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Superman: Doing It Right, for Once

This column normally administers a good-natured razzing to the generally awful stories that usher a superhero into death, then back again, through a series of attention-getting gimmicks that frequently insult the reader. This tone derives from the nature of most of this work; comics typically do kill superheroes for reasons that do not result from inevitable processes in their ongoing story (Warlock provided an exception to this) and then revive them by patching together unlikely stories from elements like amnesia, clones, secret twins, and the like (as in the particularly grotesque example of the revival of Jean Grey).

One story, however, while suffering from the same reasons for temporarily "killing" a character, began with the premise of the death and return, sparing the necessity of positing time-travel rescues, self-sacrificing blobs of Silly Putty, coma, body substitution, or the elements of the resurrection formula. We find an altogether superior treatment of the subject of the superhero death in the "Death of Superman;" and in its undoing, the writers did nothing to cheapen the story that went before.

We have here a work that demonstrates, among other things, how to handle the death of a superhero right. Granted, no one believed DC would leave Superman dead or had ever, for the smallest moment, intended to do so. The point of the work lay elsewhere, in the excellent treatment of a complex story dealing with the consequences of the death of a superhero and of his return.

The ash bin of comics history and "continuity" contains an unending stream of characters who die for shock value (in the hope of achieving a one-issue circulation spike in a title that does not sell), and, later, show up all better in a story with an occasional panel of explanation about the temporary nature of the demise. These stories, typically, avoid the probable effects of both the death and of its undoing, and, in their triteness, receive a well-deserved derision by all branches of comics readership.

The death, and return, of Superman, however, showed careful planning and forethought in scripting and execution; these stories show exactly where the normal death/rebirth story falls short, and why the majority of such stories belong in the garbage.

Caveat Lector (Let the Reader Beware)

When Superman "died" in 1993, it made headlines, but no one who had spent more than a dollar on comics really expected him to stay dead. Capitalist principles rendered leaving Superman dead an absurd strategy, equivalent to Coors abandoning its brewing facilities and shifting its resources to the manufacture of toilet plungers. Furthermore, the habits of the comics industry in regards to allowing any heroic character to die had become fairly well known; the revocable death of Lightning Lad in 1963 defined the superhero death, and defined the inevitable subsequent copout.

Even where characters remained "dead" for some time, as did most of the original Doom Patrol, a reader knows to distrust claims of INSIDE: A SUPERHERO DIES!. After all, what the pen may create, then take away, the pen may recreate. All a dead superhero has to mean is a stupid story later on explaining away the death. Even where serious-minded writers like Jim Starlin occasionally dispense with the nonviable heroes of flagging titles, no one should trust a comic book's claim of death any more than a hooker's oath of sexual fidelity.

We can, therefore, dispense with the notion that DC ever intended for Superman to remain dead. Not only the strong evidence of experience proclaims this intent; no, the entire planned structure of the event, with its multi-title crossover lead-in and its multi-title crossover undoing, remains apparent to anyone who has read the work through entirely (which the modestly priced trade paperback anthologies permit without undue financial duress).

The Manly Virtue of Death

DC managed to spare the reader a lot of garbage, really, in its treatment of the revocable death of Superman. For instance, these stories resisted the temptations (or conventions, as temptations become when no one resists them) of inflating the consequence of the story. The stakes remained at a human level in a manner atypical of the medium; no villain attempted to erase time from both ends here, or caused one half of the population of the universe to vanish, or combined incompatible dimensions, or in any way threatened more than the patch of ground occupied by the demonic berserker Doomsday.

Doomsday, as later stores would relate, enjoyed an extraterrestrial origin similar to Superman's; however, Doomsday's purpose involved no more than destruction, and, in this story, Doomsday broke free of a containment facility and enjoyed a Hulk-like rampage across the country, pulled toward Superman's adopted hometown of Metropolis, USA by a wrestling ad.

Superman, seeing the wake of Doomsday's passage, resolved not to permit the moster entry, and the story developed from this: Doomsday's relentless onslaught (the irresistable force) against Superman's resolve to hold the line and stop his advance (the immovable object).

