Do I dare ...?

"To eat a peach?"

Man of Steel #1

I've read this before. I think I already even made an IMWAN post about it, at the behest of sweet Hanzo.

Anyway, it's divided into three parts. Taking a cue from Richard Donner, it has one part set on Krypton just before 'splosion-time, the next set in Smallville not long before Clark leaves it, and then the final bit set ... well, also in Smallville -- but at a point in Clark's life when he's already been living in Metropolis for three years.

Since everybody here has read this stuff I'm sure, I won't go into heavy synopsis. Just my reactions.

The first part works fine -- the stilted dialogue that is a Byrne trademark fits the cold, sterile version of Krypton that Byrne wanted to create.

Once we get to the latter parts, Byrne's boring-ass dialogue works far less effectively. There are a few snappy moments -- "You told him?" "I told him." "He told me." -- but most of it is just bland exposition.

"I sat on a mountaintop in Tibet and just shook. With outrage. With fear!"

The dialogue when Clark and his parents talk about his newly made costume is especially irritating.
"Gotta admit you were right about the boots, Ma. They add a nice swashbuckler look!"
"The whole thing works just fine! It's got exactly the symbolic look I wanted."

And, finally, the coup de grace of bad dialogue -- "Very special" alert!!!

It's not about "Very special training" but ...

"... whenever there are people who need my very special kind of help ..."

How did that one never catch on in the voiceover for a new Superman show? "Faster than a speeding bullet ... more powerful than a locomotive ... able to offer a VERY SPECIAL kind of help ...! It's Superman! Yes, it's Superman! His costume has exactly the symbolic look that he wanted!"

Anyway.

The issue organizes the story-beats for a Superman origin in all the ways that we've come to expect post-Donner. It's all fine, the artwork is ... fine, I guess. But reads like essentially a summary, just rushing to cover everything in as perfunctory a manner as possible. It's crazy to think that in 1986, this whole "John Byrne reinvents Superman!" stunt actually worked. Cause this is some rote, by-the-numbers stuff. When you compare it to other stuff that was coming out in the watershed year 1986, this feels really quaint and bland.

In fact, the more I reflect on it, the more I don't like it.

I grow old, Evans.

I grow old.

At the time, it felt like DC had finally bent the knee and allowed Superman an updated feel. The character had a very Curt Swan vibe even when someone else was drawing him. This was Superman becoming more "of the day "

But you're right, the rebooted things felt perfunctory and by numbers until we started seeing the villains look different.

Shall Doot bare his fair behind?

Or part his trousers rolled?

Or...something?

As ever, if Doot writes it I'll read it and make stupid comments.

Man of Steel #2

Ah yes, this is much better. There is quite a bit more personality to it, I think. Superman saves the girl with the boombox, and then tells her that the boombox is a bit loud, and it would be quite considerate of her to turn it down ... that's pretty classic. Nice one, JB!

Some great visual storytelling as Lois Lane tries to track down Superman to get an interview, and Lex Luthor being kept on the fringes as a shadowy figure is quite effective.

I think one thing that makes this issue more fun than the last is that we get to see Superman in the suit. The first issue didn't have him wearing the costume until the last page. Imagine telling the story of Superman and waiting until the very last second before FINALLY having him wear the costume. As if you've made some sort of restrictive "no tights" rule, out of embarrassment.

Just imagine ...!

Anyway, it's nice here because the suit is all primary blue-red-yellow, and almost nothing else in the issue is colored in those hues. Superman is allowed to stand out as this primary-colored beacon on every page. It's nice.

It's all quite nice.

Byrne still seems to be very much in the shadow of Richard Donner here, just doing his take on the "Superman introduces himself to the world by saving people and stopping crime" montage, and then going from there straight into the Lois-meet-slash-interviews-Superman-for-the-first-time thing. The Superman/Lois relationship suffers in comparison with onscreen versions. Byrne's dialogue is, as always, dry and bland, and he doesn't have the advantage of getting charismatic actors to try and give life to it. So it just sit there on the page.

But the montage is good!

Anyway, while there's nothing new or fresh here, it's a decent take on some classic "early Superman" tropes. Definitely much better than issue 1.

It's what the world needs.

