The other side of the coin to "The Death of Superman" inside the comics was the Heroes World debacle of 1994. Ultimately, it killed the indie distribution channels, as at least 9 comic distributors failed between 1994 and 1997, along with Heroes World. It also sent Marvel Comics into bankruptcy.
Jim Shooter and a consortium tried to buy up Marvel during this nightmare, but the rights were licensed all over creation, so they couldn't make it work. Their pockets weren't deep enough.
Jim Shooter's old site and Chuck Rozanski's blog have details on these twin tornadoes that killed comics and left them soulless zombies.
But, the dream died for mainstream comics along with Superman, and it never really came back. Marvel and DC shepherded around more and more zombie titles just hunting sales and merch. The LCSs made their own beds for the most part, and even demanded that subscriptions be sacrificed to them for a small slice of additional sales in the Direct Market. Did those materialize? Unlikely.
More and more, the mainstream comics companies cut off their seed channels -- the newsstands and subscriptions. Rural and some suburban readers aged out -- no more comics in dime stores, drug stores, grocery stores, and book stores -- no more kids finding out what comic books were.
Average age of comic readers in 2024: 34-37 years old.
The author writes “The Greatest Generation built the world. The Baby Boomers inherited it. Generation X was left to sweep the floors after the party ended.”
Why do you GenXers seem to forget the Silent generation? Yeah, they were a recessive gen, but so is GenX.
That said, Superman has always been my favorite because he was Clark Kent. He was a hero who was both Good and Lawful. As Superman he was a god, but he chose to be one of us as Clark Kent.
You have two types of "generations", and it's easy to get them mixed or forget them, especially as the marketing dudes keep shifting the goal posts to sells their stuff.
Just before and through the 20th Century, we have the Physical Generations and the Cultural Generations. Cultural REALLY kicks in after WWII with communication advances.
Not sure which generational scheme you are employing here. My background is Strauss and Howe. Have been part of the Fourth Turning discussion site since 2000. The most common generational scheme I have seen in the one given by Pew, whom I note use the exact dates from Strauss and Howe (S&H) until the Greatest generation (Tom Brokaw named) which they give as 1901-27 and S&H give as 1901-24, the Silent (S&H’s name) is 1928-1945 for Pew and 1925-42 for S&H, the Boomers, 1946-64 for Pew, 1943-1960 for S&H, GenX (Douglas Coupland named) 1965-80 for Pew, 1961-81 for S&H, Millennials (coined by S&H) 1981-1996 for Pew, 1982-? for S&H (this generation was still being born when they published Generations in 1991).
Entities like Generation Jones and Xennials are cusps created to handle the fact that generations in this sense tend to blend into each other rather than be distinct groups.
I've become quite the GT nerd since discovering Strauss & Howe. As to your earlier point, the Heroes and Prophets are dominant generations, while the Artists and Nomads are "passive." That's one reason why the Silents and the war they fought tend to be forgotten. X is remembered/considered (grudgingly) now only because we're still alive. Assuming America still exists when the next Awakening is due, we'll probably be even less remembered by anybody but historians.
"Making Clark the “real” identity and Superman the mask, though? That felt off."
It was very off. It just doesn't work.
Regarding Luthor as CEO, the idea itself isn't bad, but it should have been a new character. It does not work for Lex, for the reasons you stated. Also, it brings in a time-limited element - how long can he get away with pretending to be a good guy while trying to kill Superman? If he were pretending to be good while, I don't know, skimming profits from charities or running some kind of political intrigues, maybe. But trying for years to kill the world's most famous superhero is going to draw some attention, no matter how hard he tries to keep it secret. There's only so many times he can get away with "Oh, yeah, that super-weapon that almost killed you? It was stolen from my lab last week. Again. Oopsie."
That said, I will say that Marv Wolfman, who came up with the idea, did a couple of things with it that were actually interesting, but then he didn't use Luthor hardly at all until right before he left the book, while Byrne was using Luthor left and right as a cartoon villain. Makes you wonder why he left the book, huh?
The Krypton thing. That was pure capital-B Boomer garbage. The past is worthless, history means nothing... "My home planet exploded and my entire race is dead? Ho hum."
"Making [Luthor] a corrupt CEO just made him just another sleazy executive in a decade already packed with them in both fictional and real worlds. It made Superman's arch-enemy small and that made Superman small."
Seems like everything about the 80s revamp was designed to make Superman small.
"We were a generation of survivors. Generation X either went to jail, rehab, or the military."
