by Larry Tye
BYRNE WALKED AWAY FROM SUPERMAN in 1988, just as the comic book industry was turning around financially. There are two ways to earn money in publishing, as in most enterprises: sell more of what you make, or earn more on each item you sell. DC did both.
Expanding the readership seemed like a lost cause by the 1980s, a decade defined by break dancing, Cabbage Patch dolls, and an Official Preppy Handbook. A comics industry that had sold nearly a billion books a year in the 1940s was down to 175 million. Superman’s numbers had been plummeting since 1965, when it reached 823,829 copies per issue. Sales fell to 446,678 in 1970, 296,000 in 1975, 178,946 in 1980, and a paltry 98,767 in 1985. That same year the comic strip, which by then ran in just fifteen newspapers, called it quits for a second time.
Then something happened. In 1987, sales nearly doubled from the year before—from 98,443 to 161,859. Behind-the-scenes initiatives by Kahn and her colleagues finally started to pay off, all at once. Christopher Reeve’s movies had introduced Superman to tens of millions of new fans, made millions of aging fans feel young again, and motivated subsets of both to have a look at the hero’s comic books. John Byrne’s radical remake, and the press attention it was generating, added to the buzz and stirred up collectors. The new look and the newly numbered Superman book made many think the Byrne titles would become classics. They stocked up, keeping the books in their closets wrapped in protective plastic, unread, waiting until the right moment to sell. Not even DC was sure how much each of those factors contributed, and the trends became impossible to monitor after 1987 because the publisher stopped making its circulation figures public. But everyone agreed that, finally, the Superman news was good.
That wasn’t enough by itself. Whether the bump lasted a year or several, it was temporary, and sales figures would never rebound to anywhere near their 1950s peak or even the level of the 1970s. The comics business had undergone what Time called an adultification. Older buyers were replacing younger ones, a trend that had begun when Americans replaced their radios with TVs, and kids found CDs, PCs, MTV, and other faster-paced ways to sate their thirst for fantasy. Hard-core fans were the norm now, with fewer casual ones and comics no longer the mass medium they had been for half a century. A survey by Marvel Comics found that its average reader was twenty, which meant he or she was born just after the postwar boom in babies and funnies. On average readers were spending ten dollars a week on comic books, which was beyond the allowance of the average kid. And that ten dollars didn’t go very far, since a comic that cost fifteen cents in the 1960s and fifty cents in 1980 was generally a dollar by the end of 1990, with Superman and Batman holding out a bit longer at seventy-five cents.
To DC, predictability was as important as total sales. Historically, comics publishers printed two or more books for every one they sold. Candy stores, five-and-dimes, groceries, and other retailers could return any that were unsold for a full refund, which gave them little incentive to be realistic when ordering and left publishers with garbage bins loaded with untouched comic books. Direct sales changed all that. Kids who had grown up loving comics and still did started opening stores that sold nothing else. Beginning in the 1970s, they made a bargain with publishers: Knowing their customers in a way that general newsstands couldn’t, they could predict how many copies they would sell and were willing to give up the right to return unsold ones. In return, publishers gave them lower prices. It worked well enough for both sides that by 1986, when the Byrne reboot was being unveiled, there were four thousand specialty comic shops nationwide accounting for half of all sales. And DC once again was making money from its comics.
OVER THE YEARS SUPERMAN became entangled in a web of inconsistencies. In the 1940s he fought alongside a super-fast hero named Flash who under his scarlet costume was a college student, Jay Garrick, and who lived in the same world we do. In the 1950s he fought beside a Flash named Barry Allen, a police scientist who lived in a parallel Earth where Jay was a comic book character and Barry’s inspiration. Superman and Batman were honorary members of the Justice Society of America, a first-of-its-kind team of superheroes formed in 1940, and in 1960 they were founding members of the Justice League of America, which had never heard of the Justice Society. More confounding was how Superman had spent his youth. Did he slowly discover his powers and keep them hidden until he arrived in Metropolis and took on the identity of Superman, as Jerry told us from the first? Or did he start out as an adolescent hero named Superboy until he became a man, as Jerry and others started telling us later? And why, as he carried on decade after decade, didn’t Superman ever look a day older than thirty?
