Superman Treasury 2025: Hero for All

Dan Jurgens draws eight pages of his second treasury format Superman comic, having written and laid-out the entirety of 1999's Superman / Fantastic Four (with deeply compromised finished art by Art Thibert.) It's inked by Brett Breeding, and while the continuity is garbled by some lousy Rebirth-period flourishes, it is mostly a testament to the 1990s "triangle number" era. Anyone who read the books in the period surrounding "Reign of the Supermen" would be forgiven for feeling nostalgic. There's been online discourse since Standards Manual's rerelease of the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide that other artists draw a version of Superman, but only José Luis García-López draws Superman. That's particularly fair if you grew up with the Christopher Reeve movies and surrounding merchandise, but García-López rarely provided complete art for Superman stories-- mostly just the early issues of DC Comics Presents. Jurgens came up in the late Bronze Age, shared influences with García-López, and produced interior and cover art for nearly a hundred Superman comics. Jurgens was likely the closest fans ever got to a more substantial García-López run, which may help to explain why he was to many the Superman artist of his generation.

At least, that's how I can best rationalize it, because man, I am never going to "get" the appeal of Dan Jurgens to those people. To me, he'll always be a technically proficient journeyman, who was never the most appealing or interesting artist drawing Superman at any given point. He succeeded Jerry Ordway on Adventures of Superman in 1989, working alongside Kerry Gammill on Superman. A few months in, George Pérez returned Superman to Action Comics, when it was reclaimed from the experimental weekly anthology format. By 1992, Jurgens had taken over the core Superman title, but Tom Grummett had replaced him on Adventures, while Jon Bogdanove had launched Superman: The Man of Steel. I would favor every one of those artists on any given book over Jurgens. I've liked a few Superman stories written by Jurgens, but on a monthly basis, I usually preferred other writers as well (though he had good runs of The Mighty Thor and Tomb Raider.) And yet, DC always runs back to Dan Jurgens when they've had a "come to Jesus" moment in screwing up the Man of Steel... like when they killed off the New 52 incarnation and replaced him with Jurgens' Superman: Lois and Clark version, which gave us their son, Jon Kent.

I thumbed through the new treasury, otherwise drawn by Bruno Redondo, out of curiosity. Obviously this was put together to exploit enthusiasm for the 2025 Superman movie, as well as readers "of a certain age" with the disposable income to pay the premium on a publication format largely abandoned since the 1970s. I do like Redondo's art, as well as the coloring of Adriano Lucas, which often digitally replaces solid blacks with more animation-style cel coloring. Having come up in the Bronze and Chromium Ages, I've been spoiled by a level of rendered detail never before or since seen in comic book art, which could make the most of being printed at near to the scale of the original art board. I'm not even confident that the art in this book has a physical manifestation beyond the printed edition, and while attractive, the colors have a better claim of making use of the treasury dimensions than the line art. So if it's not an art book, that leaves it up to the story to justify the indulgent scale. This is a Dan Jurgens script. The odds were never in its favor.

The whole reason that I was primed to write this post was because I saw a lot of Martian Manhunter action in this book during that toss. I stopped partway through, once I'd committed to reading the thing. So of course, that stopping point for me was also more or less the stopping point for the Manhunter from Mars in the story.

A giant robot attacks Metropolis, prompting an evacuation of the city. Ma and Pa Kent are tasked with taking a still-adolescent Jon Kent out of town. I assumed that meant the story took place before Brian Michael Bendis squatted down to release his "embellishments" on Superman lore, but that crap was referenced later in the all-Jurgens sections. For all I know, they've de-aged Jon Kent in recent months. I gave up on following DC continuity a year or two into the New 52, so finer points like that would be lost on me. Superman has a surprisingly easy time taking out the robot, and then we're randomly(?) presented with a Smallville flashback deploying Ben Day dots. We see Pa Kent die in a tornado, ala Snyder's Man of Steel, and it occurred to me that the guy I saw with Ma earlier had a bit of Dale Gribble about him. Maybe she caught another feller as a widow in the modern(ish?) continuity? The '90s stunt implant Kenny Braverman was present in the flashback, as was young ginger Lex Luthor, which I'm aware was a Silver Age element returned to continuity in the Birthright mini-series (bought cheap used; yet to read.) A young adult Luthor was present for another flashback.

