Twenty years ago today, DC Comics published Superman #75, “The Death of Superman.”The final chapter of the Doomsday! storyline that played out over several parts in Superman, Justice League of America, Action Comics and the then-published titles Adventures of Superman and Superman: The Man of Steel, the story broke from the comfort zone of the creative team at the time by taking on a more Marvel-style story that embraced big action, blood, property damage and a monstrous, unstoppable villain.Coming off the John Byrne revamp and working under creators like Jerry Ordway, Dan Jurgens, Roger Stern and Louise Simonson, the Superman titles of the early ’90s tended to be somewhat more character-driven, and both Ordway and Jurgens say that the initial pitch for Doomsday! was actually rejected at first with much of the creative staff saying, essentially, “It’s not really our kind of thing.”
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While you wrote a lot of key stories in Superman’s publishing history, the death-and-rebirth stuff is among some of the very little material DC singled out as still having happened post New 52. It doesn’t seem like it can be just sales–what do you think is the enduring appeal of that story?
How would you describe the creative process that shaped the story? I think everybody knows how it came about, with Jerry’s “Let’s kill the bastard” that was widely reported in the documentaries on the Superman: Doomsday DVD, but you were the one whose name is synonymous with the story.
How do YOU feel about the story? It’s very fondly remembered by some and by others it gets a lot of the blame for the speculator boom and bust of the ’90s.
20 years on, The Death of Superman still figures prominently in your bio. Is it a little more prevalent for you, do you think, becuase you were the artist who actually did the killing? I mean, you get those black bags at every convention.
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Justice League of America
And since you were still kind of transitioning from the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League into something else, did you enjoy the fact that this massively-successful story you were working on allowed you to incorporate Booster Gold, a character you created?
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I’m sure I’ve told you before, but when I was a kid, I was a Marvel guy and occasionally something more “extreme” at DC in the vein of Lobo/Deathstroke/Batman kind of stuff. Superman, I never had any use for and so when I heard (on my local TV news) that he was going to die, I came back to comics just to see the sonofabitch go down. The character work you, Roger, Louise and the others were doing kept me there for the long haul. Is that a story you hear a lot?
Can you explain the panel structure of the Doomsday! story for our readers? Ages ago you explained the way it was set up (culminating in the full-page splashes of the final issue) and somehow I had never noticed it before!!
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Crisis
Man of Steel
Obviously you’re the only one of the old gang who’s worked on Superman in recent years (except for Bogdanove, who drew the RetroActive special). Do you think now that you’ve taken a bite at the New 52 Super-apple, you’ve had your say or do you expect you’ll be back sometime?
