Thanks for reminding me of the PAD/McFarlane Hulk from 1987, which was based on the status quo established by the the six-issue run of Hulk from 1985 written and drawn by John Byrne -- which introduced a bunch of inane nonsense and then didn't come together in any meaningful way before Byrne ditched the project to do Superman instead. PAD and Todd took Byrne's garbage and spun it into compelling comics gold. That run was amazing!

And your point about Claremont/Silvestri X-Men is also well-taken. Starting in 1987, Silvestri began proving himself to be an artistic collaborator for Claremont who eclipsed Byrne in every way. Another reminder of Byrne being a sub-par relic of the 1970s who just couldn't cut it once the new decade turned over.

I whole heartedly agree with the assessment that MOS #3 is a complete turd.
I re-read it recently and was amazed on how bad it is.

All the JB Superman stuff is on sale on Amazon Kindle for anyone interested.
I have them all.

Oh yeah, I noticed the suit got colored darker. Since my Silver Age Supey knowledge is low, I didn't know if maybe Bizarro always had a darker suit in the Weisinger days.

That's cool if it's a reference to Superman 3. That's a not-oft-referenced Superman film.

Not oft, I say.

It's funny that you mention the "bizarre ... ohhhh!" thing. I thought it was pretty good too, but I remember someone online (on a different, inferior comics forum) mentioning that bit of dialogue and talking specifically about how much they hated it.

You can't please everyone, I guess. Then again, we here at IMWAN are more open-minded than some when it comes to evaluating the works of John L. Byrne.

I wondered if maybe the inking was part of the problem.

No, YOU are the one doing worthwhile things.

See?

See how it feels, when someone says that to you?

That sounds like it might be a funny interview to revisit.

Nowadays he likes to say that Man of Steel was met with 100% universal acclaim at the time.

I don't totally hate the idea of stripping everything down, as a starting point for a reboot. It makes perfect sense really. But of course then it's going to be inevitable that all of those fun old ideas will slowly be reintroduced. If anything, that's the whole reason for the strip-down in the first place, is the fact that you now have the freedom to reintroduce concepts and ideas at whatever pace you see fit.

But whenever Byrne talks about what became of post-Crisis Superman, he always seems annoyed that eventually all those ideas came back in to the comic. Because he didn't see all the imaginative extra details as the fun lore that makes Superman interesting, but instead saw them all as things to be scraped away and then left off.

That might be fine for a single film, or film trilogy -- Christopher Nolan didn't feel the need to include Rainbow Batman, Ace the Bathound, Bat-MIte, or the "bat-radia" when he made his movies, after all. But for a character who is starring in 20 to 30 pages of comic-book story every week, in perpetuity?

I mean COME ON people.

Man of Steel #6

"I'm so glad you were able to find time for a quick vacation."
"Well, not exactly a vacation, Ma."

Byrne has a lot of writing quirks that make me annoyed -- perhaps irrationally so. (Or then again, perhaps entirely rationally so. PERHAPS.). One of them is how he corrects his own word-choice through dialogue. Like, if Clark isn't on vacation, just say what he's doing in Smallville. Don't have his mother call it a vacation and then have Clark pedantically correct her. "Hmmm, not exactly the right word, stupid old Martha Kent. Try again, you dumb woman you." It's funny too because I feel like every time he does this, it's a male character correcting a female character.

Anyway, I hate it.

One thing I do like how big the "S" is on Superman's chest. I feel like I've seen some controversy about that online. Some have argued it is a little much. I like it. Giant letter "S" is how it ought to be. It can't be too big.

So issue 6, what happens. Clark learns through a computer/hologram thingy in his ship in Smallville that he's from the exploded plant Krypton. He also finds out that Lana hates him. She berates him for ruining his life and then tells him that she is happy. Huh?

Oh, and once again, Byrne picks the most boring way possible to find out about his origins.

By now, everyone here knows that Byrne had decided that for Superman to talk about "Rao" and set up a shrine to Jor-El and Lara, etc., all of that was a SMACK IN THE FACE to Ma and Pa Kent. Which is stupid, but Byrne is in charge, so he has to drive the point home that his version of Superman thinks Krypton ought to just fuck right the fuck off to fucktown. Thus we get the longest, most boring thought-bubble-encased monologue in all of comicdom. Allow me to paraphrase ...

