From: mss2@quads.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Subject: Re: superman
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 16:57:43 GMT

In article <By0JyL.7vE@news.cso.uiuc.edu> trumpins@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu (Barbara Trumpinski) writes:

>"NOBODY has mentioned a very important death which occurred earlier
>this week...superman has met his match...he died in lois's arms.

>rest in peace, superman...

>you gave me many hours of joy when i was younger."

><crash>  her glass hits the fireplace.

	"Um, Kitten... I don't think you need say your final goodbyes
to Kal-El of Krypton just yet.  Yes, DC Comics has pulled off a fairly
impressive publicity coup, but I this being comic books I suspect
(read `am certain') that his death ain't in no ways permanent.  Rumor
hath it he'll be up and about in six months.  Even if that's just
rumor, if he isn't alive and kicking within the year I'll eat my
fedora and have my walking stick for dessert.  :-)  (DC Comics may not
be the brightest company in the world, but I suspect that the chances
that they'll permanently kill off a marketing property literally worth
millions to them are, well, slim.)

	"As a comics reader, I'm rather disgruntled at DC Comics for
the whole Superman thing-- if you're _going_ to kill off Superman, you
do it with some _style_ for goodness sake.  You _don't_ just have him
beaten to death in the course of stopping some big, strong guy who no
one's ever seen before.  You have him die fighting Lex Luthor, or
someone of equal stature and/or saving something that's critical to
him: the universe, the Earth, Lois...  He's killed either by a real
overwhelming force or by a reasonably clever plan-- _not_ by someone
who's just somewhat bigger and stronger than he is.

	"And if anyone wants to see the end of Superman done well, I
recommend saving the money which would have gone to this Doomsday
thing and digging out the storyline called "Whatever Happened to the
Man of Tomorrow" by Alan Moore, published in 1985 (Superman #423 and
Action Comics #583).  I'll quote from the opening:

	"`This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but
then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only
good.  It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and
the great miracles long since performed; of how his enemies conspired
against him and of that final war in the snowblind wastes beneath the
Northern Lights; of the women he loved and of the choice he made
between them; of how he broke his most sacred oath, and how finally
all the things he had were taken from him save for one.  It ends with
a wink.  It begins in a quiet midwestern town, one summer afternoon in
the quiet midwestern future.  Away in the big city, people still
sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant
speck in the sky... but no: it's only a bird, only a plane.  Superman
died ten years ago.  This is an imaginary story...

	"`Aren't they all?'"

	Michael puts down the comic.  "Right after they published
that, they reworked Superman significantly, at least from the
perspective of someone who reads these things.  As a result, after
some attempt to like their `new' Superman, I realized that the
prologue to `Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow' was correct--
Superman died there after all.  The death of his replacement might
have affected me if it had been well done.  And I'm a sucker for these
sorts of stories.  I have the comics in which Supergirl was killed
back in '85 (and she actually didn't get better, but was written out
of the history and later replaced with a character who had
significantly different powers and origin), and in which Superboy was
killed in '87 (turned out, as part of the rewriting mentioned earlier,
he wasn't Superman as a boy after all, and he died saving his parallel
universe's Earth) and I can still actually get choked up reading
either of them.  It's costumed heroes and melodrama, but the writers
are able to make me care about these people.  But they couldn't
conjure up anything of the sort this time-- I suspect, in the end,
that that's why I'm disappointed in them."

Michael


-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Indeed I tremble for my country
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 when I reflect that God is just."
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on
mschiffer@aal.itd.umich.edu	    Virginia (1784)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans