If you didn't like "The Death of Superman" you might like this

[icon_uk]

Or not....





Tonight the part of Hank Henshaw will be played by... Elijah Wood!

And, no I'm NOT kidding

Courtesy of the son of the man who brought you Animal House....




And on an unrelated note, an old animated favourite returns! Remember this series from the 1980's?



Looks like it's getting a revamp!






Okay, in case you haven't guessed, this is NOT a remake, it's a completely fictitious trailer of a non-existent series, put together as part of an Animation schools end of year project, but you have to admit it manages to look like just about EVERY 1980's show ever made no? (Even down to the muscle-hound hero of dubious-sexuality!) I'd watch the hell out of this series, certainly better than the new yawntastic Voltron series...

Comments

[glprime]

(Harry Partridge's Watchmen cartoon was pretty awesome too.)

This is rather impressive, and yeah, brings back quite a number of memories. The so-bad-it's-good nostalgia factor always wins over your adult mind. And honestly, the Stallion base is one of the coolest damn space station/home base designs I've ever seen. Pretty epic.

[icon_uk]

(Harry Partridge's Watchmen cartoon was pretty awesome too.)

Okay, thanks to the power of Google I now have to ask...

HOW THE HELL HAVE I MISSED THIS UNTIL NOW!!!

[glprime]

I honestly thought you were posting the Stallions thing in solidarity of earlier postings of his stuff to this comm :)

You need to waste more time on the net. (Admittedly, Harry doesn't seem to cross post as much as certain other creators, and he only got really Internet!famous for a few recent things.)

[icon_uk]

Nope never even heard of him before...

[avantre]

Famous (internet or otherwise) doesn't mean universally known. And the Watchmen cartoon was a classic.

[darkblade]

His American Akira was also pretty good but it didn't age well.

[biod]

Oh man, I forgot that existed.

[korvar]

Is the claim really being made that characters coming back from death had never happened before Death Of Superman?

I mean, nobody that I recall reading comics at the time thought his death was going to be permanent. Not one person.

[icon_uk]

I think that's his point, when they killed Superman, it was so obvious he'd be back that it was impossible to take any "Death!!!" seriously again.

(Though to be fair, the other major DC character deaths; Barry Allen and Jason Todd, would remain dead for another few years apiece)

[korvar]

I thought Death as a revolving door had been pretty well established by then... Jean Grey had already come back by then, for example. In fact, she'd managed to be killed again before Death of Superman (and that's not counting being temporarily killed along with 50% of the Marvel Universe during The Infinity Gauntlent)

My recollection is that we didn't think Superman was permanently dead because we didn't think any superhero death was permanent.

Maybe the Death of Superman brought that idea out into the general public (although they'd seen Bobby step out of the shower in 1986).

[icon_uk]

Jean Grey was a Marvel character, DC had a different approach.

[miss_abnormal]

I see it more as that Superman's death was made into such a big thing for one of the most iconic characters ever that, when being brought back, it offended the new readers and many of the old and made Death look insignificant. Yes, comic book characters had died and come back before The Death of Superman, but they were not generally characters that were the first things that popped into your mind when someone asked you about superheroes.

DC made his death like it was a historic event to be remembered years to come and people took it that way. Him being resurrected just made all that drama, tension, and excitement within the comic book insignificant. Also, he was brought back practically a year later, making it clear that DC of that time planned that since the beginning. It's not like, say, Barry Allen, who was resurrected (or came back from the Speed Force or whatever) years after he died, written by a different writer and an almost different DC.

So, Superman's death was practically nothing. He proved that comic book characters could be brought back no matter how much tension or heartbreaking the death itself was. It also proved that writers could come up with the most ridiculous of excuses to bring people back. It didn't matter anymore if it took three, ten, or fifteen issues to kill someone, especially if that someone is incredibly iconic. Death was no longer the end of one's life, a life in which one has experienced creation things that make it valuable and the moment of death so heartbreaking.

[q99]

One of the thing is most returns used to be "Oh, they weren't really dead, it was a clone/double/robot/whatever." More actually came back-came back after Superman.

And yea, the comic public knew he'd came back, but it still did open the floodgates.


