Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Retro Review: John Byrne's Superman


Now, decades after John Byrne’s six-issue Man of Steel was published, it reads like one of many alternative Superman origin stories that we’ve seen over the years. The details of Superman’s life have been malleable in the hands of DC’s creators, with various Supermen in alternate timelines and alternate dimensions encompassing multiple variations on a theme.

But in 1986, the decision to allow John Byrne to reboot DC’s flagship character was a radical move, a revolution on the printed page. Striking changes were made in the nature and tone of the series, but even more significant was the fact that the entire accumulated history of the iconic character was being erased, giving Byrne the opportunity to start a new history from scratch. This was welcomed by many fans, while reviled by others who denounced it as “Marvelizing” Superman, and saw it as eliminating and replacing their favorite character rather than as evolving the existing character into something similar but not identical.

Man of Steel is thus a revolutionary work, but unlike some of the other landmark comic book works in the mid-Eighties, it was a revolution in particulars rather than in form. But the particulars that changed were many, and include:

• Krypton as sterile rather than a high-tech utopia.
• Superman born upon his arrival on Earth rather than arriving as a toddler.
• Powers developing gradually over years instead of at the moment of arrival.
• Debut as a young adult and not as Superboy.
• No memory of or attachment to Krypton; identifies only as an Earthman.
• Adoptive parents remain alive into the present.
• Clark Kent persona tough rather than meek and mild.
• Ventures into outer space rarely instead of being a frequent space traveler.
• Smart, but not an inventor with knowledge far beyond Earth technology.
• Strength, speed, and vulnerability powers at much lower levels than pre-Crisis.
• Tense working relationship with Batman, and they are not friends.
• Not a founding member of the Justice League.
• Only survivor of Krypton.
• Lex Luthor is a Machiavellian businessman rather than a mad scientist.

These many changes are not haphazard or arbitrary in design: They all support one overarching aim, which is to humanize Superman, making his life and interactions more like an ordinary man’s life, and less a thing of pure science fiction.

Detractors of Byrne’s run saw humanizing Superman as counterproductive, as the concept of Superman was always intended to make him something far better than a real man, and being far better, he was also by definition removed and apart. Nonetheless, Byrne’s choice was to make him less removed. Nowhere is this more evident than in doing away with the Fortress of Solitude. The Bronze Age Superman owned a house in the Arctic (isolated), bigger and more wonderful than any real man’s house, housing a museum and a zoo of interplanetary specimens, for the sole viewing pleasure of Superman himself. Yes, it was wonderful, but it was in equal measure a fortress of solitude. The pre-Byrne Superman was a strangely lonely man, self-absorbed, twice orphaned, confiding his secret identity to not one person on Earth who wasn’t also a superhero. He said that he could never marry Lois or Lana, because that would expose his wife to danger, but in what was a major plot hole, he still identified his friends and girlfriends publicly. Byrne changed all that, making Lois a romantic interest without the puerile games around whether or not Superman could marry her. Byrne moved the center of gravity in Superman’s life away from superheroes and towards ordinary people. In this regard, he did more for the characterization of Superman than had been done in all the decades before.

But Man of Steel and Byrne’s run as a whole are not a literary masterpiece. It hits some nice notes at times, but the language is stilted and relies far too often on exposition. Superman often says and thinks things that nobody would say or think, in order to deliver an essay from Byrne to readers about how the character had been reinvented. These are often awkward comments about how the Byrne Superman’s world is different than what came before, and rejecting the truth that in storytelling, it’s better to show than to tell.

Perhaps the high point of Byrne’s run is in Superman #2, when Luthor’s efforts to probe Superman’s life result in beatings to the people he loves, and an explosion that callously kills two of Luthor’s henchmen right in front of Superman. Then, when the enraged hero confronts Luthor, he is exposed to kryptonite and mocked. The Silver Age Lex Luthor had to kill Superman to win. Byrne’s Luthor manages to stalemate Superman simply by remaining in business and hating him. It’s a dramatic shift in their dynamic and makes for far more powerful storytelling than the Silver Age Superman-Luthor war, which always came down to gadgets and pseudoscience.