Or worked two jobs to barely afford a modest place just outside the edge of the Section 8 neighborhoods. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Excellent essay. I love the wording that Superman was a proposition. It really stung and I'm Gen Y. I've no harsh words here for Gen X, only sorrow. Superman was a great icon for so long so that it is sad what's been done to him.
I hope none of my characters from my fantasy serials are ever as poorly treated as him.
Lex Luthor was born as a Mad Scientist Archetype--an artifact from the era he and Superman both debuted in. He always worked well enough as a mad scientist.
Changing him into a corporate CEO was just part of a "re-imagining" to make everything conform to a leftist Boomer weltanshuang. What is peak evil to leftist Boomers?
1. Christianity
2. Capitalism
3. The American Armed Forces
4. Masculinity
Luthor transformed into a capitalist punching bag for the writers and editors at DC. It's as simple as that, IMO.
Luthor MIGHT have worked as a cult leader. A hyper-intelligent, super charismatic leader of a human exceptionalism movement. This even plays into the Nietzschean aspects of Superman's own genesis in the 1930s. This version of Lex doesn't threaten Superman's life but his very meaning. “Kryptonians were born perfect. We must earn our greatness. Superman is not a savior—he is a ceiling.”
Can I believe that a man can fly? Why yes if it's John Carter or Son Goku from Dragonball. A propositional hero that was mashed up and became far too corporatized by his own lack of identity over the years? Well that simply depends on the nature of authorial ownership and direction.
Superman may be the most iconic American character who sadly by having his ownership taken away from his own first team of authors is and will forever be cursed to be an unfinished proposition past the New Deal golden years of the United States. And by being unfinished, I mean that Superman is never allowed to marry, can't have kids (or if he does some bozo in DC editorial like Brian Michael Bendis will just torture him) so he never completes his journey at all. This is the same kind curse that plagues all Marvel and DC cape books if there's no real ownership nor direction other than pounding out weekly slop stories that will have their payoffs revoked. And in the end Superman just devolves to the wrong kind of icon, a toilet symbol above the bar washroom.
If there was truly a want to revive him more people tackling him would need to grasp how ERB's frontier heroes operated like John Carter or Tarzan, by going back to those sources for thematic inspiration. For later knock offs, give him back a legit Superman family with proper kids for once and a marriage even if you can't give him change through growth, because that's how Dragonball clocked Superman in reads and influence among alot of kids in the west today. Even John Carter got to seal the deal with his princess and sired a son. Gilgamesh raised kings in the wake of his bloodline. If you don't do this then your superhero will seem to be unromantic and sterile in any generation of readers instead of being vitalist.
Also the other lessons that should be taken from these influences is by no circumstances should you ever keep trying to throw space jobbing types to Superman. The whole Death of Superman story arc suffered from having a jobber villain knock him out instead of one of his legit threatening foes. Darkseid, any one of the various space god types, even a Lovecraftian magical cosmic foe should be the true final bosses of Superman. Imagine a death of Superman storyline where you had the Kryptonite Man running amok with a stolen green lantern keeping him alive and trying to fight the entire JLA with deadly Kryptonite constructs each one more maddening and deadlier than the last. That's the story you put a man like Superman through, not jobbing with the Spiky Not-Hulk.
Even Lex as the Corporate Man can work, if they bothered to remember he was born in Metropolis's Suicide Slums in his OG origin. If you were to correctly do it in the Gen X and later generational mold, he's a working class man that through his hard work and taking some big globalist/national security tickets got to make himself a tech made man CEO (like say Peter Thiel and his panopticon org Palantir). But unlike the man of Kansas, Lex is a byproduct of the globalist urban monoculture, and despite his working class background despises and spits on that very background and it's inhabitants while drinking champagne as a pseudo-socialist. Many of you on here, have met these types in the various tech, biotech to NGO sectors, so it's not that hard of a sell to do.
Great article!
The other side of the coin to "The Death of Superman" inside the comics was the Heroes World debacle of 1994. Ultimately, it killed the indie distribution channels, as at least 9 comic distributors failed between 1994 and 1997, along with Heroes World. It also sent Marvel Comics into bankruptcy.
Jim Shooter and a consortium tried to buy up Marvel during this nightmare, but the rights were licensed all over creation, so they couldn't make it work. Their pockets weren't deep enough.
Jim Shooter's old site and Chuck Rozanski's blog have details on these twin tornadoes that killed comics and left them soulless zombies.