Hopefully no one will consider any of this years-old synopsis to constitute "spoilers;" if any of this does, I apologize, and recommend purchasing The Death of Superman, World without a Superman, and The Return of Superman trade paperbacks.

Back to the point, however -- after the Justice League (in one of its more pathetic incarnations, devoid of original players and laden with unfamiliar and uninteresting characters eventually killed off or abandoned by DC) failed to stop Doomsday, Superman realized a few things: a) that he had to do it himself; b) that he might fail; and c) that he might die in the process.

Within this story, during each successive failure to contain the monster, Superman became more aware of his own mortality; and, in the final fight, the death that never came close during superman's previous 55 years stopped, for a moment, to visit.

...Can He?

One expects a death to affect survivors in some proportion to how much the decedent's life affected the survivors. In English, if someone nobody knows dies, nobody cares; if somebody dies who has done everyone a favor, (almost) everybody cares. Previous death stories, however, left the question of the impact of these deaths open, either by undoing them too quickly, or by ignoring the question altogether (with exceptions, and these generally written by Jim Starlin).

The "World without a Superman" stories looked at the effect of Superman's death on the people he once protected. It looked in at these characters as they tried to go about the normal business of their lives in a world changed by the seeming death of Superman; it showed how some tried to grow into the vacuum left by Superman's absence. For instance, Bibbo the bartender enjoyed some attention in his pathetic attempts to answer the question "What would Superman do?"

"I Am in Charge Here"

Closet historians recall the details of Hinckley's attempt on President Reagan's life. When Hinckley managed to get a .22 bullet or two into Reagan and a few of his friends, General Alexander Haig addressed the press, attempting to calm them by stating that Haig remained in charge. Folks tend to attribute this to quirkiness, or egotism, or ambition, or just some kind of characteristic Haig oddness, since Haig's position as Secretary of State did not render him next in command if the President died; Vice President Bush, the Speaker of the House (Tip O'Neil) and the Senate Majority Leader (Robert Byrd?) would have a crack at that seat before him.

The succession problem, however, becomes worse in the absence of a clearly dilineated chain, and the "Reign of the Supermen" stories dealt with this as no less than four figures put in claims to the status of Original or Replacement Superman. We would expect no less to happen with the passing of some immensely important, or iconic figure; at least one General Haig, unclear about his role in the new world of the deceased figure, might wrongly step forward.

Instead of a lot of maudlin "I can't believe it" soap opera dialog (which had already occurred in the stories), readers found a power struggle between would-be Supermen, each with a different claim to the title; and the conflict degenerated to fisticuffs on at least two occasions as interested parties attempted to challenge these claims.

Given a superhero universe centered around a nucleus like Superman (while quietly sidestepping DC's tendency to confuse said superhero with the Star of the Old and New Testaments), and assuming the seminal and iconic nature of Superman, one would expect an army of would-be claimants to the title to swarm over his name like flies on a corpse, and the year after the "death" of Superman represented just such a result, followed by rumbles of the Haigs of superherodom as they strove to defend or claim Superman's name.

Honey...I'm Back!

Superman's return represented probably the weakest link in the chain of tales that followed his death. His realization of the nature of his death and rebirth occurred in expository conversations between fistfights. Perhaps page counts compelled a truncation of some longer, better-told version of such exposition. Whatever forced that material into the out-of-the-way corner it occupied, it deserved at least a page or two while Superman described the process of awakening, staggering to the Kryptonian battle-suit, and the like, or while Superman described something like the "tunnel of light" effect reported by a number of real people experiencing death experiences.

This becomes the more remarkable as an omission when one considers that Johnathan Kent enjoyed an entire story dedicated to his own near-death experience, as he hallucinated elaborately (or communicated with the other world, depending on how one interprets it). If Johnathan Kent could traipse through a landscape of memories, history, and fears for twenty pages, why couldn't Superman get a page?

On the other hand, we should consider it fairly fortunate that Superman dispensed with the issue-long death experience at that point, since the story had moved on to the assembled Supermen and Green Lantern dealing with the Cyborg's destruction of Coast City.

