel for reasons it doesn't take a Freud to figure out. Chiefly I'm thinking of tales like "The Three Wives of Superman," (
http://supermanfan.nu/main/?p=4458), which makes Superman a widower three times in one book, and of course the legendary "Death of Superman," for some reason almost universally regarded as a classic despite being, IMHO, relentlessly bleak and brutally cruel without even offering the final ray of hope Moore's story does. Moore may play nasty here, but he's not exactly inventing the practice. The only real difference I can see is that we knew "Death of" was Imaginary and everything would be fine next month, whereas with Moore's tale we knew it was the end, the "real" end.
Anyway, that's the spirit in which I read it: it's a Silver Age tale told in the 80s. So the images may be a little more graphic and scary (though only compared to what went before, not what's come after) but the spirit is the same. Note that in stories like "Death," or its polar opposite "The Saga of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue," or even the "fake-out" story "The Last Days of Superman," the writers are sure to touch all the bases, as if working through a checklist of all the elements in the mythos: Legion? Check. Atlantis? Check. Kandor? Check. I take Moore's approach in the same vein, except in this case he's tying up each of those threads: Krypto? Dead. Bizarro world? Gone. Luthor? Killed. Yes, it's a bloodbath, but again it's not the first time an Imaginary Story killed off everyone or nearly everyone, and if you're going to write the last Superman story, you've got an awful lot of baggage to get to.
Ultimately what I don't like about the story is that it is in fact designed to end the saga. But that's the same problem I had with the other "imaginary stories" that did the same thing. Somewhere out there, obviously, is an audience that wants to see how Superman dies, which bullet has Batman's name on it, etc. That's never been me, partly because I can't think of many -- if any -- examples where it was done well. I liked the way Marvel's Captain Marvel died, but it helped that it was only the second story I ever read with him in it; to me dying was the most interesting thing he ever did.
Anyway, I guess my point is "Whatever Happened to..." is not the best story, and certainly not the masterpiece it's cracked up to be (though for the record, I think "The Killing Joke" is a much more egregious example of a Moore story being puzzlingly over-rated), but it is, for me, what it set out to be; an 80s version of an "Imaginary Story" that could easily have been written by Jerry Siegel, except that if it was there would have been a lot more dialog balloons with characters saying *CHOKE!* and *SOB!* and *GROAN!*
