Comics! The Final Days of Superman!

I ventured into the comics shop recently, which is something I don’t do all that often anymore, for two main reasons: first, as I’ve lamented several times here at Stevereads, the bloom of most comics went off the rose for me a few years ago when DC Comics – the mainstay of my comics world for decades – conducted a company-wide reboot of its characters and continuity, taking a broad and colorful and most especially grand tapestry of superheroes and transforming them at a stroke into a batch of grim, flak-jacketed, hateful misanthropists. These beings didn’t stand for truth, justice, and anybody’s way but their own. They punched, growled, and screwed with equal petulance; they had the names as the great characters they replaced, but their natures were completely, almost sadistically reversed from anything I grew up reading and liking.

And as evil chance would have it, my favorite DC character was one of the hardest hit. Superman has always been a source of insecurity for some comics creators – the less imaginative among those creators see his moral purity and vast array of superpowers and thought these things precluded interesting drama. The best Superman writers over the decades have seen the enormous opportunities offered by the very things that dismayed those other writers, but in “The New 52,” Superman became The Watchmen‘s Doctor Manhattan, only with hair. When he was talking to mere mortals, he floated a little above the ground with his arms folded across his chest. When is romantic soul was stirred, the woman in question wasn’t the thoroughly human, grounding Lois Lane but the battle-armored “New 52′ version of Wonder Woman.

In short, this version of Superman was exactly the kind of cool, monstrous alternate-reality version of the character that the old Superman, the one I read for decades, would have fought, outwitted, and then banished back to his own dimension.

But old habits die hard, and I was so accustomed to reading DC comics that I more or less limped along continuing to do it, despite only very seldom actually enjoying what I was reading. Eventually I started shifting my reading to graphic novels and away from the weekly issues that kept appearing at my comics shop. And even though I’ve recently noticed DC writers gradually drifting their concepts of the characters back to their pre-New 52 incarnations, I still stayed away from buying individual issues – for the second of my two reasons: DC recently announced that the summer of 2016 will see yet another company-wide reboot, this one dubbed “Rebirth” and featuring Gawd-knows-what further changes to these characters. Buying individual issues seemed doubly like a waste of time.

And yet, I missed going to my comics shop and buying individual issues! And recently, a storyline was announced spanning the whole family of Superman-related comics, a storyline said to be revolving around something called “The Super League.” It intrigued me, so I let it play out for a few installments, then I went to the comics shop and bought three or four of those installments, starting with Superman #51, which features a very dramatic cover by Mikel Janin with the legend “In the Heart of the Sun … the Super League is Forged!”

The issue opens equally dramatically: a full-page close-up of a Superman so young and pretty that the old Curt Swan/George Reeves Superman, my Superman, wouldn’t have recognized as any variation of himself. And this younger, prettier Superman says, “I’m dying.”

It turns out that several recent events in Superman’s life have combined to fatally weaken his body. He’s run every kind of test he knows, and he’s certain: he’s dying, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. He sets about telling his loved ones – in this issue, he first tells Lana Lang back in Smallville, then he goes to Lois Lane, who quite simply says she’s missed “talking to my best friend every day.”

In the next installment, in DC comic that used to be called World’s Finest and is now drably called Batman/Superman, Superman goes to the Batcave and tells Batman, who protests that they have to fight it, that there must be a way to save Superman’s life. Superman assures him that there’s no hope.

The next installment I bought was the latest issue of the drably-titled Superman/Wonder Woman, with great artwork by Ed Benes. In this issue, Superman breaks the bad news to Wonder Woman. And because this “New 52” version of Wonder Woman is a stupid, petty, brawling blockhead, her main concern is that Superman told Lana Lang, Lois Lang, Supergirl, and Batman before he told her. Fortunately, Superman is still healthy enough to shut her up by kissing her.

The thing that surprised me most about these three issues (I skipped an installment that mostly concentrated on Supergirl, whose New 52 incarnation is so tooth-grindingly boring that I can’t really stand reading her even in small doses) was how much I enjoyed them. The interactions between Superman and Batman, between Superman and Lois Lane, especially between Superman and Lana Lang, all felt immediately authentic, very little like the bulk of the New 52 run. And at one point there was splendid double-page spread of Superman simply going about his job, selflessly saving the day. The story had a great deal of heart.

Must have been a donor heart, of course, since the one thing completely missing from these issues was any plot involving a “Super League.” Indeed, the term “Super League” is never even mentioned in any of these issues, which are part of a story called “The Final Days of Superman.” No idea where this “Super League” business comes from, but I finished these issues feeling something DC’s New 52 lineup has virtually never made me feel: eager for the rest of the story.

I don’t miss the irony, of course, that I’m feeling this just as the New 52 itself is about to undergo a major disruption. Given the almost uniform series of bad decisions involved in the New 52, I’m going into “Rebirth” expecting the worst. But before that, at least I’ve got this neato story to enjoy.