Byrne began the run with a well-thought-out plan. He plants small clues that grow into major plots, such as the chunk of kryptonite that sticks to Kal-El’s rocket, and the stranger in the brimmed hat watching the site where the rocket came down. Small investments of this kind paid off later, with the serial taking on more complexity than the issue-after-issue formula of previous years. This was a Superman for a more grown-up audience than the Superman that came before, and that was precisely what the era called for.

Byrne’s era relaunched Superman, took him through a couple of major crossover events, and resolved the paradoxes of the post-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes by introducing a Pocket Universe. John Byrne left the series after Superman #22, with Superman having executed three Phantom Zone criminals in the Pocket Universe. This event, and Byrne’s work as a whole, led into other creators producing some good and impactful work, with the fondly-recalled Triangle Era, Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday, and later his marriage to Lois Lane. With time, the stamp of Byrne’s work faded as more writers put their own touches on the feature, and it became something considerably different than it was when Byrne left in 1988. In some respects, the Byrne continuity is still with us in 2015, as at least some elements of the post-Byrne Superman are still in continuity after Flashpoint. The Byrne run was a bold effort, and it worked.

8 comments:

  1. Nice analysis. I was among the readers who initially rejected the Byrne revamp, but it did create the Triangle era that I came to embrace. I think we tend to love what we first know, which in my case was late Silver Age and Bronze Age Superman. But, yes, the stories became far better in the Post-Crisis era thanks to John Byrne.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MWTE, I missed the community response at the time, but there were people still anguished about it during the years before Flashpoint.

    I learned of the reboot from a TIME magazine article in 1988, and started reading the title with the very first issue after Byrne's departure. I always approved of it overall, but there are superficial trappings to which one becomes accustomed and anything new seems strange. The idea that Superman had to hold his breath to spend a little time in space never really sat well with me. But, yes, the stories simply became better, which is the ultimate vindication.

    The biggest downside of the era, as I see it, is that the conflicting visions of what Superman is like helped bring on a succession of alternative origin stories and versions which have diminished any one iconic vision from being shared. Even now, after Flashpoint, it feels like too much is still up in the air. Is part of Secret Origin still definitive, mixed in with Morrison's Action run? I'd like to know, but at this point, I have Superman-origin-story fatigue.

    But Byrne can't be blamed for that. He laid out a clear, detailed vision, and for many years thereafter, it worked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, the very last story I ever want to read again is a new Superman origin. I think, too, that Superman for at least a decade now, and especially since the New 52, has been quite fuzzy. Mort Weisinger & Co. managed to maintain one Super-persona for a few decades. Now, his persona changes practically story arc to story arc. Batman can have new writers and still project his distilled essence. What is that essence for Superman anymore?

    ReplyDelete
  4. My Superman has always been George Reeves, especially as he portrayed the character in the first season of the tv series. I thought that depiction was close to the Siegel and Shuster concept.
    Stylistically, I did like the Byrne Superman, but I was offended by two things. One was the killing of the Kryptonians from the pocket universe. Superman had a code against killing. Period. The other was Byrne's depiction of Superman hovering, upright, about a foot off the ground, talking down to people, including Lois. That's hardly the depiction of a down-to-earth hero. I view Superman as being a Boy Scout in character, even when tough and gritty. Byrne's Superman was too arrogant for my taste.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Adventures of Superman #444 and Superman #22 still haunt me to this day. The destruction of the pocket Earth, followed by the murder of the pocket Kryptonians caused a schizophrenic episode in Clark, resulting in him sleepwalking and masquerading as Gangbuster, which was well done by Roger Stern and Jerry Ordway.

      Delete
  5. Gerry, those are interesting takes. The Reeves Superman is an iconic version, and it wasn't the first version of Superman I saw, but was certainly memorable.

    The killing of the Kryptonians was certainly controversial, and, as it occurred in Byrne's very last issue, felt like he'd done something very big, then left it for other writers to deal with it. In many cases, I've been troubled by stories because they seemed to tarnish the heroes I'd previously gotten to know. Years later, I can look back on the Pocket Universe subplot and admire it, although genocide, Phantom Zoners splattering human heads, and Superman deciding to kill were definitely things that didn't sit well with me at the time, nor, for that matter, did the Big Barda issue of Action in which Sleez controlled Superman to unprecedentedly sleazy ends.