"I may have been born on Krypton, but Earth is my home. My biological parents may have been some dude named Jor-El and some bitch named Lara, but my birth parents are the amazing Jonathan and Martha. I may be Kryptonian, but it was humans that gave me my values. Krypton may be my planet of origin, but my values are those shared by the citizens of Earth. My genetic code might match Kryptonians rather than Earthlings, but in my heart, I am --"

SHUT UP SHUT UP FOR FUCK'S SAKE WE GET IT SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

Man oh man, I hope this starts to improve.

Final thoughts on Man of Steel ...

Well, I liked issue 2 and issue 5.

Apparently when people discuss the question of what is the "Best" Superman origin story, somehow Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries gets in the conversation. More than that, some people actually pick it as the best.

Byrne likes to say that his entire life was wasted -- because he spent decades showing people the right way to do superheroes, but despite that, people were still okay with a Latina playing Sue Storm. We can all follow the logic, of course, and it leads us inexorably to the conclusion -- yes, John Byrne, you wasted your whole life.

But as a counterpoint ....

Apparently he managed to fool an entire generation into thinking that Man of Steel 1-6 is not only good, but superior as a Superman story. He made a fortune off of this garbage. No one else this side of D.B. Cooper has perpetrated such a massive heist and gotten away with it clean. Viewed through that lens, Byrne can hardly be said to have wasted his life. On the contrary, his legacy as a master perpetrator of artistic fraud is assured.

Superman #1

"He must've been pulling his punch before."

I note bit of dialogue because the whole phrase "pulling his punch" ... I've only ever seen it in superhero comics. Most often Claremont-written comics, but others have used it too. Has anyone ever used the phrase in real life? I always thought it was kind of dumb-sounding. It just means punching someone not as hard as you can, right? I dunno, this isn't Byrne's fault, because Claremont is the one who really overuses this one. "I'd better pull my punches, or I could cripple -- even kill -- him!"

It's a stupid phrase, we can all agree on that, right? At least, it always seems stupid in the comic, in a thought bubble accompanied by a drawing of a giant muscled guy who looks like he's hitting harder than he's ever hit anything in his entire damn life.

Anyway ...

This issue is more like it. It feels like Man of Steel was just an extended exercise in illustrated exposition that Byrne barely even wanted to do. Here, he finally seems like he's doing something interesting. Mysteries are introduced, there are revelations regarding Kryptonite ... plus the issue is set three weeks after Man of Steel #6, allowing there to be some momentum, i.e. a sense that the events of the previous issue are informing what happens in the next.

And we get some excitement in the form of Metallo thrashing Superman. Sadly, Metallo looks totally lame. Well, at first he does. Then Byrne does a Terminator riff and has his skin peel off, revealing a metal skeleton underneath. And that looks awesome!

Ed Piskor pointed out on Kayfabe once that Superman's rogues gallery is weird in that while there are some iconic characters, none of them have an iconic look. Lex Luthor comes the closest, but even in his case, it's just a bald head. And not even that is really consistent. (How often did we see Gene Hackman bald? The Superboy Lex Luthor was hardly ever seen bald. Jesse Eisenberg had long hair when he first showed up in Bats V Supes, and the Lex of "Superman and Lois" started out with hair and a beard too, as I recall. Oh, and I'm not totally through "My Adventures With Superman" Season 2 yet -- NO SPOILERS -- but so far that Lex Luthor has hair. And John Shea had hair when he first appeared on the Hatcher/Cain thing.)

But anyway, all the other villains ... they look different in every new incarnation. How many looks has Brainiac had? Toyman? General Zod? Bizarro probably is the closest to having a consistent iconic look, because his is just "backwards"-Superman with a funked-up face.

And that goes for Metallo too, as Byrne completely redesigns him here to be a Terminator-without-the-skin. It looks cool, but ... didn't Brainiac have a "metal skeleton" look just a couple years earlier?

Anyway, it was a good observation by Piskor. It's a weird curiosity that Superman's rogues gallery is absent any truly iconic looks. As compared to Batman, where -- even though people like to do tweaks and different versions -- there is an iconic, plutonic ideal for all the major rogues.