Odds and Ends

The story did leave loose ends. Against previous precedent and principle, I will say that some of this came from the limited space in which the artists and writers could work; the story probably could have used some additional development of just how thoroughly things might go all to ruin without Superman's hand to straighten matters out. However, this would have ruined some of the setting unity of the "World without a Superman" stories, which mostly reflected the effect of Superman's loss on Metropolis.

The story also tied off some loose ends rather perfunctorily, such as the "rescue" of Clark Kent to restore Superman's absent alter ego.

In this case, one can achieve some necessary perspective by considering the aftermath of other comic-book resurrections. The normal story of this sort either ignores the loose ends altogether until readers forget or a retroactive continuity change dispenses with them; or it uses these loose ends as the beginning of a lacelike work of complications (as in the case of the return of Jean Grey). This leaves the question open about how to resolve the dangling questions some large character change will invariably create; should writers cut them off (so to prevent their further tangling an already convoluted continuity) or build upon them?

Perfection must ever elude the grasp of the contents of a monthly title or a series of regularly scheduled works, and the "Death of Superman" stories did not pretend to achieve such an impossible goal. However, it did achieve a more realistic target: success. The death did not represent a surprise ending, but a logical culmination of events DC allowed to build for months; and the return relied on nothing more improbable than the existence of a Superman in the first place.

What This Teaches Us

Normally this column deals with how uncompromisingly awful a death-and-return story can become. Much of this awfulness originates in the haste of the conception; comics has a poor record of keeping secrets, and too much buildup will likely spoil the surprise. However, a decent death story (and, more difficultly, a decent resurrection story) requires forethought, the efforts of a good writer, and probably both. Thus we can sneer at the many temporary deaths of Marvel's Wonder Man, since these seldom involved more than one month's planning; and we may furthermore congratulate ourselves on each subsequent resurrection the character enjoys, because we knew it had to come (and on a budget, too).

DC obviously refused to trifle with Superman's "death," even if everyone expected a higher court to overturn it before much time had passed. When they got around to telling the story that had not appeared in over fifty years of Superman stories, they made sure to have available the following resources:

• Talent.
  If DC had used the gimmickry of a superhero death to sell a book by itself, we would rightly group the "Death of Superman" stories with a huge heap of poorly-made and disposable dreck. However, artists like Dan Jurgens, Jackson Guice (who never impressed me until this story), Jon Bogdonove, Jerry Ordway, Tom Grummett, Doug Hazelwood, and a the likes presented a visual approach with considerable vigor and diversity. Nor did the handling of the tale by writers like Roger Stern and up-and-comer Dan Jurgens, Louise Simonson, and Jerry Ordway fail to approach the story's potentials.
• Scale.
  In other death stories, a reader could note the diluting effect of inflation. Adam Warlock, for instance, died to save the galaxy (or group of galaxies) from the pernicious effect of his Evil Future Self; Phoenix died to save the universe from her cosmic munchies; and Wonder Man, contrary to this trend, tended to die because nothing interesting had happened for a page or two in the books in which he appeared. In "Death of Superman," the scale remains firmly attached to a human scale. The showdown between Superman and Doomsday occurs in and over the city of Metropolis; in a sense, the stakes involved the city and Superman's view of himself as the protector of that city. Between his "death" and resurrection, the cast of affected persons mostly includes nonsuper humans coping with the gap Superman used to fill. The story just missed a unity in this regard by attempting a resolution around the destruction of irrelevant Coast City and the appearance of a world-destroying menace; the writers might have exhausted their momentum by this point, since the scale of the story left the human and only barely touched upon it after the bombs started dropping.
• Quirks.
  The normal death story includes the big fight scene where the hero can sacrifice himself or can open himself to his own treacherous murder by some bad guy. The normal resurrection involves either the hero suddenly appearing again somewhere, in whatever condition, or a bunch of heroes discovering that their lifeless comrade never really died and launching a rescue mission. In between, the death never appears to matter but for the occasional expository panel where the hero's friends vow revenge or justice or where the hero's special companion vows never to forget him. This story became much denser, rather than thinner, after Superman died; a social vacuum appeared throughout Metropolis, into which Superman cultists, body-snatching government scientists, profiteers, and would-be successors stepped.