    It's interesting to recall these things now, and we can at least say that if one didn't like the direction Byrne took then, it's water far, far under the bridge by now.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "This was welcomed by many fans, while reviled by others who denounced it as 'Marvelizing' Superman"

    I think this was DC's intentions, with their hiring of Byrne, Miler, and Perez. Probably not a good idea with Superman though, who should remains semi-mythical and aloof.

    -

    "Byrne began the run with a well-thought-out plan. He plants small clues that grow into major plots"

    Something I think he learned from Chris Claremont, though I don't think it works as well with solo titles (as opposed to team titles).

    -

    "were definitely things that didn't sit well with me at the time, nor, for that matter, did the Big Barda issue of Action in which Sleez controlled Superman to unprecedentedly sleazy ends."

    Yeah, that's always been my main beef with Byrne: He's a pervert (as his run on She-Hulk shows).

    ReplyDelete
  7. I've been thinking a lot recently about the Byrne Superman reboot and searching online for analysis from others (which is why I'm commenting on this eight years later). Re-reading the run for the first time in probably 30 years in the recently published hardcovers, I'm struck by how well it holds up in some respects, and how frustratingly dated it is in others.

    In many ways, my views echo most of those that you've written above. For those who weren't there at the time (I was 13 in 1986, so the perfect age to be reading these stories), it's difficult to articulate how radical this reboot (or "revamp" as DC called it at the time in the pre-PC era) was, as was so much of what DC in particular was publishing (1986 to 1990 is, for me, the true Golden Age of comics: a time of real creative ambition). But as you stated, most of the radical change that Byrne instituted was at a content level (new Krypton, new Luthor, etc.). Where I think Byrne's run falls short of other DC prestige projects and/or reboots of the time (Miller's and Mazzucchelli's Batman; Perez's Wonder Woman; Truman's Hawkworld; Grell's Green Arrow; Chaykin's Blackhawk; Chaykin and Garcia-Lopez's Twilight; Gaiman and McKean's Black Orchid; O'Neil and Cowan's Question; Gibbons and Rude's World's Finest; Miller's Ronin; Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen) is in its lack of formalistic or stylistic innovation or ambition. For all of the reasons that you listed above, 35-plus years later, it reads like a comic of its era, whereas the other books that I listed above still feel startingly modern in the way that they pushed the envelope with their storytelling.

    But those disappointments aside, when I re-read these stories again I still get a surge of that thrill of conceptual reinvention that I felt in 1986. There's a palpable swagger to Byrne's Superman that the character never had during the Curt Swan era (where for me as a child and even more so as an adult, Swan's Superman felt like an affable but paunchy (and almost neutered) uncle; someone who was likable, but not necessarily someone that you wanted to spend time with or be inspired by).

    What I think is also interesting is where it falls on the SuperMAN or SUPERman side of the debate. There are some people (radical traditionalists) who insist that Superman must be godlike and perfect, whereas others (like me) prefer a more fallible, imperfect Superman (a more relatable Superman, if you will). And I think a lot of Byrne's stated frustrations working on the character at the time (which led to his run being cut artifically short) were because the radical traditionalists were/are so vocal and so opposed to any interpretation of the character that deviates from their own preferred version. And I think that irreconcilable tension amongst the DC audience (radical traditionalists vs those who want to see the character evolve) is why DC has had so much trouble settling on a consistent approach to the character.

    I sometimes wonder about modern DC's relationship to this material. For all of its faults, Byrne's Superman is still visually beautiful (Byrne was at the height of his artistic powers), fun to read, and even to this day, still historically significant. But the material seems to get little respect from DC management. Yes, they published the run in hardcover, but it was standard size hardcover (not oversize omnibus (or, even better, an Absolute Edition of the original six-issue Man of Steel mini-series to sit alongside the Absolutes of Batman: Year One and Perez's Wonder Woman)), and they did it so many years later than I thought they should have (why they didn't release it in hardcover at the time that Zack Snyder's Man of Steel came out (a film which owes a ton to Byrne's Superman) still baffles me to this day). They've repeatedly released the post-Byrne runs (Death of Superman; Return of Superman; Superman in Exile) in multiple Deluxe and Omnibus editions, but the Byrne run which started it all feels almost orphaned in comparison.

    -- Daniel

    ReplyDelete