Superman's Best Era Is Getting Omnibus Releases Starting This Fall
The Triangle Era, which is sandwiched between the John Byrne years and Infinite Crisis, will apparently finally be collected in full starting in September.
Penguin Random House has announced that, starting in December, DC will begin printing omnibus editions of Superman's "Triangle Era," the time between cover date January 1991 and April 2002. Fans started calling it the "triangle era" due to triangles featured on each week's cover, helping audiences determine the reading order of the comics. With four monthly titles beginning with Superman: The Man of Steel #1, this became a necessary way to keep track of the story, as the Superman titles of the 1990s all flowed from book to book, telling one, continuous narrative instead of having distinct stories told by each title's creative team.
A typical triangle number would be something like Superman: The Wedding Special's 1996-47. That would indicate that the book was the 47th title in Superman's 1996 reading order. They loosely correlated with weeks, but since the titles were weekly, it wasn't until the introduction of the quarterly title Superman: The Man of Tomorrow that the numbers ever went higher than 48 or 49, since most one-shots and annuals didn't have triangle numbers.
From the start of John Byrne's The Man of Steel about five years before, until roughly the end of the Triangle Era, Superman had one, ongoing story with a pretty strict continuity and some well-enforced rules about characterization, powers, time-travel, and mythology. It was around 1999 when that system started to really fray, with a large-scale creative reset and the new writers started to redefine Krypton and downplay some of the key supporting players of the Triangle era, like Cat Grant and Perry White's wife and adoptive son.
Many of the "Triangle Era" books have been reprinted numerous times over, due to their involvement with events like the Death and Return of Superman or the Electric Superman saga. Others have never been available in reprints, since it didn't become de rigeur to reprint every single issue of a DC title as collected editions until the end of the '90s or early 2000s. These omnibuses will collect the books that actually had triangles on the front, with the Byrne-era books already collected in four oversized Superman: The Man of Steel hardcovers and most of the stories that bridge the gap between the Byrne years and the Triangle Era available in the Superman In Exile Omnibus.
Here's how Penguin Random House describes the collection:
The 1990s saw a new wave of creative vitality and fan interest in comics' original superhero, with four tightly connected monthly series bringing the Man of Steel to new heights: Superman, Adventures of Superman, Action Comics, and Superman: The Man of Steel.
These four series, while continuing to retain their own distinct voices, worked closely in tandem with each other, telling a detailed larger narrative of Superman's never-ending battle. In turn, DC added numbered triangle icons to each cover, indicating to readers exactly where in the story a given Superman issue would fall-ushering in what readers fondly remember as "the triangle era."
Following years of demand, these revered stories return with Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 1, a comprehensive collection of the first year of these comics from creators including Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Jon Bogdanove, Bob McLeod, and more. Stories include "Time and Time Again," "Blackout," and Clark Kent revealing his secret identity to Lois Lane!
This volume collects Superman #49-64; Adventures of Superman #472-486; Action Comics #659-673; Superman: The Man of Steel #1-8.