Man of Steel's Popularity: Is It Really a Surprise?

Superman, we've been told, is a difficult character to get right. If you believe the comics press (and we've been guilty of this ourselves from time to time), nobody has done right by Big Blue in years, and the Silver Age Superman remains the unchallenged beacon of light from which everything shines. Mark Waid, who worships at the altar of the pre-Crisis Superman, has been widely credited as one of the most influential Superman creators of the last twenty years in spite of never having had a significant run on any of the character's ongoing monthly titles, while long-running creators like John Byrne, Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway get no end of heat for being part of "The Nineties." And the standard-bearer of Superman on film is Christopher Reeve, whose last great outing as the character came in 1980.

So...how did Man of Steel make a boatload of money this week and get something like 85% of the audience to like it enough to earn it an A- CinemaScore? Well, according to a new poll, it's simple, and it's just like almost everything else in comics. Those truisms are apparently the opinions of a very vocal minority, repeated so often that the community assumes them to be accurate. They're not necessarily any more indicative of the broader fan community than the Stephanie Brown fanatics or the people enraged that Dial H has been cancelled. As part of an infographic released by ComiXology taking a look at Superman in time for the release of Man of Steel, a poll conducted by the digital comics retailer revealed that the overwhelming majority of fans polled said their preferred Superman was the Modern Age (post-Crisis on Infinite Earths) iteration, which began with John Byrne's The Man of Steel and continues through the New 52. Of course, they didn't break that up into the Byrne Era, Birthright Era, Johns Era, etc.--but the point is, these readers claim to prefer the more recent stories to older ones in significant numbers. This is perhaps not surprising given the source of the infographic, but according to the press release, comiXology and DC Comics jointly "surveyed more than 10,000 fans to get their thoughts on the movie, villain of choice, Superman's love interest and, of course, their favorite Superman comic." While it's probably fairly safe to assume that ComiXology customers skew younger and are more likely to identify with a newer version of Superman, it's not totally clear that it waas only ComiXology readers who were surveyed.