I was reading some of these things as they came out, since a colleague had told me that John Byrne was doing Superman and I was curious. For its time, I'd say the art was pretty damn good, in those I saw. I've since read most of them, and I liked them for what they were. The dialogue is clunky for sure but not always and not noticeably worse than its contemporaries, I'd say.

(I'm gonna Steinbrenner this thread)

Makes sense.

But even the "of the day" part feels less dated than other products of 1986, doesn't it? Or maybe it's just that I have nostalgia for other 1986-things but not this. Man of Steel just feels stodgy compared to Watchmen, Dark Knight, Daredevil: Born Again, etc. (And of course, the most ahead-of-its-time comic of all of 1986, "Classic X-Men" with its reprints of awesome Claremont X-Men comics from 1975.)

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time ...

Man of Steel #3.

Batman: "As you can see, I have a portable crime-lab, here in the trunk of my automobile. One of the most advanced such labs in the state."

Byrne decides that he'll write Batman as a full-on Adam West. A bold choice!

Superman didn't fight any villains in the first two issues, so the first super-villain of the post-Crisis Superman is ... Magpie.

Mag. Pie.

I guess there's something to be said for keeping readers in suspense, and not immediately giving us a familiar rogue like Lex, Brainiac, Zod, Bizarro, or what-have-you. Giving us an original creation as the first rogue isn't the worst idea, thinking about it.

But why did she have to be this lame? Granted, her whole motivation is tainted by knowing that Byrne has this weird bugaboo about "magpies," and uses it to deride fans who dare to enjoy movie adaptations. Still, even putting that aside ... couldn't she at least LOOK cool? Byrne knows how to create cool visual designs. He's even made female characters with bird motifs -- specifically! -- look cool before. SNOWBIRD, ANYONE???

Since she's a Gotham-based villain introduced to be a new member of Batman's rogues gallery ostensibly, maybe Byrne is just trying to continue the whole "Adam West" vibe he's got going, and creating a campy villain on par with King Tut or Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. I dunno, man. She's weaksauce.

Also, for all of Byrne's talk of "grandeur," he actually can't do grandeur. At all. He has the opportunity to create a brand-new "first" meeting between Superman and Batman, and he makes it the most boring thing ever. What an epic fail.

Two bad issues, and one good one. So far, the score is low. But perhaps things will get better.

Man of Steel #4

"Now I can set about the rather elaborate procedure I have to go through to shave my super-tough beard." Superman thought to himself. Expositorily.

"Luckily, just as a normal man's face is toughened by the daily routine of shaving, my own cheeks have become increasingly resistant to the heat beam." He continued to think to himself.

Oy, I hate this one already.

First confrontation between Superman and Lex Luthor, set roughly 18 months after the events of issue two. It's boring.

Once again, Byrne is given the opportunity to remake an iconic moment in a modern myth -- the first meeting of Superman and Lex Luthor. And as with the Superman/Batman encounter, it's the dullest way possible.

I guess Byrne is trying to keep everything grounded ... keep the beginnings low-stakes and simple, so that there is somewhere to go in future issues, and room for stakes to get higher. Fair enough.

It's still boring. Superman: TAS did this way better. So did Superman '78. Smallville's first-meeting-of-Clark-and-Lex was quite different from the traditional one, but it still had a mythic quality to it.

By comparison, Byrne's iteration is weak.

So far, we've had only one good issue out of four.

Man of Steel #5

Lois has known Superman for five years as of this issue. Time is a-flyin'! Ya gotta love that.

Lex has a scientist named Dr. Teng who made a machine that can create clones. It scans Superman and tries to make a clone of him, but unfortunately Teng had assumed Superman was an augmented human. Instead he's an alien. His machine can't replicate alien DNA, and so when the Superman duplicate emerges, he immediately starts to "crystallize." Thus -- Bizarro origin! I think it works. How different is it from the classic Bizarro origin, though? Is it actually the same? Well, either way, I like it.

He's never called "Bizarro" in this issue though. And he never speaks. But he commits suicide in order to grant Lois Lane's sister Lucy her recently-lost sight.

I remember someone saying that the blind-Lucy thing was from a Silver Age story ... and maybe Bizarro providing the cure is also from the Silver Age? Is that right?

NOTE: Dr. Teng is in Smallville, but on the show she's a sexy chick scientist instead of a dorky male scientist. IMPROVEMENT.