But, the dream died for mainstream comics along with Superman, and it never really came back. Marvel and DC shepherded around more and more zombie titles just hunting sales and merch. The LCSs made their own beds for the most part, and even demanded that subscriptions be sacrificed to them for a small slice of additional sales in the Direct Market. Did those materialize? Unlikely.
More and more, the mainstream comics companies cut off their seed channels -- the newsstands and subscriptions. Rural and some suburban readers aged out -- no more comics in dime stores, drug stores, grocery stores, and book stores -- no more kids finding out what comic books were.
Average age of comic readers in 2024: 34-37 years old.
Great post and summation. Part 7 of 5 non-ironically factors in the inflation that helped crush the Tulip Frenzy.
We do believe.
We believe in the Good, Beautiful, and True, and their Source.
We don't believe in their "deus ex machina," whatever form or reboot it may take.
That should terrify them.
The author writes “The Greatest Generation built the world. The Baby Boomers inherited it. Generation X was left to sweep the floors after the party ended.”
Why do you GenXers seem to forget the Silent generation? Yeah, they were a recessive gen, but so is GenX.
That said, Superman has always been my favorite because he was Clark Kent. He was a hero who was both Good and Lawful. As Superman he was a god, but he chose to be one of us as Clark Kent.
You have two types of "generations", and it's easy to get them mixed or forget them, especially as the marketing dudes keep shifting the goal posts to sells their stuff.
Just before and through the 20th Century, we have the Physical Generations and the Cultural Generations. Cultural REALLY kicks in after WWII with communication advances.
Physical generations span 20 years
Cultural generations span 10 years.
Physical: Greatest
Cultural Greatest & Silents
Physical: Boomers
Cultural Boomers & Generation Jones
Physical: Gen-X
Cultural: Gen-X & Gen-Y
Physical: Millennials
Cultural: Millennials & Gen-Z
Physical: Gen Alpha
Cultural: Gen Alpha & ??
Not sure which generational scheme you are employing here. My background is Strauss and Howe. Have been part of the Fourth Turning discussion site since 2000. The most common generational scheme I have seen in the one given by Pew, whom I note use the exact dates from Strauss and Howe (S&H) until the Greatest generation (Tom Brokaw named) which they give as 1901-27 and S&H give as 1901-24, the Silent (S&H’s name) is 1928-1945 for Pew and 1925-42 for S&H, the Boomers, 1946-64 for Pew, 1943-1960 for S&H, GenX (Douglas Coupland named) 1965-80 for Pew, 1961-81 for S&H, Millennials (coined by S&H) 1981-1996 for Pew, 1982-? for S&H (this generation was still being born when they published Generations in 1991).
Entities like Generation Jones and Xennials are cusps created to handle the fact that generations in this sense tend to blend into each other rather than be distinct groups.
I did write one post on this stuff.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/generational-cycles
So where does this physical versus cultural generations stuff come from? Do you have a link?
Brian Neimeier's Schema
https://www.kairospublications.com/blog/lost-generations
I've become quite the GT nerd since discovering Strauss & Howe. As to your earlier point, the Heroes and Prophets are dominant generations, while the Artists and Nomads are "passive." That's one reason why the Silents and the war they fought tend to be forgotten. X is remembered/considered (grudgingly) now only because we're still alive. Assuming America still exists when the next Awakening is due, we'll probably be even less remembered by anybody but historians.
"Making Clark the “real” identity and Superman the mask, though? That felt off."
It was very off. It just doesn't work.
Regarding Luthor as CEO, the idea itself isn't bad, but it should have been a new character. It does not work for Lex, for the reasons you stated. Also, it brings in a time-limited element - how long can he get away with pretending to be a good guy while trying to kill Superman? If he were pretending to be good while, I don't know, skimming profits from charities or running some kind of political intrigues, maybe. But trying for years to kill the world's most famous superhero is going to draw some attention, no matter how hard he tries to keep it secret. There's only so many times he can get away with "Oh, yeah, that super-weapon that almost killed you? It was stolen from my lab last week. Again. Oopsie."
That said, I will say that Marv Wolfman, who came up with the idea, did a couple of things with it that were actually interesting, but then he didn't use Luthor hardly at all until right before he left the book, while Byrne was using Luthor left and right as a cartoon villain. Makes you wonder why he left the book, huh?
The Krypton thing. That was pure capital-B Boomer garbage. The past is worthless, history means nothing... "My home planet exploded and my entire race is dead? Ho hum."