Not a knock on Byrne, really. It isn't his fault. (OR IS IT)

Just kind of strange.

Anyway, I thought this issue was pretty enjoyable. It's nice to see that finally Byrne is injecting some energy and excitement into the series. Maybe he just needed to get MoS out of his system.

Action Comics 584

I can't read the ending of this one, without remembering Hanzo's new dialogue for the final page. It's some funny, funny stuff.

But actually I never read this one before, I've read the doofy sanctimonious preachy ending with the word balloons that completely cover Superman's face ... but not the stuff leading up to it.

The stuff leading up to it is boring. Just Superman fighting Cyborg and Wonder Girl. Oh, and Changeling. With Byrne's usual tedious dialogue. Superman refers to the Titans as children, and Wonder Girl has to get all pedantic about word choice. "I may call myself 'Girl,' but I think you'll agree that I'm more than a 'child.' After all, how many 'children' can do ... THIS?" (And then she lifts a truck or whatever.)

It's so rote and by the numbers. There's no sense of whimsy, and certainly no ... wait for it ... GRANDEUR. It's just people fighting and talking about their fighting while they fight. "My lasso is made of one of the strongest polymers known to science." Fascinating stuff, Wonder Girl.

At least when Claremont spells this stuff out, he uses narrative captions. A narrator is allowed to be long-winded. When it's the characters blathering about their powers or the fact that their weapons are "made of the strongest polymers known." it makes them seem lame AF. (That's right -- lame ALPHA FLIGHT.)

Ah well. Onward.

Superman #2

This one was pretty cool. It's the "Lex Luthor finds out Clark is Superman but refuses to believe it" issue. It's not really as clever as Byrne thinks it is, granted, but it pretty much works.

There's also Byrne's weird desire to torture and brutalize female characters, which we see here as Lex has Lana Lang tortured. But ... I'm more hyper-aware of that from having seen Byrne do it over and over in other comics. Taken here as one isolated occurrence, it works to create some drama and intensity.

Everything else holds up pretty well, I think. I complained earlier that Metallo is a bit derivative of the skinless-Terminator design, but ... it still looks cool. And unlike the red eyes of a Terminator bot, Byrne has given Metallo big bulging eyeballs, which is pretty great.

This issue is the first appearance of Lex's Kryptonite ring, which is awesome. Did Byrne invent that idea, or did Lex wear a Kryptonite ring pre-Crisis too? I do love the Kryptonite ring, NGL.

I'm not a huge fan of Byrne's Lex characterization. It's really melodramatic and over-the-top in a way that seems to fight against Byrne's attempts to make a more grounded, "barnacle"-free Superman. "No one kills Superman but me" is one of his mantras apparently, and then later he has Superman at his mercy with Kryptonite -- i.e., he could kill him right there! But he says he wants to drag things out. That's how he wants to play his and Superman's "little game." (Byrne loves the phrase "little game.")

So Byrne is like this super-billionaire who built an empire from nothing (I assume), but ... gosh, he certainly isn't the most practical guy, is he? In issue 1, Metallo was about to kill Superman, but then Lex stopped it. Even though he wants Superman dead. "Nobody kills him but me!"

Then in this issue, he could have killed Superman -- just like he wanted! But he decides that would be "too easy."

I think we're to understand that at this point in the continuity, Superman has been in Metropolis for seven years. So Lex has hated this guy and wanted him dead for seven years, and he finally is able to do it ... and he doesn't. "Too easy!" Dafuq ...?

A more subtle, layered and complex Lex Luthor would be more interesting, but instead we get this goofball. But hey. It's just Byrne being the basic bitch that he is.

Despite my complaints, I did enjoy this issue. Love the Terry Austin inks on Byrne, of course, and the issue is really well-paced. And I actually did have a moment of enjoying Lex, when he is ready to come down hard on a pair of underlings that he thought screwed up ... then when he realizes that their screw-up led to him getting exactly what he wanted, he changes his tone completely and starts complimenting them and calling them his "dear chaps."

"Dear chaps" is always a delightful phrase.

Also, I like when a single Superman story packs a lot of "lore" into it. This one gives us the (seeming) death of Metallo, Lex's acquisition of Kryptonite, AND the creation of the Kryptonite ring. That's some good, exciting stuff.