Contradictions are a given for comic books, which are fantasies and, in the case of a long-running character like Superman, have been written and drawn by hundreds of different people, each of whom added his own flourish. One way to deal with the incongruities was to have fun, then tell readers it was an imaginary story or a dream. Another was simply to ignore them, the way Superman’s handlers did when Pa Kent turned up as John, Jonathan, and Eben, and the Man of Steel went from outrunning a speeding train to flying faster than a wave of light. That worked fine when readers were eight or nine and stayed with the comics only into their teens. It became a problem as Superman’s audience shrank, aged, and became at least as versed in everything that had come before as his writers and editors.
So, in time-honored science fiction form, those writers and editors concocted new laws of nature and systems of logic. The Superman adventures from the Golden Age of comic books, from 1938 through the early 1950s, were said to have occurred in a dimension called Earth-2. The Silver Age Superboy and Superman lived in an alternate reality called Earth-1. The parallel dimension concept had been around in science fiction for decades, but DC first introduced it to comic books in 1961, in a story where the Barry Allen Flash met the earlier Jay Garrick version. The two universes occupied the same physical realm but never intersected because they spun at different speeds of vibration. They were given counterintuitive names—Earth-2 for the older reality and Earth-1 for the newer one—in 1963. The changes were made under Julie Schwartz’s leadership and they filled in the black holes that had troubled faithful readers since Superboy showed up in 1945. The Justice Society was on Earth-2, where Superman returned to the original spelling of his Kryptonian name, Kal-L, and his adoptive parents were John and Mary Kent. The Justice League was on Earth-1, as were the hero called Superboy and Jonathan and Martha Kent. When the Earth-1 Superman was in his prime, Kal-L started showing his age, which wasn’t surprising since he was almost twenty-five years older, and he went into semiretirement. Most supporting characters were tough to tell apart, but not Supergirl, who was Power Girl on Earth-2, where she took over for her cousin when he called it quits.
Over time it got even more muddled. If two Earths were good, why not an Earth-3, Earth-4, Earth-5, Earth-6, Earth-K, and Earth-Prime? Superman was part of several of the new worlds, and each came with its own special heroes and villains. Characters crossed between universes and comics titles at dizzying speed. Superman fans now had to buy other heroes’ books to follow his exploits, and vice versa, which was part of the motivation for DC. New readers were left with their heads spinning and many gave up. Even some veterans had trouble keeping track and pined for the simplicity of one Earth and Jerry and Joe’s singular Superman.
That is the beauty of comic books: When things get out of control, editors can blow up one reality and create a more reader-friendly one, which is what they did in 1985 for DC’s fiftieth anniversary. It came in twelve parts, required years of careful research, and was something that author Marv Wolfman had been aching to try since he was a kid reading comics on his stoop in Brooklyn. They called it Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it could as easily have been named Let’s Start Over. In a battle between the ever-powerful Monitor and Anti-Monitor, planets were annihilated, heroes died, and archenemies joined forces to save their skins and their worlds. The five worlds that weren’t destroyed were condensed into one and no one
remembered that there had ever been more. Gone were Luthor 1, Barry Allen’s Flash, and Supergirl, among millions. There was but one Superman now, one Lois, one Lex, and one set of stories to keep track of. It was the most cataclysmic event in the history of the Multiverse, rebooting DC’s entire line in one swoop, and it set a template both for future comic-cleansings and for impending changes in Superman.
