DC Relaunching AGAIN

[MikeandRaph87]

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/nigh...g-85-spoilers/
The headline made me snicker due to the period we are going through in media.

So is the longest will they/eon't they Bruce and Selina? Hal and Carol are in the running too.

[ZariusTwo]

It's getting ridiculous with Hal and Carol. Grant Morrison bigged up their connection a lot when he was promoting his run, but in the actual book, he just has Hal shack up with obscure girlfriends from prior runs and then has Carol make him 'wait' for another chance for reasons she long outgrew back when Geoff was writing the book.

With Dick/Babs, this is their first real meaningful romantic interaction since they broke off their engagement after Infinite Crisis. That's a long time, possibly a longer interval than it took for Peter and MJ to be reunited in the mainline Spider-Man comics...and assuming you don't want to count the Convergence series where the pre-flashpoint versions did get married

[MikeandRaph87]

Well, I loved Nightwing#85 and I really want to see a retro Bat book when it was just them. That flashback tease when Barbara got past Wayne Mansion security was exactly what I enjoy. I liked the issue more than anything since Tomasi's Detective Comics #1008 and #1009-1011 stories. I didn't even realize that IDW released a TMNT issue today.


Also, I was wondering...what issue number did Wally West take over the Flash title and is it worth a read?

[Leo656]

If you mean originally, like "originally" originally, it was in "Crisis on Infinite Earths". The final issue #12, specifically. But there's no point at all in reading just one issue of Crisis, and especially since Barry's death was a few issues earlier and that was the incident which led to Wally taking up the mantle in the first place. So you'd have to read the entire 12-issue series to even understand the story, anyway. And all Wally does in issue #12, essentially, is put on the suit and declare he'll carry on Barry's legacy. Not much more to it than that. That entire issue was basically just about setting up the new status quo for the new, now Multiverse-less DCU.

The entire series is obviously worth reading - anyone who likes DC really can't call themselves a "fan" if they never read Crisis - but not specifically just for things like that.

That transitioned directly into "The Flash #1" in 1986, which is where Wally's journey as Flash really began. So that's pretty simple. Flash (Vol. 2) #1.

If you're specifically looking for where he first dons the suit, Crisis #12. If you want to see where he actually gets to BE "The Flash" and do Flash things for more than a couple panels, Flash #1.

[ZariusTwo]

Mark Waid telling 'middle-aged' readers they're not the audience anymore

[sdp]

Originally Posted by ZariusTwo

Mark Waid telling 'middle-aged' readers they're not the audience anymore

For most industries this is a good thing, they want to keep the brand alive by having new blood. But in the case of comics that was the only audience they have left. I don't see any way comics can ever recover from being a small niche.

[Leo656]

Sales have been in the dumpster for a decade ever since everything went over $3 an issue, so naturally, what you wanna do is alienate the "middle-aged" comic book fans, who are 1. The only people who can read anything longer than a text message or Tweet, and 2. The only people who can afford to buy the books.

I've said this plenty of times: Mark Waid was one of the best Flash writers who ever lived, maybe THE best. But past that, he's a complete idiot and I don't like him.

EDIT: Oh, GOD, he's doing Superman again? BARF. He's TERRIBLE at writing Superman! What the actual f*ck.

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by sdp

For most industries this is a good thing, they want to keep the brand alive by having new blood. But in the case of comics that was the only audience they have left. I don't see any way comics can ever recover from being a small niche.

It's like the letter column of the new issues of Ninja Turtles. One fan bid the comic farewell realizing it had strayed from why he loved it while another by contrast took his place. This author joined with #99 and is enjoying what we are getting. Curnow was neutral as one fan's money was replaced by another. I would argue that the fan who joined with #99 will be temporary as the fan was a fan moreso of the controversial writing style of Campbell moreso than TMNT and the letter writer who said 'goodbye' had a son who he was discouraging from interest which would translate to future sales. This whole period we are in now like any other is driven by the almighty dollar. Its not sustainable.

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by Leo656

If you mean originally, like "originally" originally, it was in "Crisis on Infinite Earths". The final issue #12, specifically. But there's no point at all in reading just one issue of Crisis, and especially since Barry's death was a few issues earlier and that was the incident which led to Wally taking up the mantle in the first place. So you'd have to read the entire 12-issue series to even understand the story, anyway. And all Wally does in issue #12, essentially, is put on the suit and declare he'll carry on Barry's legacy. Not much more to it than that. That entire issue was basically just about setting up the new status quo for the new, now Multiverse-less DCU.