(And then at some point they stopped even making it require big-huge events or very specific circumstances to come back, people just started returning)

[biod]

"Fuck! Run! It's the Hulk!"
LMAO

uh...ok

[mr_cyn1cal]

Yeah, well thanks for saying "nobody gives a fuck about superman" and then...you know, not supporting that with, you know, proof or anything. And yeah, OK, some of that stuff about what DC comics is? Certainly true then and now, sure. And hey, I can forgive the inaccuracies of retelling the story. But yeah...thanks for 15 minutes of bitching while not proving a point, other than "man, Elijah Wood really needs a better agent". And as far as Steel goes, yeah, I guess it was wrong of DC to try and promote a new character who had an interesting hook and background - thankfully the new 52 has taken care of all those problems!

Well I enjoyed it.

[steverodgers5]

But I have a kind of deranged fondness for that era. As the whole guessing game of the four supermen, was enough of a hook to get me reading dc for a while. (Before that it was really only Marvel that I read, Dark Knight Returns being the only notable exception..)

So thanks for posting it. Brought back some fun memories..

[filkertom]

Meh, whatever. Space Stallions, on the other hand -- that rocks.

[icon_uk]

Doesn't it though? The theme tune is so wonderfully, completely 1980's that it would work on it's own (I confess I bought the theme from the link on their youtube page), but the designs of the characters are also rather marvellous.

[silverzeo]

Funny, but the dude is wrong in some minor areas... Blue Beetle is STILL dead, they brought him back to life temporary to tease Booster and the fans, and the Guardian was a Jack Kirby creation and one of the writers was trying to bring him back... only to disappear over time... not to mention characters were brought back before the death of Superman and after Infinite Crisis, like Wildcat was to be crippled but made a complete recovery...

Will he cover stuff like Spider-Man's OMD or the other waste of time Marvel events, like Civil War, the comic that went out of it's why to kill Captain America only to bring him back once some one else took charge of the White House.

[big_daddy_d]

Ok one: Chris Hardwick, Chris Evans (I'm sure that was him as Hal Jordan), and Ron Howard. Awesome.

Also the following needs to be made into a net meme:
Parenting
Ring Shit!

This was too funny.

[q99]

That was pretty funny :)

[wizardru]

I actually thought the video was pretty funny in parts. The only things I didn't agree with (and no, I'm not going to obsess over his continuity/detail mistakes):

1) A guy who was SIX at the time these comics came out telling me how people reacted? DUDE. I was there. I don't know who this mysterious fan rage was supposed to come from, but it wasn't any comics fans I ever met. Check Peter David's 'But I Digress' column at the time, which specifically mentions how the only people who didn't lose their **** and didn't think Superman was actually dead WERE THE ACTUAL COMICS FANS.

2) Citing 'Death's' ridiculous sales numbers and then indicating this caused the sales to diminish after Superman came back is demonstrably wrong. All comics sales have been dropping for decades. Superman itself has remained in the top selling comics as the industry has gone down the hole. Superman was the best selling title of 1992...and then 2004. In the years prior to Superman's death, he was selling under 100K some months. Years after 'Death' he was still selling in the top 10 and one of the few titles that could keep up with the X-titles in terms of sales. That's not even factoring in the speculator's market of the 90s.

3) Claiming 'Death of Superman' destroyed death in comics is like forgetting that before we had Jar Jar Binks, we had the Ewoks. Hell, the most controversial and much more contentious resurrection of Jean Grey had already happened about seven years prior. THAT might have destroyed it. Oh, and Gwen Stacey's return as a clone back in the 1970s? I mean, seriously, characters came back from the dead all the time long before Superman did it. Remember how Supergirl died in the Crisis? She was back in less than 2 years. Oh, sure...it was a 'different' Supergirl. Remember when Iris West came back? Has it accelerated in recent years? Certainly. But to claim that death lost all meaning when it happened to Superman? Preposterous. Especially in light of all the other stuff going on, like Green Lantern going nuts and being replaced and Batman being 'broken' and replaced. It was clearly a set of moves designed to generate sales. And everyone knew it. The only people who were worked up over it were people who hadn't read comics in decades or who were mad at the ID in general. But they weren't customers of DC, so their opinions didn't matter. And let's not forget, the Death and Rebirth of Superman was wildly successful (certainly financially and I'd argue creatively; the weakest part was Doomsday and the actual death).

Don't get me wrong: I think this video makes some funny points (even if it specifically pretends that it doesn't know details of the story and goes out of it's way to make it seem like a bad story, when it wasn't). What I find annoying is someone who was barely old enough to read attempting to speak with authority about how it all went down.

[eyz]

Well, I actually liked Death and Return of Superman, AND enjoyed this video XD