As always, "King" Kurt is interesting and insightful.
I'm enjoying the Busiek Superman much, much more than ALL-STAR SUPERMAN (though I think it would be revealing to see who prefers what to what).
A few comments I thought were particularly intriguing:
Superman's so powerful that the stories have to be about something other than the powers and the fights, or else it just turns into a game of cosmic one-upmanship that I think would bore the crap out of the audience.
I agree with this, because for one thing, Superman's stories, as a result of the fact he doesn't really get into fights, are consequently plotted very differently from those of other superheroes; they're based on him pulling a clever trick at the last minute, or a twist ending that totally recontextualizes the entire story, or generally solutions from way out in left field based on his brains and on mental action.
An example of this would be that Bronze Age story where Superman was transported to the future, along with other heroic figures: Abe Lincoln, and so forth. They were beamed back there in order to have a chat with them, because they were just about to die.
Suddenly...out of nowhere, Superman cravenly says that he refuses to go back - why would he want to return if he's going to die if he can remain in the future and live?
Such behavior seems strange, however, in reality, it was all part of Superman's plan, his Super-Brain clocking.
KDB: Actually, I worked up plans for Arion when I was going to be writing JLA regularly, and that storyline fit really well into Superman, so I just moved it over. I started looking at Arion because nobody was using him much, and he'd had his own book for a while, he had some history, some gravitas, some sense of being important to the DC Universe – and I really liked the bitter, cranky old phony he'd become in Arion the Immortal. And then I found out he was dead, but I found out that only added to the fun of the story, to bring Arion from the past into the present, cranky as hell that he's dead in this time and he still can't rest.
I loved this story! He was characterized so magnificently. I'll have to go at length about this in the future. Let it suffice to say for now that the thing I find most fascinating here is the idea this was originally supposed to be something in Busiek's extraordinary, underrated JLA run. I am still wondering what was supposed to be in it were it not cut short. The Cosmic Egg, for instance, is still out there, as is the fact the Crime Syndicate owes the JLA a favor.
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