The entire series is obviously worth reading - anyone who likes DC really can't call themselves a "fan" if they never read Crisis - but not specifically just for things like that.

That transitioned directly into "The Flash #1" in 1986, which is where Wally's journey as Flash really began. So that's pretty simple. Flash (Vol. 2) #1.

If you're specifically looking for where he first dons the suit, Crisis #12. If you want to see where he actually gets to BE "The Flash" and do Flash things for more than a couple panels, Flash #1.

Oh, no. I know all the above full well. I mean in the current ongoing.

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by ZariusTwo

It's getting ridiculous with Hal and Carol. Grant Morrison bigged up their connection a lot when he was promoting his run, but in the actual book, he just has Hal shack up with obscure girlfriends from prior runs and then has Carol make him 'wait' for another chance for reasons she long outgrew back when Geoff was writing the book.

With Dick/Babs, this is their first real meaningful romantic interaction since they broke off their engagement after Infinite Crisis. That's a long time, possibly a longer interval than it took for Peter and MJ to be reunited in the mainline Spider-Man comics...and assuming you don't want to count the Convergence series where the pre-flashpoint versions did get married

Hal faced Cyborg Superman over Coast City in Green Lanterns#57 and immediately after the battle went to Carol. It was like after all this time finally, but the next appearance of Hal Jordan had suggested that Hal gave into his one fear, committement and had a one night stand in the middle of nature with a random blonde. It made no sense. I would have said Bruce and Selina, but while there was immediate attraction in Batman#1, Bruce let her go because he found her attractive tripping over Robin on purpose, it was not until 1978 when they were written as a couple on Earth-2 by Levitz and Wein did it start. By actually committing to his childhood sweetheart then Hal would have overcome great fear.

Barbara Gordon tried to help Dick after he was shot, but the denying who he was and writing off Bruce, Barbara, and Alferd and preferring to fool around with a bartender made no sense at all. I love the character interaction with both Bruce and Barbara. Bruce calling Dick after the announcement made me smile and then swooping in to fend off the battalion of robocops that lured Dick not wanting to lose his son in the place he lost his parents. I love his interactions with them. I would like to see Wally and Barbara interact based on their connection with Grayson to see how it would be.

Also, Barbara Gordon lost her first best friend when Supergirl was killed off. I guess that is lost and Black Canary is her new best friend? While Dick Grayson and Wally West have history prior its not until Mark Waid's run on The Flash that they are suddenly best friends?

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by MikeandRaph87

Hal faced Cyborg Superman over Coast City in Green Lanterns#57 and immediately after the battle went to Carol.

That was definitely GL Vol. 3, #46.

It was like after all this time finally, but the next appearance of Hal Jordan had suggested that Hal gave into his one fear, committement and had a one night stand in the middle of nature with a random blonde.

Wait, where are you getting that? What random blond?

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

That was definitely GL Vol. 3, #46.



Wait, where are you getting that? What random blond?

The Green Lantern Season One #1 by Grant Morrison.

GL vol.3#46? Interesting! He did go to her last in the Parallax: Final Night special.

[ZariusTwo]

Trans women are now welcome on Paradise Island

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dc-c...radise-island/

[MikeandRaph87]

This post is for Leo656, I understand that you define Superman from Man of Steel( 1986) to Superman's Return (1993-1994) about 7 years worth of material.

What is your take on Lex cloning himself after developing cancer and passing himself off as his own son for about 3 years? Also, what about The Matrix posing as Supergirl?

Also, I define Batman from 1967-1984 roughly Barbara Gordon's 1st appearance to Jason Todd becoming Robin. What is your take on my favorite comic run? It's roughly 17 years.

[Leo656]

Well, the easy one first. I was a big fan of Matrix Supergirl, in part because I was a big fan of DC's "No More Kryptonians" edict at that time. I liked how they managed to fit both a new Supergirl AND Superboy into the mythos, without having them be tied to their Silver Age incarnations. I was never a big fan of either the "Superman's Cousin" Supergirl or the "Young Clark" version of Superboy. The old Superby stories were corny as hell (and Clark as Superboy was a giant retcon anyway) and Kara Zor-El's character has frankly NEVER been all that interesting. I've gone on at length about it in the past, but Kara never had any identifiably personality in the past, and when they brought her back a few years ago the best they could do to give her one was make her an unlikeable, super-emo brat. And I didn't like that either.

