Superman's Death

[Gary]

To each his (or her) own. Overall I enjoyed the death and rebirth storyline, though I thought parts of it could've been better.

GOOD:

* Karl Kesel's writing. Karl is a great writer who can express a lot in just a few lines of dialog.

* The Man of Steel, a good new addition to the Superman milieu. (Though I think DC later botched it by making the guy a superhuman; his character works better as a sort of everyman, the guy with no special powers but who helps anyway out of personal responsibility and because somebody has to).

BAD:

* The Kryptonian Superman. Like most of Roger Stern's stuff, it moved at the pace of an asthmatic corpse. (That these parts were published in "Action Comics" strikes me as kind of ironic.)

* The ridiculous Deus Ex Machina ending.

As for the art, I liked Jurgens/Breeding and Grummet/Hazelwood, didn't care much for Guice/Rodier. Bogdanove/Janke, IMO, was kind of hit and miss -- sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

[JulianPerez]

God, where to even begin on how clueless and thoughtless the Death of Superman maxiseries really was.

There's a specific moment when the badness of a concept just crystallizes. Remember the 1996 Godzilla movie? What was the exact point the lack of understanding the directors had of who Godzilla is really hit home? It had to have been when "Godzilla," when confronted by fighter jets, turns tail and runs away from them.

Godzilla doesn't run away from fighter jets.

Ditto here for Superman losing a fight to some random monster. Superman doesn't lose fights to big monsters. He's Superman.

What was worse was the lack of intelligence ascribed to Superman, who in every one of his good stories is shown to be clever and intelligent and resourceful and cunning. He couldn't think of a better plan than just sit there and trade blows with the monster (putting aside for the moment that Superman is supposed to be invulnerable)?

Here's one plan, and this is just off the top of my regular, non-Super Brain:

Why not just pick Doomsday up and throw him into orbit?

Or, have Superman lay his cape out on the ground, so that Doomsday walks over it, then, gather it together, and drag that into space?

Or use his Heat Vision to blind the monster temporarily with a flash and then trip it?

Or (and here's one plan from Alan Moore's SUPREME) trick Doomsday into digging until he's trapped at the Center of the Earth?

Or get two Justice League teleporter pads: set one up on Mars, and the other where Doomsday can be tricked into stepping on it?

And that's just off the top of my head.

What's worse, it seems, is that stupidity was an airborne virus that day: nobody else in the DC Universe thought of a similar plan. There's got to be at LEAST one telepath that can neutralize Doomsday mentally, so Superman's ultimate sacrifice wouldn't be required.

Even worse, the monster had no clear motivation. WHY did it destroy the city and attack mankind? We get no explanation. Maybe Doomsday had nothing better to do that day and wrecking cities is the big scary monster equivalent of going Cow Tipping.

Note: Dan "Electric Superman Was My Idea" Jurgens later retconned that the reason Doomsday went after Superman is because he was a Kryptonian. ...Right. And apparently Doomsday had heretofore unrevealed sensory power to detect Supes somehow from all the way in the Midwest? And if Doomsday COULD detect Superman somehow ("Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a Kryptonian") and pursued him, wouldn't Superman figure this out, and move himself to Antarctica, or at least somewhere that the fight would entail less collateral damage than say, downtown Metropolis?

And even Doomsday's potentially most interesting superpower, the ability to evolve a solution to defeat any foe, was handled incompetently by the writers (a superpower stolen from and more interestingly applied with Legionnaire Nemesis Kid). For instance, wouldn't it mean Doomsday, when facing defeat at the hands of Superman, would evolve into SOMETHING to deal with him - perhaps turning his body into Kryptonite, for instance?

And let's not forget the format of the actual issue: basically, several splash pages, making it the most I've ever paid for a coloring book somebody else has colored.