All in all, ees a guhd wun.

Glad I could help!

You da man!

Byrne tried to send Krypton to fucktown, it's true...but subsequent writers dragged it right back into continuity.

My memory of MOS is that it was uninspired but the subsequent Superman issues improved because there was a lot more action and stuff going on in general. They were far from being the worst comics around in 1986, IMO.

The idiosyncrasies you point out (regarding exposition) became far more prominent in Byrne's DC stuff for some reason, but the post MOS stuff definitely does get better. I always bought Byrne's stuff despite his writing not because of it, but I think his DC era is where he began to truly think he was "The King, now". I'm certain that being placed in charge of Superman was why he began to see himself that way. He enjoyed the Time Magazine thing (despite complaining about the reference to cheese). He mistook industry cred for for street cred and vanished up his own rectum (creatively speaking).

If Byrne's ego was out of control before, being the guy who got to reboot Superman was where the Emperor strode out fully nude and decided to continue the parade regardless. Even though it's not the worst thing Byrne ever did (IMO) it's also a long way from being his best work.

I don't think what he did with Superman was all bad, it just wasn't as good as I'd expected it to be given how much I enjoyed his work at Marvel.

Then again, I was a teenager so....what did I know?

Reading JB’s Superman is where I first became aware that his heroes don’t have adventures, they have explanations.

Byrne does complain, but he was the one that started bringing all these elements back.

IIRC under Andy Helfer as editor both Superman and Adventures of Superman while superhero comics both seemed to have a more "plausible" sci fi bent in terns of stories and villains (Metallo, Bloodsport, Host and Ramapage). Once Helfer left or took a step back and Mike Carlin came in, it seemed Byrne did whatever he wanted across all 3 titles. Wolfman wrote a better and more nuanced Lex Luthor who was genuinely threatening as opposed to Byrn'e bombastic and quick to enrage version.

After the LOSH issues and the loss of Wolfman (who to this day I cannot see anywhere why he was removed or left after a year), Byrne brought back a lot of Pre-Crisis elements: Mr. Myzptlk, Lori Lemaris, The Toyman, The Prankster and even the Superman robots that he was annoyed about.

I'm glad they came back in a more revised and modern context, but he complains about things he had already started instigating.

Onr thing that annoys me about Superman # 1 (maybe two):

Metallo's creator, later identfied as Emmett Vale, was a subplot that was introduced in MOS # 1 (the guy when Jonathan shows Clark the rocket in trenchcoat and hat, and in the barn on the last page) and MOS # 4 (Superman sensing he has been photographed after arresting Luthor), and we learn his motives through Metallo in flashback in Superman # 1, but...Superman never does even by going through his lab. He just sees all this info on himself and then launched the whole lab that contains human remians in to space.

Anyway, it would have made more sense to keep Vale alive even though he was dying of kryptonite radiation exposure - a nice touch since he had stolen the rocket and been exposed to the stuff for years, and foreshadows what was going to happen to Luthor - confront Superman himself to explain or for Superman to uncover his motives for stealing the rocket ship, kryptonite and creating Metallo.

2nd. Why did Vale see Superman as a threat? As after his public debut all he did was go around saving people and fighting evil criminals.

That all seemed to have mileage and then Byrne just blows through it and forgets some of the plot elemtns for Metallo he laid down.

This is characteristic of Byrne's work - he always had a tendency to end things abruptly (Wendy's Friends is an example) but he began to simply discard things around this time in a more obvious way. He did the same thing with his Hulk run and it became commonplace in much of his later work. It's obvious in Next Men as well (and we see the ultimate example in Elsewhen, I think). He was "bored, now" and so he simply discarded whatever he was bored with.

To me Byrne comes across as if his chief intention is to convey to the reader how nimble his intellect is, how impressively clever he is, but he seems less interested in telling a compelling story. If he were to use a bit more nuance it would imply that the reader is his equal, and that isn't what Byrne believes

This discussion of Superman's rogues gallery gives me a thought -- Superman does not have a good, overall rogue's gallery. It pales in comparison to other superheroes of similar stature to him. There, I've said it.

You're forgetting Magpie.