But I was a huge, HUGE fan of the three-part "Supergirl Saga" which ended John Byrne's run, with Superman bringing Matrix back to our Earth from the Pocket Dimension. The early stories with Matrix being all brain-scrambled and having a mental link with Superman, to the point where she/it thought they WERE Clark at one point, were some really interesting stuff. Then when she came back to Earth during the "Panic in the Sky" storyline and picked up as Supergirl, that started a really cool run for the character. I always liked how hard they worked to really make her as different from Superman as possible, down to having a completely different power set and everything. It circumvented a ton of problems the Kara version always had, specifically being that she's really just Clark with a skirt. Matrix was much more of a unique character, despite her origin being more complicated (allegedly the reason she was written out and replaced with Kara back in 2004).

At first, I wasn't as much a fan of the whole bit where Matrix merged with Linda Danvers, but honestly that entire Peter David series was probably the single best Supergirl run of all time. They managed to introduce some of the old Silver Age mythology in a new and cool way, and having Matrix merge herself with someone else felt like a natural evolution for her/it, since as an artificial life form Matrix had always had some major existential crises going on anyway, so all the stuff about her journey to try and become a "real" person and obtain a human soul were supremely interesting.

So yeah, huge fan of Matrix Suprgirl, and she's always been my favorite version of the character (with the Matrix/Linda hybrid a close second). They did so much evolution with that character over more than 15 years, to the point where simply erasing her from ever existing and just replacing her with plain old Kara again felt like a huge, HUGE step backwards. I was open to it, but then the whole Emo Brat stuff mixed with the "Zor-El was secretly a bad guy and sent Kara to Earth to kill Kal" angle just ruined it for me. Especially when they couldn't even keep that straight and went back and forth on it every week. One week, Kara was sent to kill Kal... next week, it was false memories... next week, she WAS a sleep agent but had managed to "overcome her programming"... the week after that, it was all some Black Kryptonite hallucination... I'll be honest, I tapped out pretty early on all that. They really botched it.

Just like with Barry and Jason Todd, I never saw any Kara stories post-2004 that made me GLAD that she was brought back and kicked her replacement to the curb, because just like with Barry and Jason I thought their replacement character was much more interesting.
-------------

As for Lex being a clone and passing himself off as Lex Jr., I'll be honest it all came off a lot better than it probably sounds on paper. Lex was dying of cancer (brought on by his Kryptonite ring), and they needed a way out of that plotline, so they had him fake his death in a plane crash. Without Lex to keep Metropolis running, the city started falling apart until his "son" miraculously showed up to take the reigns and fix everything.

This was rather ingenious on Lex's part, because firstly, it created an environment where the people of Metropolis were suddenly more sympathetic to Lex than they'd ever been before, seeing as how once he was gone everything started to collapse. But furthermore, Lex Sr. was fairly well-known as a scumbag in spite of his public persona, so by passing himself off as his "son" he managed to get a fresh start and clean slate. He managed to fool everyone, even Superman, into thinking he was a super-nice guy with nothing but pure intentions, and this allowed him to operate unfettered. Previously, he always had someone keeping one eye on him, and whenever anything bad happened Lex was usually the first one under suspicion; by using the "Lex Jr." persona, he was able to remove all suspicion from himself and keep Superman or anyone else from hawking him. It was honestly pretty brilliant.

I liked it. It added a whole new dimension to the cat-and-mouse between Superman and Lex. It was a very "Lex" thing to do. And, when the time was right, it allowed him to re-emerge and claim anything evil he'd ever been linked to was really his "evil" clone, and in turn get ANOTHER clean slate (with nobody but Superman being aware as to what had really happened).

