Comics A few questions about "All Star Superman" from a Marvel fan.

number 5...the all star line is all out of continuity stories, even with each other...like, Morrison's arc won't have any effect on the next arc, and so on...it's essentially classic superman stories being told without having to worry about continuity

 

Yeah the stories have a strong silver-age feel to them.

 

TheSumOfGod have you ever read Greg Ruckas Superman?

 

No. It's got a large backstory to it.

Not really. It's just an out of continuity tale.

No.

Yes.

Basically.

 

Yes. Morrison describes it as "if the Silver Age never ended, this is how he would have ended up." Or something to that regard. Personally, I think he goes a little overboard with the silver ageness, but then I was pretty taken suprise by the large amounts of it.

I'm probaboy going to hate myself for asking this, but......


What's wrong with the Byrne stuff?

 

And what's wrong with that?

It was a place that got so wrapped up in their traditions and their egotism that they let themselves die.

Just in that one storyline. There some rather lighthearted Superman stories after that.

And what's wrong with Lex being a buisnessman? He was still the same manipulative ******* as always.

 

The thing is, that assesment makes no sense. He was not born Superman. A hero can't be born. Heroism was shaped through life experiences and what those close to you taught you. Just because he had his powers from the start doesn't mean he was born Superman. It just means that he was born super. He was raised Clark Joseph Kent, the son of two farmers in Kansas. He grew up as Clark Kent. He made the conscious descision to become Superman. He could have, easily, simply used his powers for personal gain, or not even use them at all. No one forced him to become a hero but himself. It was because of his upbringing that he became a hero, not his pedigree. And really, Clark being a fabrication just makes SUperman too aloof. Too cold. It's like it's some stupid game to him. Like he's looking down on us. It makes him a character who isn't interesting to write abvout and is usually not interesting to read about. At the end of the day, I'm sure, he thinks of himself as Clark Kent, a Kansas farmboy who grew up to be a reporter. Not Superman.

The thing is, it was a utopia. No famine, no war, almost no crime, and no disease. Everything was shiny and nice. It's just that, to become a utopia, a society would have to give up certain aspects of humanity. You can't have abtruely perfect society. It's just not in the nature of people.

I agree that the 90s had their faults, but there were also some very good stories in those years aswell.

And he wasn't a scary genius in and after Man of Steel? He was always portrayed as highly inteligent, and often showed very in depth knowlege of electronics and engineering.

 

No. I'm not. Although I do have some socialist veiws. Though I tend to consider myself more of a libertarian. Hey look, a monkey....

 

He only hates them because everyone who didn't vote for Bush in the DCU voted for Lex Luthor.

 

The biggest problem with Byrne's Superman is it deviates too radically from Siegel and Shuster's intentions. The Post-Crisis Batman is still pretty close to what Kane and Finger created, but the Post-Crisis Superman has basically taken everything that Siegel and Shuster established and turned it completely around. Even with all it's chages, Silver Age Superman still stuck to the basic standards that S & S sat: that Superman is Superman first; that Clark Kent is a disguise and an act; and that Krypton itself represented the pinnacle of human accomplishment and it's loss was therefore a tragedy. Byrne got rid of all of that, and that's why the Post-Crisis Superman in my opinion is just another Superman-derived character like Supreme or the Sentry or Hyperion. He just happens to have the name and the costume.

But the All-Star Superman version is the real deal.

 

The thing is, Krypton was the pinnacle of human acomplishments. It was, for all intents and purposes, a perfect society. It was also very cold and arrogant. But really, that's the only way you could get such a utopia. The only way you can have a truely peacefull society is to have the emotions take a back seat to logic. That is the nature of people.

 

That's only one way to look at it. The 30's vision of a perfect future was a future with incredible accomplishment, but people still retained their humainity, for better and for worse. And S & S were aware of many different visions of the future, as both Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Fritz Lang's Metropolis influenced their work.

Byrne's Krypton was just hideous to look at, and I hated his costume designs. In fact, besides Alpha Flight and Count Nefaria's costume, I'm hard pressed to think of any Byrne costumes I like. The Hellfire Club I suppose.

 

You didn't like it because you didn't like his designs? That seems a bit much. Anyway, way I see it, Byrne's Krytpon was as close to a perfect society as what seems possible. And really, over seven billion people died. That's something to be mourned, weather you'd like to live there or not.