It took only a few weeks on my first job before I did my first professional writing about comics. It was an article titled “Comic book enterprises take off,” and it appeared in the Feb. 15, 1992, edition of Sundial, which was the Arizona Daily Sun’s weekly entertainment section and TV listings.
This was pretty impressive, given I started the job less than a month before.
The article was about John Helmer, who opened a comic shop Beyond Comic Books at 10 S. San Francisco St. in Flagstaff. (If you’re out there reading this, John, hi!) At the time, this was the only comic shop in Flagstaff, though a few bookstores did carry some comics.
The article let me sound off on what was going on in comics. Remember, this was February 1992. Image had not yet put out any comics, though the initiative had been announced. I got in some mentions of mature reader comics like Hellblazer and The Sandman, manga like Akira, and the super-hot artists of the day like Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Lee that would soon launch Image Comics.
You can see those newspaper pages here, and you should be able to read them, if you like. Any faults in the copy or errors are entirely my own.
Skip ahead to the autumn of 1992, when there was one comics event everyone was talking about: the death of Superman.
I was not reading Superman at the time. I read Batman titles, Justice League titles and what would become Vertigo titles, but not Superman.
For those who don’t know where Superman was at the time: John Byrne relaunched Superman after Crisis on Infinite Earths reset the DC Universe. The Man of Steel six-issue series in 1986 led into a new Superman #1, while the original Superman series continued as The Adventures of Superman, and Action Comics became a Superman team-up title.
Superman’s 50th anniversary in 1988 got a lot of mainstream attention. There was a TV special hosted by Dana Carvey that featured a brief interview with Byrne. You can find it as a bonus feature on DVD or Blu-ray sets of the Superman movies, or here on YouTube:
Time magazine published a Byrne Superman cover for a story on the anniversary.
However, Byrne soon left and the Superman series continued uninterupted. Stories would begin in one title, continue in the next title, and conclude in the other. The effect was an almost-weekly comic.
This cadence was interrupted by a brief experiment called Action Comics Weekly. The series turned into a weekly 48-page anthology starring a variety of DC characters such as Green Lantern, Blackhawk, and Secret Six. A center-spread newspaper-style Superman strip was drawn by Curt Swan. The series didn’t even make it a year, running from issues 601-642, before reverting to a regular monthly comic format with art and story for several months by the late, great George Perez.
Around this time, Clark revealed his secret identity to Lois Lane. Shortly thereafter, they became engaged. In 1991, the titles adopted the triangle numbering that helped readers know the reading order of the three titles. A fourth title, Superman: The Man of Steel, was added to the schedule, bringing over writer Louise Simonson and artist Jon Bogdanove from Marvel.
On television, the series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was a hit. And this conflicted with DC’s plans for Lois and Clark to marry in 1992. The TV show’s producers didn’t want conflicting stories, as Lois and Clark were not engaged on the show, which depended on the will-they-or-won’t-they tension.
With DC’s plans made moot by the series, a random suggestion for what to do instead came up: Let’s kill him! This somehow struck a nerve and the story began to develop, leading up to Superman #75, in which the Man of Steel would meet his final match.
The story hit the news and caught on, at least in part because this was in the midst of the speculator age. By autumn 1992, Image Comics had sparked a huge wave of interest — in both the stories and the in value these comic books might have. People bought multiple copies of everything Image, confident these books would one day be so valuable that selling them would put kids not yet born through college or fund lavish retirement plans abroad.
This was always silly, but there was real FOMO. No one wanted to miss the one issue that did take off, that would be worth real cash or an issue you really wanted for your collection, so the illusion kept everyone going for at least another year.
This angle helped sell the story to the media. People who hadn’t read or bought a comic in years wanted a copy of Superman #75, either because it was historic — DC was promising Superman wasn’t coming back — or because they thought it would be worth money.
DC amped up the stakes by planning a regular comic book version and a $2.50 deluxe version that would be shipped with a special cover, polybagged with a trading card, a full-size poster, a Daily Planet obit for Superman, a small sheet of stamps, and a black armband ribbon with a red Superman logo (no blood). Both versions featured a great three-page fold-out of the final moment when Superman died.
I was discussing all this with a colleague at the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff who also liked comics. Sundial mostly focused on local arts and entertainment, but my friend said comics were entertainment, too, and if I wanted to do an article on this, I should. Thanks, Adam!