I had missed like a year's worth of Superman comics when all that was going on, so when I picked them back up again I was a little confused about the whole "Lex Jr." business, but it didn't take long to get caught up since his underlings were in on the scam and also his thought bubbles explained it frequently. So I think in like one or two issues I was all caught up on what was going on with that. I thought it was very creative.
-------------

Also, I do think the Superman books were pretty much at their BEST through '94 or so, but there were still a lot of good-to-great stories after that and through 2000 or 2001. After that it got spotty. But in the late-90s and early-2000s you still had some stuff like the Dominus plotline or the "King of the World" story that were very good. They lost a little momentum around 1994 but it's not like everything ground to a halt.
-------------

As far as the Batman stuff, it wasn't a bad run. I have some issues from back then; they're fine. It was definitely a better era for single-issue stories, but honestly I always find the 80s and 90s Batman stories to be far more memorable. The 70s were just too "conventional" for me; stuff like "Riddler robs a bank, Batman stops him, next issue it's The Penguin, rinse and repeat." They were written well enough but most of it was pretty "vanilla".

All my favorite pre-Crisis Batman stories are collected in the "Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told" trade paperback, as well as the "Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told" companion volume.

It's not like I outright dislike the Silver Age; it's just that I grew up in the Post-Crisis era when everything had a lot more depth and sophistication; even as a kid, everything Pre-Crisis just came off as super-simple and one-dimensional. Most of the DC comics before 1986 had only a little more depth than an episode of Super-Friends; I was much more intrigued by the stuff people like Byrne, Ordway, and Starlin were writing at the time.

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Well, the easy one first. I was a big fan of Matrix Supergirl, in part because I was a big fan of DC's "No More Kryptonians" edict at that time. I liked how they managed to fit both a new Supergirl AND Superboy into the mythos, without having them be tied to their Silver Age incarnations. I was never a big fan of either the "Superman's Cousin" Supergirl or the "Young Clark" version of Superboy. The old Superby stories were corny as hell (and Clark as Superboy was a giant retcon anyway) and Kara Zor-El's character has frankly NEVER been all that interesting. I've gone on at length about it in the past, but Kara never had any identifiably personality in the past, and when they brought her back a few years ago the best they could do to give her one was make her an unlikeable, super-emo brat. And I didn't like that either.

But I was a huge, HUGE fan of the three-part "Supergirl Saga" which ended John Byrne's run, with Superman bringing Matrix back to our Earth from the Pocket Dimension. The early stories with Matrix being all brain-scrambled and having a mental link with Superman, to the point where she/it thought they WERE Clark at one point, were some really interesting stuff. Then when she came back to Earth during the "Panic in the Sky" storyline and picked up as Supergirl, that started a really cool run for the character. I always liked how hard they worked to really make her as different from Superman as possible, down to having a completely different power set and everything. It circumvented a ton of problems the Kara version always had, specifically being that she's really just Clark with a skirt. Matrix was much more of a unique character, despite her origin being more complicated (allegedly the reason she was written out and replaced with Kara back in 2004).

At first, I wasn't as much a fan of the whole bit where Matrix merged with Linda Danvers, but honestly that entire Peter David series was probably the single best Supergirl run of all time. They managed to introduce some of the old Silver Age mythology in a new and cool way, and having Matrix merge herself with someone else felt like a natural evolution for her/it, since as an artificial life form Matrix had always had some major existential crises going on anyway, so all the stuff about her journey to try and become a "real" person and obtain a human soul were supremely interesting.

So yeah, huge fan of Matrix Suprgirl, and she's always been my favorite version of the character (with the Matrix/Linda hybrid a close second). They did so much evolution with that character over more than 15 years, to the point where simply erasing her from ever existing and just replacing her with plain old Kara again felt like a huge, HUGE step backwards. I was open to it, but then the whole Emo Brat stuff mixed with the "Zor-El was secretly a bad guy and sent Kara to Earth to kill Kal" angle just ruined it for me. Especially when they couldn't even keep that straight and went back and forth on it every week. One week, Kara was sent to kill Kal... next week, it was false memories... next week, she WAS a sleep agent but had managed to "overcome her programming"... the week after that, it was all some Black Kryptonite hallucination... I'll be honest, I tapped out pretty early on all that. They really botched it.

