The Death of Superman - Part 1

[history79]

8 pages of 26

















7.25 pages of 22

Comments

[dr_archeville]

DOOMSDAY KILLED OPTIUMS PRIME! ;A;

(Then again, dying is kind of his thing.)

[lbd_nytetrayn]

That's what I was thinking, too. =)

Well, that and "there sure are a lot of 'elsewheres'."

[crinos]

See, this is how you put a villain over.

Doomsday literally beat up the entire Justice league with one hand tied behind his back.

[icon_uk]

Actually, this struck me then, as it does now, as being amongst the worst sort of jobbing. None of the heroes think, or plan properly or even notice that, for example, Doomsday can't fly, they just keep trying to punch him, or if they have a ranged attack like fire, do so from about four feet away.

[tpsreports]

Hear hear!

[lego_joker]

Buuuuut if nothing else, it provides a handy excuse for why Bruce didn't call for any backup when Bane blew Arkham wide open. He *couldn't*.

(I forget - was Dick doing anything important during Knightfall? He'd already quit the Titans, right?)

[q99]

Superman noticed, but every time he tried to pull Doomsday to space he got punched hard for the attempt.

[icon_uk]

Isn't Bloodwynd telekinetic? And Guy should have been able to use a ranged attack, if no GL's are around., as should Superman come to that. Don't lift Doomsday into space because it means coming into contact with him, lift the quartermile of Earth around him into space before he can get out of it. Or find a teleporter....

It's not that these probably wouldn't have been written around too, but this is not showing any of the heroes as being competent, never mind creative, against someone whose only abilities are invulnerability and punching really hard.

[night4345]

Guy got blitzed (even his thoughts say he didn't even see Doomsday move) and the crap kicked out of him before he could use his ring's versatility. Bloodwynd wasn't telekinetic (Martian Manhunter wasn't aware of his powers as Bloodwynd). Maxima is but she'd rather fight face to face .DD would have most likely cracked or jumped away from any earth they picked up. I agree with the teleporter thing but this is nothing new to comics.

[q99]

At one point they did all stand back and unload. That's what destroyed this outfit, everyone pretty much drained their chargers and he ate it.

DD *is* supposed to be really, really, near-Flash fast at times, staying at a distance wasn't easy.

[silicondream]

So did Blue Beetle have superpowers at the time or something? Because Ted looks remarkably...alive for a guy whose head was repeatedly smashed into hard objects by a homicidal maniac with Superman-level strength. I mean, he's flattening a water main with his face in that one panel.

[q99]

No. He did end up in a coma, mind.

[md84]

Doomsday crushing that bird and that tree takes on a whole new meaning when more of his backstory was revealed. He didn't just do it out of sadism -- thanks to the really messed up way he was created, he's absolutely terrified of everything in existence. To him, anything, even that bird, is a potential threat that he needs to kill before it kills him. His very existence is a unending nightmare. I'm actually a little disappointed he never became Parallax's host, since fear is the driving force in his life.

[nightauditguy]

Who did Bloodwynd turn out to be anyways?

[randyripoff]

I don't know, but I'm betting it was Red Tornado. At least that's the cue that I got from the artwork.

[randyripoff]

And let me say "oops" right now. According to Wikipedia, it was J'onn J'onnz.

[q99]

Martian Manhunter, shapeshifted into Bloodwynd as Bloodwynd's gem took him over or something.

The character of Bloodwynd exists outside of J'onn, but as the only story with him people remember is 'the one where he turned out to be Martian Manhunter' most fans forget/don't know that he wasn't just an alt ID.

[zero_elec]

This is the point where someone posts the Death and Return of Superman video, right? (Spoilers and language warning, I guess)

[chrys]

Thanks for that. Hadn't seen it xD

[shadowpsykie]

those final words, and final panel in the final issue made me cry just like i did when Kara died...

[rickperry]

I used to love this as a kid.

[tcampbell1000]

The most overrated superhero comic ever produced, and that is saying something.

I don't mean it's all completely terrible. Some early, simple scenes of Doomsday wreaking more and more havoc are mostly effective (that's a pretty trusting bird, though). Nothing's wrong with any decision that Superman makes, and the pacing is very effective: what starts out as an ordinary day for him and the JLA grows more and more hopeless until his downfall isn't even a surprise. Doomsday's cruel laughter, his unreasoning simplicity, makes him a solid metaphor for death itself.

But also, Doomsday is a creature of completely mindless rage until the plot needs him to go to Metropolis. At this point, he suddenly develops an understanding of spoken and written English, as well as the nature of television broadcasts and highway signage, so an ad for a wrestling event in Metropolis gets him grunting "MUH-TRP-LSSS?" and then looks ominously at a sign that says METROPOLIS, 60 MILES. (Yes, I know later versions of Doomsday developed sentience, but this version is clearly supposed to be mindless before and after this one moment.)

Far too much of the story is taken up by the then-current version of the Justice League, a team which Dan Jurgens had been writing into the ground even before this: his straightforward, kinda-stilted-even-for-the-'90s approach to a team of mostly comedic misfits worked about as well as bringing George Lucas in to write an entire season of New Girl.

As others point out, this League doesn't do a great job of fulfilling its one real role in the story: selling Doomsday as an unstoppable force. The psychics on the team could've at least TRIED to shut him down, and most of the team has some kind of ranged attack power they could've tried using before Big Blue showed up. And why this team does not contact their most powerful member the instant they come face-to-face with a job for Superman is never explained.

The "mystery" of Bloodwynd is that he's the Martian Manhunter. Beetle may say he "never would've guessed in a million years," but most of us figured it out in three issues, so this attempt to sell Blue Beetle as "smarter than everyone thinks he is" backfires badly. But Bloodwynd also isn't the Martian Manhunter and is his own super-being whose powers are rooted in slave history and has the ability to speak to the dead. (And he's also an antebellum slaveowner turned corrupting spirit. It's bizarre all the way down.) You might think Bloodwynd's "talk to the dead" power would at least see some interesting use after Superman died and the League was coping with survivor's guilt. But you'd be mistaken. Bloodwynd's greatest power is his ability to avoid doing anything interesting.

And then there's the subplot where Lex Luthor in his cloned son's body gaslights Supergirl out of participating in the fight until it reaches Metropolis. He's also sleeping with her. She's a shape-shifter. We all considered this a perfectly normal thing to happen in Superman stories--it went on for years, before and after this. COMICS, Y'ALL.

The art's okay, for the most part, though certain panels look weirdly rushed and Jon Bogdanove's style was always a weird fit with the others. I do remember, though, that the art team was so oddly proud of the "countdown" shown in the last four issues leading up to the death--every page is four panels for an issue, then three panels for another, then two, then one. Like, congratulations on doing less work and calling it craftsmanship, guys.

Technically speaking, "Funeral for a Friend" was much better executed (benefitting from a longer focus on mourning than superhero comics normally allow), and "The Return of Four Supermen, Which One's The Real One, Surprise It's Actually This Fifth Guy" was silly and weird but at least consistently fun. But this story mostly reminds me of the first time the larger world seemed interested in my then-obscure comics hobby. And any thrill I felt from that was compromised by the fact that I knew it was a con. Superman would be back. The ending of the story and its last line are undeniably powerful. But even as it was published, I knew that last line was a lie.