"Making [Luthor] a corrupt CEO just made him just another sleazy executive in a decade already packed with them in both fictional and real worlds. It made Superman's arch-enemy small and that made Superman small."
Seems like everything about the 80s revamp was designed to make Superman small.
"We were a generation of survivors. Generation X either went to jail, rehab, or the military."
Or worked two jobs to barely afford a modest place just outside the edge of the Section 8 neighborhoods. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
"Seems like everything about the 80s revamp was designed to make Superman small."
Denny O'Neil vibes.
Guess who worked on Ditko's Question.
Right-leaning politics was also an O'Neil kryptonite.
Excellent essay. I love the wording that Superman was a proposition. It really stung and I'm Gen Y. I've no harsh words here for Gen X, only sorrow. Superman was a great icon for so long so that it is sad what's been done to him.
I hope none of my characters from my fantasy serials are ever as poorly treated as him.
Lex Luthor was born as a Mad Scientist Archetype--an artifact from the era he and Superman both debuted in. He always worked well enough as a mad scientist.
Changing him into a corporate CEO was just part of a "re-imagining" to make everything conform to a leftist Boomer weltanshuang. What is peak evil to leftist Boomers?
1. Christianity
2. Capitalism
3. The American Armed Forces
4. Masculinity
Luthor transformed into a capitalist punching bag for the writers and editors at DC. It's as simple as that, IMO.
Luthor MIGHT have worked as a cult leader. A hyper-intelligent, super charismatic leader of a human exceptionalism movement. This even plays into the Nietzschean aspects of Superman's own genesis in the 1930s. This version of Lex doesn't threaten Superman's life but his very meaning. “Kryptonians were born perfect. We must earn our greatness. Superman is not a savior—he is a ceiling.”
It would take a good writer, but yeah—I think it could be done.
Yes.
Can I believe that a man can fly? Why yes if it's John Carter or Son Goku from Dragonball. A propositional hero that was mashed up and became far too corporatized by his own lack of identity over the years? Well that simply depends on the nature of authorial ownership and direction.
Superman may be the most iconic American character who sadly by having his ownership taken away from his own first team of authors is and will forever be cursed to be an unfinished proposition past the New Deal golden years of the United States. And by being unfinished, I mean that Superman is never allowed to marry, can't have kids (or if he does some bozo in DC editorial like Brian Michael Bendis will just torture him) so he never completes his journey at all. This is the same kind curse that plagues all Marvel and DC cape books if there's no real ownership nor direction other than pounding out weekly slop stories that will have their payoffs revoked. And in the end Superman just devolves to the wrong kind of icon, a toilet symbol above the bar washroom.
If there was truly a want to revive him more people tackling him would need to grasp how ERB's frontier heroes operated like John Carter or Tarzan, by going back to those sources for thematic inspiration. For later knock offs, give him back a legit Superman family with proper kids for once and a marriage even if you can't give him change through growth, because that's how Dragonball clocked Superman in reads and influence among alot of kids in the west today. Even John Carter got to seal the deal with his princess and sired a son. Gilgamesh raised kings in the wake of his bloodline. If you don't do this then your superhero will seem to be unromantic and sterile in any generation of readers instead of being vitalist.
Also the other lessons that should be taken from these influences is by no circumstances should you ever keep trying to throw space jobbing types to Superman. The whole Death of Superman story arc suffered from having a jobber villain knock him out instead of one of his legit threatening foes. Darkseid, any one of the various space god types, even a Lovecraftian magical cosmic foe should be the true final bosses of Superman. Imagine a death of Superman storyline where you had the Kryptonite Man running amok with a stolen green lantern keeping him alive and trying to fight the entire JLA with deadly Kryptonite constructs each one more maddening and deadlier than the last. That's the story you put a man like Superman through, not jobbing with the Spiky Not-Hulk.
Even Lex as the Corporate Man can work, if they bothered to remember he was born in Metropolis's Suicide Slums in his OG origin. If you were to correctly do it in the Gen X and later generational mold, he's a working class man that through his hard work and taking some big globalist/national security tickets got to make himself a tech made man CEO (like say Peter Thiel and his panopticon org Palantir). But unlike the man of Kansas, Lex is a byproduct of the globalist urban monoculture, and despite his working class background despises and spits on that very background and it's inhabitants while drinking champagne as a pseudo-socialist. Many of you on here, have met these types in the various tech, biotech to NGO sectors, so it's not that hard of a sell to do.