Just like with Barry and Jason Todd, I never saw any Kara stories post-2004 that made me GLAD that she was brought back and kicked her replacement to the curb, because just like with Barry and Jason I thought their replacement character was much more interesting.
-------------

As for Lex being a clone and passing himself off as Lex Jr., I'll be honest it all came off a lot better than it probably sounds on paper. Lex was dying of cancer (brought on by his Kryptonite ring), and they needed a way out of that plotline, so they had him fake his death in a plane crash. Without Lex to keep Metropolis running, the city started falling apart until his "son" miraculously showed up to take the reigns and fix everything.

This was rather ingenious on Lex's part, because firstly, it created an environment where the people of Metropolis were suddenly more sympathetic to Lex than they'd ever been before, seeing as how once he was gone everything started to collapse. But furthermore, Lex Sr. was fairly well-known as a scumbag in spite of his public persona, so by passing himself off as his "son" he managed to get a fresh start and clean slate. He managed to fool everyone, even Superman, into thinking he was a super-nice guy with nothing but pure intentions, and this allowed him to operate unfettered. Previously, he always had someone keeping one eye on him, and whenever anything bad happened Lex was usually the first one under suspicion; by using the "Lex Jr." persona, he was able to remove all suspicion from himself and keep Superman or anyone else from hawking him. It was honestly pretty brilliant.

I liked it. It added a whole new dimension to the cat-and-mouse between Superman and Lex. It was a very "Lex" thing to do. And, when the time was right, it allowed him to re-emerge and claim anything evil he'd ever been linked to was really his "evil" clone, and in turn get ANOTHER clean slate (with nobody but Superman being aware as to what had really happened).

I had missed like a year's worth of Superman comics when all that was going on, so when I picked them back up again I was a little confused about the whole "Lex Jr." business, but it didn't take long to get caught up since his underlings were in on the scam and also his thought bubbles explained it frequently. So I think in like one or two issues I was all caught up on what was going on with that. I thought it was very creative.
-------------

Also, I do think the Superman books were pretty much at their BEST through '94 or so, but there were still a lot of good-to-great stories after that and through 2000 or 2001. After that it got spotty. But in the late-90s and early-2000s you still had some stuff like the Dominus plotline or the "King of the World" story that were very good. They lost a little momentum around 1994 but it's not like everything ground to a halt.
-------------

As far as the Batman stuff, it wasn't a bad run. I have some issues from back then; they're fine. It was definitely a better era for single-issue stories, but honestly I always find the 80s and 90s Batman stories to be far more memorable. The 70s were just too "conventional" for me; stuff like "Riddler robs a bank, Batman stops him, next issue it's The Penguin, rinse and repeat." They were written well enough but most of it was pretty "vanilla".

All my favorite pre-Crisis Batman stories are collected in the "Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told" trade paperback, as well as the "Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told" companion volume.

It's not like I outright dislike the Silver Age; it's just that I grew up in the Post-Crisis era when everything had a lot more depth and sophistication; even as a kid, everything Pre-Crisis just came off as super-simple and one-dimensional. Most of the DC comics before 1986 had only a little more depth than an episode of Super-Friends; I was much more intrigued by the stuff people like Byrne, Ordway, and Starlin were writing at the time.

Obviously, I only know the cliff notes version of the whole Death and Return of Superman opposed to having read it from the first page to the last. It's just too big to know every bit unless you are a collector of Superman comics in particular. My investment came in the destruction of Coast City so as an outsider I saw Mongul as the big bad who used the new villain on the block Cyborg Superman. I would not have guessed it was the other way around. That can be a problem for those who are picking up Green Lantern: Rebirth and such things are referenced.

I wanted to pick out the Lex cancer/passing himself off as his own son when he is in a cloned body thing and The Matrix as Supergirl because both look like convoluted messes to an outsider. I was curious of your perspectives on them. I still prefer the pre-crisis Supergirl. I assume the one we have had since 2004 is meant to be her? It feels more like the third interpretation of the second most known Superman family member. Barbara Gordon lost her best friend. Casually Comics, the same channel that will cover Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow has a few videos of the original Supergirl that might interest you. Like Barry or Hal in your words I guess you could call her 'vanilla'. Hal overcame his 'vanilla' status and became what I like to think of as Maverick meets Obi Wan. All it took was Emerald Twilight and a decade wait. Though it looks like around Action Comics Weekly roots of what we would know Hal as were seen.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...mics+supergirl

