I'm So Sick of the Death of Superman
Hey, did you know that I have a new novel for adults coming out in August 2025? It’s true! Lessons in Magic and Disaster is my first grown-up novel since 2019, and I couldn’t be prouder of how it turned out.
It’s about a young witch named Jamie who’s trying to finish her PhD dissertation about eighteenth-century lady novelists. Jamie’s mother, Serena, has been hiding away in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, since Serena’s wife died and her career imploded.
Jamie decides to bring Serena back to the world, by teaching her how to be a witch — but there are some wounds that magic can’t heal. Parts of this book still make me cry every time I re-read them, but also a lot of other parts make me laugh every time. Anyway, you can pre-order it most places already, and if you want your copy signed and personalized with a silly doodle, you can pre-order from Green Apple Books. (They ship all over!)
Let’s never do the Death of Superman storyline again!
I love the TV show Superman and Lois, so I'm bummed that its budget was slashed for its shortened final season. But I'm also pretty sad that this lovely show is burning off a big chunk of that final season doing yet another version of the Death of Superman storyline.
I would like to see The Death of Superman die in a fire.
Seriously. The Death of Superman is one of my least favorite Superman stories, though I did kind of enjoy some of the aftermath. As far as I can tell, it was a cynical ploy to appeal to comic book speculators, who were a huge blight on the industry in the early 1990s, and there's no real narrative reason for it. (This storyline happened because Superman’s comics sales had been declining, but also because a planned wedding to Lois Lane was postponed and they needed some other big event, according to Polygon.) The story was boring back then, and it continues to be boring every time we have to sit through it.
For those who've been living under a rock, The Death of Superman is a story in which a big spiky guy named Doomsday shows up and starts punching things. He punches a lot of things, and he's really good at punching, so this is pretty bad news. Who is Doomsday? He later gets an elaborate backstory involving some Kryptonian bullshit, but basically he's just a big guy who punches things. Does he have a personality? Not as such. Does he have a goal other than just punching everything in sight? Not that I could ever ascertain. He's just a punchy guy who likes to punch.
Anyway, Doomsday crashes down on Earth and starts punching stuff, and the Justice League can't stop him. So Superman shows up and starts punching him, and they punch each other. They punch each other for a really long time, and eventually they punch each other so hard that they both die at the same time. (“They both finish at the same time” seems like it should be part of some kind of erotic fan-fiction, but oh well.) So Superman succeeds in stopping Doomsday, but at the cost of his own life. There's a funeral, and eventually four imposter Supermen show up — everybody can kind of tell they’re imposters, but they hang around for ages. At last, Superman comes back to life, but now he's wearing a black version of his famous uniform, plus he now has a mullet.
That's it, that's the whole story.
How does Superman come back to life? I honestly can't say. I realized several years ago that I couldn't remember how Superman was resurrected in what's now packaged as The Death and Rebirth of Superman, so I went back and reread the original comics to find out. And now, once again, I can't remember, because it's that memorable. I know that Superman meets his human dad, Pa Kent, in the afterlife, and Pa Kent talks to him about why it’s generally a good thing to not be dead. I know there's some more Kryptonian bullshit. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a blur.
The sad thing is, the Superman comics were really excellent up to this point. They'd been rebooted in the mid-1980s by John Byrne, who’d had some legit good ideas for refocusing the series in a more character-oriented direction. And a host of writers, including the legendary Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, and Louise Simonson, were writing stories in which Superman had a robust supporting cast around him. We got things like Cat Grant struggling with alcoholism and Perry White adopting a kid. It was a really good soap opera about the ordinary people of Metropolis, and their relationship with this big blue boy scout. And then.... it was all over.
So I mentioned that this storyline seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to cater to comic book speculators.... Back in the early 1990s, there was a lot of hype around the idea that comics could become valuable if they were rare enough or important enough. People tried to hoard copies of the first appearance of a major character, the death of a character, or something like a wedding. Comics publishers did, and still do, cater to this mania by printing lots of variant editions of a comic book with things like foil covers and collectible artwork. (I'm very grateful this for this, because it led to an X-Men comic sporting some truly gorgeous artwork of the character I co-created, Escapade.