After the Crisis stories and before John Byrne’s restart, DC published one of its most moving Superman stories ever, a two-parter called “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” It was Julie Schwartz’s goodbye after more than forty years at DC and fifteen years overseeing Superman. It also was the perfect segue into the superhero’s new era and new bosses. Julie’s first choice to write it was Jerry Siegel, whom he called a “genius,” but legal hurdles nixed that idea and he ended up with a more contemporary comic book celebrity, Alan Moore. The story opened by explaining that Superman had died ten years before and a Daily Planet reporter was interviewing Lois (Lane) Elliot to find out what his last days had been like. His bitterest enemies had teamed up against him, she said, and his friends came to his defense. He broke his no-kill rule by slaying Mr. Mxyzptlk. Jimmy Olsen and Lana Lang died, too, and a disheartened Superman had disappeared into the Arctic cold, where he presumably froze to death.
But wait. On the last page, we could see that Lois’s husband, Jordan, was in fact Superman and that their son, Jonathan, had inherited his powers. It was the Superman franchise’s trademark wink, the kind that George Reeves had perfected in the 1950s and that Julie carried on decades later. It effectively said, “Hold on, readers. Just between us, there’s more to the story.” No need to spell it out—simply show baby Jonathan playing with a pile of coal, and, just by rubbing it, turning one chunk into a sparkling diamond. In the last panel Jordan looked out at his readers, suggestively closed one eye, and said, “What do you think?” As for the answer to the title’s question—Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow?—the upshot, as Julie ordained and Moore wrote, was that he, his wife, and his baby were destined “to live happily ever after.”
He was actually destined to live the way John Byrne wanted him to, which was more like a human and less like an alien. That approach was why Marvel’s heroes were outselling DC’s, and that was the kind of Superman that Christopher Reeve had been in the movies. His Kryptonian past, the way Byrne wrote and drew it, was more otherworldly than ever. He came to life not through bodily conception but in a gestation chamber, to parents who looked less human than when Joe Shuster sketched them, and he was rocketed into space not as a cuddly baby but as an unborn child sealed in a futuristic birthing matrix. The idealized Krypton of earlier origin tales was replaced by what Jor-El called “a cold and heartless society, stripped of all human feeling, all human passion and life.” No wonder Clark was quick to affirm his Midwestern surroundings and the down-to-earth side of his split personality.
Other Byrne changes were answers to critics who said the superhero had degenerated into a stodgy old man. It was true: Not just Superman but all those around him were showing their age, making him look less like a Man of Tomorrow than Yesterday’s Hero. Al Capone had been the right role model for villains in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler in the 1940s, and the Dr. Strangelove–like mad scientist in the 1960s. But in the 1980s the bad guys were corporate raiders who wore Ralph Lauren suits and ID badges to the stock exchange. Enter the new Lex Luthor, Metropolis’s wealthiest and slimiest citizen, fashioned in the image of The Donald (Trump), Ivan Boesky, or perhaps Marvel’s Kingpin. The new Lois was even more a creature of her times. No more distressed damsel or columnist to the lovelorn—the model now was the sassy Margot Kidder, who had set the standard on-screen by telling Superman, “I’ve seen how the other half lives. My sister, for instance. Three kids, two cats, and one mortgage. I would go bananas in a week.” Byrne’s Lois pumped iron and showed thighs and breasts in a way that reflected a far less prudish Comics Code and America. And sex wasn’t only for heterosexuals anymore. Policewoman Maggie Sawyer tried a closeted life and marriage but over time became more open to herself and to readers about her attraction to women.
Evolution was inevitable for a character who had lasted as long as Superman. Stasis would have doomed him. New writers and artists picked from a sprawling buffet of ideas and approaches, reflecting what mattered to them and their generation, the same way authors had with folktales like Little Red Riding Hood and with sacred texts like the Torah and the New Testament. “It’s a collective work,” says Paul Levitz, the former DC publisher who helped steer the 1980s reboot. “It’s a long conversation. People come into the room and leave the room and the story keeps getting told. The goal in any process like that is always to preserve the essence of the character.”
That is where Byrne got into trouble. He rebuilt the mythology not just around the edges but at its core, changing what not just fans but fellow mythmakers thought should be immutable. “The notion that Clark is the disguise and Superman is the real man was accepted through the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and even the ’70s,” says Mark Waid, who came to DC just after Byrne did and would get to do his own remake a generation later. “One thing that struck me as off-note with John Byrne’s big revamp was the reversal of those roles, with Superman just another disguise. It struck me as taking away one thing that made him unique and it gave short shrift to his alien heritage.” What stuck in the craw of Elliot Maggin, another longtime Superman writer, was the idea that Superman had to become less powerful to be more accessible. “You don’t define the most powerful character in the world by his limitations. The whole point is that if you have all the power in the world, what do you do with it? How he answered that question is what makes him such an important American character.” The most piercing critique came from Len Wein, who, like Byrne, wrote for both Marvel and DC. Byrne’s Krypton, Wein says, was so sterile that it “deserved to blow up.” And the new Superman “wasn’t Superman. He had no heart.”
Byrne, many fans agreed, had gone too far. He forgot that the key to Superman is that he is like us even though he isn’t us. He isn’t human but is a shining example for everyone who is. Sometimes it takes an alien to show us what is special about ourselves, or what could be if we really tried. The Last Kryptonian’s greatest powers are his mind and his heart, which are why baby boomers embrace him as much as the greatest generation did.
The Byrne remake and the controversy it spawned came just in time for Superman’s fiftieth birthday jubilee, which was perfect timing for DC. Rather than the anniversary conversation being about how calcified he was, it was about what made him a classic. The Smithsonian showed how central it thought Superman was to the American psyche with a yearlong celebration called “Superman: Many Lives, Many Worlds.” George Reeves was there alongside Christopher Reeve, in the continuous clips the museum aired from TV, movies, and cartoons. There was a battery-operated Superman wristwatch, a box of Pep cereal with Superman on the back, and, as recognizable as Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, Jimmy Olsen’s bow tie. Time thought the occasion important enough to justify a cover feature. CBS ran a special assembled by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, whose ex-wife was Joe Shuster’s niece Rosie. Playwright David Mamet paid tribute, too, writing, “I admire anyone who can make his living in his underwear.” And DC ran back-to-back-to-back birthday parties at New York’s historic Puck Building, with Mayor Ed Koch toasting the ageless superhero, “May you live to 120!”
The tribute Superman himself might have enjoyed most was a book of essays called Superman at Fifty! The Persistence of a Legend! It explored serious questions such as why Lois was so attracted to Superman (“Because he represents freedom. Freedom from a conventional life. Freedom from the roles women are expected to play. Freedom, in flying, from the gravity that pulls on humans”) and fun ones such as is there anything Superman can’t do. (A Man of Steel can’t get a tattoo, a tan, a vaccination, or a vasectomy.) As to why he persisted for a full half century, the editors concluded it w
as his “elemental power—a simple grandeur of conception—that sticks in the soul and finds its way to the corner of one’s smile.”
ALEX AND ILYA SALKIND celebrated their success with Superman: The Movie by doing it again. And again. Then they sold the rights to make a fourth to someone else. Sequels were their specialty—and how they turned red ink black. But by the third, the plot lines were testing the faith of even Superman’s fiercest defenders and budgets were plummeting along with box office receipts.
The first of the new movies, Superman II, was the most successful creatively and financially. Relieved of the need to retell the origin story, which the 1978 film had done, this 1980 release could get right into the action, although setting the opening on Krypton served as a reminder of Superman’s alien beginnings. The new movie also didn’t have to start from scratch with writers and rewriters. Nearly all the story was there in the Puzo-Benton-Newmans-Mankiewicz script, with David and Leslie Newman returning to do touch-ups and write a new ending since the original had been filched for the first movie. Part of the second film had been shot alongside the first, although precisely how much would be hotly contested.