A solid majority of my favorite Batman stories come from the late 60s through the early 80s'. I like it being just Bruce, Dick, and Barbara. The Batman: The Animated Series inspiration was largely from this period as well. Heck, I want a book dedicated to this period. Not Bruce by himself like Legends of the Dark Knight, but the three of them. So many excellent stories did not need to be supposed epics with consequences like every single run is now. 'Where Were You The Night Batman was Killed?' in Batman#291-#294, 'The Laughing Fish' in Detective Comics#475-476, Six Days of The Scarecrow' in Detective Comics#503, 'The Lazarus Affair' from Batman#332-#335 among others. Complex and meaningful yet not endless epics with so many extended characters that I care nothing for. Denny O'Neil, Len Wein, and Steve Englehart are the porridge just right if you will.

[Leo656]

The entire Death, Funeral, and Return of Superman arc is collected in a measly three, easy-to-find TPBs.

There's no way to say it nicely, anyone by 2021 who hasn't read them has nothing to blame but sheer laziness, and considering how it's still considered one of the most seminal DC storylines ever published, it's a pretty inexcusable thing to have missed.

Absolutely anything in comics looks like a convoluted mess to anyone who hasn't read This or That. The easiest solution to that is always simply, "Just read the books; it's all in there."

[MikeandRaph87]

Originally Posted by Leo656

The entire Death, Funeral, and Return of Superman arc is collected in a measly three, easy-to-find TPBs.

There's no way to say it nicely, anyone by 2021 who hasn't read them has nothing to blame but sheer laziness, and considering how it's still considered one of the most seminal DC storylines ever published, it's a pretty inexcusable thing to have missed.

Absolutely anything in comics looks like a convoluted mess to anyone who hasn't read This or That. The easiest solution to that is always simply, "Just read the books; it's all in there."

Like I said, Superman is the best superhero ever and started the genre. I just prefer to read him in a team up book, not his own featured story. I guess I am just surprised at your disinterest in pre-crisis Superman since the late Silver Age/Bronze Age Batman is my definitive era of the central comic character I collect. I do understand the COIE-Zero Hour being your favorite in that you read it as a kid and was your introduction to the character and genre as a whole though.

Thoughts on The Long Halloween Special?

Spoiler:

I was not happy to see Commissioner Gordon refer to Barbara as his niece. Miller was crazy, he omitted Barbara deal with it post-crisis DC!
However, Barbara wanting to go trick or treating with Dick and Batman delivered 'as discussed' was fun. I love those two interacting! Also, Calendar Man being the featured villain upping his game was nice. Also getting closure on The Holiday Killer storyline. I am thankful that Loeb did pull a fast one and go along with the stupid twist from the film adaptation. It fits well!

[Leo656]

I dislike Pre-Crisis Superman because before Byrne came in and cleaned house, the character and his mythology had accumulated so many barnacles and flat-out bad stories that the Superman character essentially necessitated "Crisis" all by himself. Thus it's no wonder why out of all the heroes who had their histories and characters "fixed" by Crisis, Superman arguably had more changes made than anyone else, except maybe Wonder Woman.

Everything people who hate Superman cite as reasons Why they hate him and his mythos, are all relics of the Pre-Crisis era.
- Impossible power-levels with no reasonable limits.
- Writers just making up new powers to Deus Ex Machina their way out of a story.
- Being a dick to Lois, up to and including ever-more-convoluted lies to protect his identity.
- Kal-El having come out of the womb fully-powered. Dumb.
- Clark having already had a decade-long career as Superboy before ever relocating to Metropolis.
- More and more Kryptonians being revealed to have somehow survived Krypton's destruction, to the point where as one '80s-era writer described it, "It seemed as though the only people who REALLY died on Krypton were Kal-El's parents and a few of their closest friends and neighbors." Everyone else miraculously survived and made their way to Earth as a super-villain. Dumb.
- Every idiot on Earth can just walk to any creek or lake bed and miraculously find some Kryptonite.
- Perhaps the biggest problem, the writers writing it so that "Superman" was the Real Guy and Clark was just a disguise. Despite the fact that this guy grew up and lived a whole life as "Clark Kent"; the idea that he's "Superman" in his thought balloons is laughable.

And so on. Now, there WERE admittedly some half-hearted attempts to rectify some of this, in the late-70s and early-80s. Like the story where a Superman doppelganger siphoned off half of Superman's powers, for example. But most of it didn't stick, including that.