So the events in many comic books seemed to be dictated by a desire to fuel a speculator frenzy in order to goose sales. Around the same time Superman died, Batman suffered a career-ending injury, Wonder Woman lost the right to be Wonder Woman, Aquaman lost a hand, and Green Lantern snapped and murdered all his friends, before being replaced with a new Green Lantern.
One of my first jobs as a real professional journalist, in the late 1990s, was writing an article for a financial newspaper about why comic books were a bad investment, especially if you weren’t already a fan. I interviewed a ton of people, and the main example everyone brought up was Superman #75, the issue in which Superman bites the bullet. My sources quite reasonably pointed out that DC printed a gajillion copies of this issue, because they knew everyone would want to buy it — which meant it was effectively worthless. (Sure, if you find a mint condition copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 in your attic, then you do indeed have a nest egg. But you can't buy a book being published today and expect to get rich.)
The Death of Superman has become a touchstone purely because it gained so much mainstream interest, and everyone vaguely heard about it at the time. And because it’s one of the few Superman storylines most people are aware of, we’re doomed (ha) to get endless rehashes of it. There have been two animated versions, and both Tim Burton and J.J. Abrams took a crack at adapting it for live action. More recently, Zack Snyder did a very rushed version of this storyline in Batman v Superman and Justice League, and despite having seen Justice League, I cannot explain how Superman comes back from the dead that time, either. And now, Superman and Lois is doing it too — though at least this time, I can tell you how Superman comes back from the dead. (I won't, because it's a spoiler for an episode that just aired.)
Part of my objection to The Death of Superman is that I just don't think it's a Superman story, per se. Yes, Superman punches things a lot — in fact, one time Superboy punched the walls of reality so hard, he brought a dead Robin back from the dead — but I don't think of punching as the core of what Superman is about.
When I think of Superman, I think of compassion, integrity, and generosity — both to his chosen family and to humanity as a whole. Yes, Superman keeps punching Doomsday because he wants to keep people safe, including the people he loves. But Supes has no way of knowing that the punch that kills him will coincide with the punch that kills Doomsday, so this feels like a fairly hollow act of self-sacrifice to me.
And it's no accident that Superman's most famous villains tend to be defined by intellect. Lex Luthor is an evil genius. Brainiac actually has the word “brain” in his name. Even the Toymaker is a brilliant inventor. When you have a character who is as physically powerful as Superman, it's not that interesting to watch him fight someone else who's really strong. Forcing him into a battle of wits, on the other hand, can be very compelling.
If you want an awesome story about Superman dying that is very ripe for adaptation, you — and Hollywood — should check out All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, Superman flies too close to the sun and is overloaded with the solar radiation that gives him his powers. He soon realizes that he is dying, and there's no way to prevent it. You get a beautiful wistful story about Superman making the most of the time he has left with the people he loves. There was actually a moment when I thought Superman and Lois might go this route, since it's their final season and we did see Superman fighting Doomsday in the middle of the solar system. But alas, no.
(I have been very encouraged to see James Gunn, writer and director of the upcoming Superman movie, referencing All-Star Superman a lot.)
I'm gonna close by mentioning an infamous comics panel in which Batman says to Superman:
I know I said previously that Batman always pwns Superman, but in this case Batman is totally wrong. Superman did not in fact inspire anyone when he died. He died in the most basic, foolish manner possible, using his fists instead of his brain or his heart. He died not because there was a good story to be told, but because comics sales were down. I can list dozens of times that Superman has inspired people — and they were all from the way he lived, not the way he died.
Music I Love Right Now
I was going to post about something else this week, but then my friend Hailey introduced me to Brazilian non-binary singer Felipe Catto. Check out their scorching cover of “Lately” by Stevie Wonder: