Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3361105-20130620163542

Folks in the Introductions thread were getting onto the topic of why they thought the Death of Superman is an overrated event.

So, I thought, why not get into a big debate about it, because that's what dorky people like us love to do?

Now, this isn't too fair, because both of the guys talking about it in the other thread thought the story was kind of lame - and now, I'm going to say the same thing. (But I know that if I can convince Mrblonde to get in on this, he'll have some counterpoints).

I thought that Death of Superman was a mess. Doomsday was wedged uncomfortably into the DCU, and though they did their best to incorporate him into the world with little teasers at the end of a bunch of books, his reason for existing was... well, basically to kill superman. So, he turns up, and then does. Woopdedoo.

It's not actually that bad a story. I was more disappointed by the execution. The idea to have the book gradually increase its panel sizes to one panel-per-page sounds good, but when you're the buying public (and of course, most of us weren't, because we were between being the glint in the milkman's eye and ten years old) you end up with 22 PANELS of story, rather than what we would normally expect from 22 PAGES of story.

And, what's worse, is that pretty much every page/panel of is somebody punching someone else. All the best stuff in the book happens right after they finish punching each other... right about here:

Anyway, the BEST thing about the Death of Superman is that we got Reign of the Supermen out of it, which was this cool event where all four of the Superman books... (Action Comics, Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Superman: Man of Steel) was taken over by a superman, but you weren't sure which one was the Superman (except the black one. We were all pretty sure it wasn't him.).

But the major criticism of the whole Death of Superman storyline was that it turned out none of those dudes was the real Superman, and the real guy came back in about a year (for some reason, it came as a surprise, despite the fact that DC had made it pretty clear he was coming back in the media). And then - worst of all - all those douchebags who had bought the comic thinking that it was going to be worth a lot, because superman was never coming back ended up with hundreds of copies of one of the most widely printed comic books in history, and the speculator market went to poopooland - but that's another story.

Recent smug as shit travesties of human waste have argued that the story caused a problem for all comics that was the Death of Death - no death could ever be permanent.

And this proved true in most cases (but not others... until it did, later).

What do you folks think? Dare you challenge my arguments, which are so airtight they could double as a mermaid's brassiere? 