So, I called DC Comics in New York and asked for the PR department. I was connected with Martha Thomases, who handled PR at the time for DC, and she was kind enough to send me a package with press releases, a few of the comics that led into the Death of Superman storyline, and a copy of The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told trade paperback.
I asked her if I could speak to editor Mike Carlin or any of the writers or artists on the comics, but she said they were unavailable because they were working on the stories that would come after the Death of Superman.
I went back to Beyond Comics and John Helmer. A friend of his who helped around at the shop was a student at NAU and connected to the owners of Atomic Comics in Mesa, Arizona. He had a lot to say as well, but didn’t want to be included in the article. He showed me some Golden Age Superman comics and was very up to date on comics history. He talked a lot about how great it was to go to San Diego Comic Con and meet all the creators.
I finally sat down to start cranking out the story, and it came quickly and fairly easily. I used the resources I had, which included “The Comic-Book Heroes,” as well as a few other bits and pieces I was able to find at the public and NAU libraries.
It turned out extremely long — more than 2,300 words! — and took up two full tabloid pages in Sundial, plus a jump. I had a couple other editors take a look at it and make suggestions and fix any typos or grammar errors I had made. (We worked on a now-archaic computer typesetting system that had orange monotype displays. They were not easy to read or work on.)
Re-reading this article after so many years, I think the first section covering the news part of the death of Superman is solid. The history stuff is disorganized and I got a few things wrong — though not intentionally. This was before the internet, so checking facts on something like comics history was not as easy as it is now. Any errors in the story are, again, my own.
I had decided to put the story on the cover of Sundial, which lead to a rather unpleasant confrontation. There was a woman, whose name I forget, who ran a very small dance company in Flagstaff. We had always covered their events and previous editors in my position had put those stories on the cover. This was a small town, remember, and there often was a bit of a struggle to find engaging local entertainment stories beyond whichever C-list country band was swinging through town that week. She expected her event would be featured on the cover and handed me what she wanted to be used as the image. I told her that the story would run in the issue but that the cover would be the death of Superman. She threw what I can only describe as a fit in the front office waiting area. It was my decision and I took it, waiting for her to finish and walk out. My friends in the newsroom tried to save me by poking a head out and saying I had an important call. But I stuck with my decision and let her run with her anger until she left, disappointed. You can’t make everyone happy.
The day Superman #75 came out, I headed to John’s shop at lunchtime to pick one up. Several people in the newsroom asked me to get a copy for them, if I could. When I got there, John was very effusive about the article and had a lot of nice things to say. He had already sold out of Superman #75, but he had set aside a copy of the deluxe version for me.
The frenzy that surrounded this release was incredible. The strangest story I heard was from a friend who worked at the local Hastings, which was a chain that sold books, music, videos, appliances, and had a comic book section. A friend who worked there had told me that one of the managers was a comics fan and really was trying to grow the comics section of the store. However, the store’s shipment of Superman #75 never arrived and the boxes containing them were never recovered or accounted for by the shipper or the store.
The best part of all this was that I was now on the press list for DC Comics. I began receiving press kits and releases, as well as press copies of some projects. This led to me doing a few more articles about comics in general and DC in particular at the Sun.
Inspired by my Flagstaff comics friends, I made plans to attend San Diego Comic-Con in 1993. At the DC booth, I ran into Martha Thomases who was happy to see me. She told me I had just missed a press conference on the return of Superman and gave me a press kit on it that included an advance copy of the collector’s edition of Superman #82 with the chromium cover, and the foil cover for Adventures of Superman #505.
Here’s what was in the press kit:
DC had ongoing signings at the convention for Superman and Batman creators, and I managed to hit both. I walked away with a 1st print newsstand copy of Superman #75 and a Superman poster signed by Dan Jurgens, Denis Rodier, Glenn Whitmore, and Barry Kitson. Hot stuff!
The Superman titles of this era deserve a closer look. With four titles making Superman an essentially weekly comic book — and a damn entertaining one — is an underrated achievement. Ultimately, comics are entertainment — and the run of Superman comics from 1986 through the Triangle Era and well into the 21st century is as consistent and entertaining a run of comic books as has ever been published anywhere.
More next time.