Roger Stern

[JulianPerez]

Administrator's note: this thread has been split from this one.

Roger Stern, because he deserves to write Superman again. He did a good job, but I'd like to see him again with HIS stories, not parts of a bigger story.

Good point! Roger Stern was maybe, along with Jerry Ordway, one of the bright spots of  the Dark Age. In something like PANIC IN THE SKY, he put in a lot of George Reeves-esque panache in the character, reference to the past (he brought in the Mechanical Monsters from the Fleischer years, as well as giving Brainiac his head-ship) and he had Superman as a brilliant general to the heroes that the others were in awe of (Ice described him as "the most incredible man she had ever seen"). In other words, Roger Stern's Superman had moxie.

He was hobbled by the fact he did nothing but continue the plots and subplots of the Mike Carlin writers. Here's the thing about something created by committee - it doesn't make everyone a genius, it shouts the geniuses down.

I do want to know how Roger Stern would write Superman without Carlin and the others. His AVENGERS run was one of the greatest, along with Englehart, Busiek, Roy the Boy, and Stan the Man.

[Great Rao]

I do want to know how Roger Stern would write Superman without Carlin and the others.

Roger Stern did write a Superman novel and he also wrote a stand-alone storyline that ran in Action Comics Weekly.  Have you read either of those?

I didn't like the novel much, probably because I didn't agree with many of the editorial decisions that had been made about the character.

The Action Comics Weekly storyline was probably one of the best of the Carlin era, and the Curt Swan artwork was gorgeous, but I still had major disagreements with some of the Iron Age elements that were in it.  They felt very forced and out of place.

[Superman Forever]

He also wrote a graphic novel called Superman For Earth, about ambiental problems.

[Kurt Busiek]

Roger Stern did write a Superman novel and he also wrote a stand-alone storyline that ran in Action Comics Weekly.  Have you read either of those?

Roger's written three Superman novels:

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF SUPERMAN

SMALLVILLE: STRANGE VISITORS

SUPERMAN: THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE

kdb

[Gary]

I've no wish to bash Mr. Stern, but IMO he was one of the weaker writers from that era.

The main problem I have with his work is that it tends to be too slow and talky. There's entire issues of (ironically) Action Comics by him where basically nothing happens. And I don't mind stories dedicated to character development, but they need to actually reveal something about the characters; too often Stern's just rehashed things we already knew.

[Bill 9000]

Having recently read The Death and Life of Superman, I thought Roger Stern handled it well ... although I regretted that he omitted Hal Jordan's involvement in the saga.