The way Byrne (and later Jurgens) presented the character and the mythos was, to me, the "proper" and most fully-formed depiction. It erased all of the nonsense and got things more "back to basics". No other Kryptonians, period. No more "infinite" power levels or convenient plot-device super-powers; he can do what he can do and that's ALL he can do. No more "he was born fully-powered" nonsense (that baby would have murdered literally everybody, before he was even a year old; some things are too ridiculous to even give the time of day, and "Super-Baby" is one of them). No Clark as Superboy. No more constantly lying to Lois, and allowing him to just tell her the truth outright once their relationship got serious. And of course, Clark thinking of himself as "Clark" - who he's always been - rather than either his made-up super-hero name, or his "dead name" which nobody who's living had ever even called him by.

Byrne took a paper-thin, one-dimensional cartoon character with ridiculously over-inflated powers, and made him a person. For the first time. By imposing limits on his powers and determining that Clark would now think and act the way actual human beings think and and behave, the entire character became more interesting than he'd ever been.

Which isn't to say there are NO good Pre-Crisis Superman stories. There are a handful, most of them written after 1975. Even before Byrne, SOME writers were still trying to do some minor clean-up on the character; as I mentioned, though, it wasn't until Byrne that those attempts were more widespread and made to last.

It's not like I wasn't exposed to Pre-Crisis stuff when I was a kid; I went to comic book stores with my Dad often, and I'd pick up whatever Superman back issues they had available. I also picked up TPBs, which were less common back then. But even AS a kid, the older Superman stuff just really did not play well with me at all. It was all very clearly, very obviously written for readers at, at best, a third-grade level; anyone older than that, I'd think, would find those stories insipid. I was always more interested in seeing the modern comics adapt some of those older concepts, and do them better.

I mean, even the "Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told" TPB I grew up reading was little more than a neat curiosity book, to me. I'd argue that 90% of the stories in it aren't even especially "good"; rather, they're more "historically-relevant" than anything - first Luthor story, first Bizarro appearance, and things like that. Then in the 70s era, things actually got "passable", and then in the 80s "Actually Good".

But to be blunt, if anyone ever said, "Superman was way better before John Byrne revamped him," I'd flat-out accuse that person of being on serious drugs. Or jut plain having no taste. The character and his stories could ONLY be considered "better", pre-Crisis, if a person really, REALLY just prefers that super-hero stories be strictly for very young children and no one else. Because just about nobody else could reasonably have gotten any satisfaction out of a Superman comic book printed earlier than 1986.

I do collect issues and TPBs of the character from the Pre-Crisis era, as I'm something of an historian for the character. And I appreciate them, sort of, for what they contributed to the mythos and the longevity of the character. But I don't actually get any great joy out of reading them. They're silly. Very, very, very silly.
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I don't have any strong feelings on The Long Halloween. It's... fine. I never liked the twist reveal that Harvey's wife was one of the killers; I know that very little time had ever been spent on his wife as a character, but there'd ALSO never been any hint that she was a psychotic murderer, either. And as far as I know, nothing of note was done with her character after that, so it just seemed like a shock value twist with no ultimate payoff.

I also feel like the story is too long; I get the conceit, "Twelve months in a year, twelve issues in the series", but very much of it feels like padding. It's a "mystery" that takes forever to reach its conclusion, and said "conclusion" is an ass-pull retcon that nobody reading the story could have reasonably deduced for themselves, thereby making the "mystery" and its reveal a cheat.

And, I feel like if you don't absolutely LOVE Tim Sale's art - which I don't; he's okay, too stylized for my tastes - that the entire story loses much of its appeal.

It's fine, I own the TPB. I just don't have any real strong opinions about it. Everyone always declared it a masterpiece, and I just always sort of shrug at that. It's Just Okay, to me.

I also haven't seen the movie and really don't have any strong urge to do so.

[MikeandRaph87]

I think all of that can be summed up as a maturity in the writing. Before Man of Steel mini it was little seen. Even the stuff I pointed out as convoluted messes you have pointed out are all explained in-story.

Still the 70's Bat is where it's at.

I prefer Dark Victory to Long Halloween but love them both. Some of my favorite overall not just post-crisis.

Did anyone pick up Aquaman/Green Arrow: Deep Target?