This issue overall was enjoyable. Apart from Clark and Lois' snappy "flirtatious" patter at the start. Byrne sucks at writing any kind of witty repartee.

But yeah, I dug this one overall. "Classic" Bizarro is more fun than Byrne's silent Frankenstein-ish version -- both in terms of visuals and in personality -- but as a first appearance for the character, I don't mind that he's more low-key and mysterious here.

Issue 5 goes in the "plus" column for me.

I support this thread, Evans' Steinbrennering of it, and Li'l Jay's "There, I've said it" style comments in it.

I have to comment as well, as much as everyone hates it when I do (not that I blame them). I recall being impressed by the art back in 1986 but sort of...not disappointed really, but underwhelmed by the dialogue. It does come across as a very rote 'superhero origin story', and there's almost nothing epic or heroic about it. It was Byrne doing Superman, which was a novelty at the time, but it revealed more of Byrne's shortcomings as a writer than anything else he'd ever done before (in my opinion).

If they'd had Byrne as co-author with...well, anyone really...I don't think it'd have the antiseptic quality that it has. Of course, Byrne was on a mission to prove he was "The King, now" so there was no chance of that happening.

There's such a strikingly lacklustre quality to the dialogue ("They all wanted a piece of me"), and I'm not sure I'd noticed that about Byrne's writing before I first read this - I was 15 when this came out so that probably explains my own shortcomings as a reader. Maybe it was the case that the behind-the-scenes people at Marvel knew how to approach Byrne and convince him to loosen things up a bit? That they could massage his ego so he'd change certain little things without making him feel like he was being criticized? Maybe the editorial staff at DC were just hesitant about upsetting him, since so much was riding on this project, so they just let him do anything he wished?

Perhaps there was an element of giving Byrne enough rope to hang himself with? Giving JB the job of rebooting Superman had to have annoyed some of the prominent DC mainstays, or so I'd assume. Byrne did get Curt Swan booted off the title he'd been synonymous with for so many years and I'm sure that didn't make him popular. In fact, a look on Wikipedia revealed this...



If the feeling at the DC office was that management had hired Byrne for the reboot so they weren't going to intervene...that could explain a lot. I know that Byrne's reputation had to have preceded him at DC, and he probably didn't win any friends with his reinvention of Luthor - which was "inspired" by Marv Wolfman - so...I can imagine they may have simply let him do what he liked hoping he'd come a cropper. Just my opinion, though.

Nice to see you're finally doing something worthwhile with your life.

As I recall,Dick Giordano did the inks for this miniseries.His inks were much too light and feathery to enhance Byrne's art. Karl Kesel was a much better fit for the job.
Remember how excited I was that JB was going to work his magic on the Man of Steel.That feeling didn't last too long.

This issue was my first exposure to Byrne's Superman, albeit like 5-6 years later, and I bought it solely because of the Batman appearance. I knew that the Byrne relaunch was considered really good by the fandom at the time, but boy, I thought this issue sucked big time and I didn't read the rest of MOS for a few more years after.

I do remember an interview with Byrne in Comics Scene shortly after he took over where he came off as really whiny and defensive about some of the controversies his reboot and its changes were generating. It was actually how I first learned that he had done away with Superboy and Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes, all of which I loved a lot (more than the then-current comics, actually) and which I found upsetting.

In broad terms,this aligns with that first Bizarro appearance,down to Bizarro curing Lucy (as an aside,I liked how Luthor called his creation "that bizarre...oh!" For Byrne,that's pretty clever). Also notice how Bizarro's costume is colored like Evil Chris Reeve in Superman III.I notice things like that.
This was the only issue of the mini-series I would call good. Pretty damn sad.

I didn't read Man of Steel until a few years ago. By then, I was over Byrne so felt nothing reading it. However, back when they were coming out, I DID read several Byrne Superman and Action comics, including Superman 9 with the Joker and Action Comics with Spectre amd Green Lantern, and I really enjoyed them. It felt like Marvel ha brought its style to DC, and the interesting stories and crystal clear story telling was, well, 'super' At that time, I also tried several Marvel comics (Todd McFarlane Hulkie, Silvestri X Men) and found them ugly and impenetrable. So, in context, these were, I contend, better comics than you are making them sound. They weren't Watchmen, but then what is?