At the in-story present, alien invaders destroy the JLA... satellite? Watchtower? I don't know what they're calling it these days. Both Superman and Batman are initially missing from the action, but fellow super-heroes step up to defend a variety of global flashpoints in the invasion. This would be "the Martian Manhunter part." The actual invaders were semi-generic anime mech troopers in pale orange and green. They're like a very boring redesign of parademons. As best as I can tell, their main advantage is taking out Earth's communication technology. The Alien Atlas appears to battle the baddies on the Golden Gate bridge, and he is treated as the key to uniting Earth's metahuman protectors, via a massive telepathic network. There's also lots of token appearances by members of the JLA, JLI, Teen Titans, etc. A big deal is made out of Aquaman delivering the U.S. President and Congress to safety underwater, as though that was a relevant and beneficial action to the world order of 2025. Positively provincial.

As anyone familiar with how Martian Manhunter appearances in Superman comics go, J'Obber J'Onzz's off-panel defeat at the invaders' hands marks the end of the world's effective resistance to the aliens. It is here that the ultimate threat is finally revealed... Lady Maxima! And... um... the Cyborg Superman? See-- Dan Jurgens created Hank Henshaw as an analog for Reed Richards, who had to watch his astronaut family slowly die from horific deformities similar to those of the Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and The Thing. Instead of elasticity, Mr. Fauxtastic merged with machinery, which is how he survived. Using genetic material from Superman, he grew a partial clone body, with compensatory cybernetic elements. I don't know that it was ever explained why he couldn't clone a whole-ass Superman body, or at least doctor-up a completely human face, instead of looking like a T-800 Terminator wearing 9/10ths of a Superman body. The Cyborg Superman has been destroyed many times, but always seems to return to this SuperMetallo form. He was of course one of the ersatz Supermen during "Reign," was in at least one of the Doomsday revival mini-series Jurgens did, and was even a big part of Superman / Fantastic Four, owing to his being a Reed Richards rip-off. In this context though, he's only here as a life-sized "marital aid" for an alien queen who could never seal the deal with her Man of Steel.

Maxima's purpose here was to punish Superman for choosing Lois Lane over her, and making a baby with her. Now, Maxima was killed off in the 2001 Superman event "Our Worlds at War," but a revamped version arrived three years into the New 52, and then more or less reverted to a more faithful version in 2017. Jon Kent debuted as a decade-old in 2015, and was up-aged to 17 to serve as Superman's replacement a few years later. All this is to say, it's a bit rich that Maxima would react this strongly to a long-elapsed, rarely/never-expressed grudge from multiple continuities ago. While powerful, Maxima never seemed to work at this scale before, and I'd guess her usage as the villain was in honor of the still-tender passing of her co-creator, George Pérez. But also, Maxima was a member of the version of the Justice League that Dan Jurgens wrote, and Cyborg Superman is one of his pet creations, so... this.

Batman shows up mostly to prevent the killing/capture of Lois Lane, and to explain who Maxima and Cyborg Superman are to Superman's life partner. Some alien albino gal named Glyanna shows up to prevent the killing/capture of Jon Kent. Except that character was created in 2023, and Jon is back to being a boy, so I don't get this continuity. I do get the Ben Day dot "flashbacks" where Clark Kent never developed powers, became editor-in-chief of The Daily Planet, but watched Lois Lane become the twice-over babymama of Lex Luthor. See, this is Jurgens ripping off "For the Man Who Has Everything," badly, and never explaining why an illusion meant to placate a captive Superman (who never actually escaped from the giant robot's trap-body) instead catalyzed his jailbreak. Just as it's never explained how a couple of second-tier Superman villains and random alien invaders defeated all the metahumans, although somehow Steel and armored Lex Luthor have among the best showings of anyone. Simply, the key explanation is that Dan Jurgens was rarely a notable writer, and got by on telling Superman fans that theirs was the bestest boy! That's what we have here, yet again.

I didn't go wild for the James Gunn Superman movie, because it was a sloppy mess of comedy bits and fan service that crowded a post-1986 version of Superman that I've never fully embraced out of his own eponymous movie. I had the opposite reaction here, of loathing the Jurgens-era SuperDuperMan who rendered the entire DC Universe as mere supporting players in his stories. I know this will always be J'Onn J'Onzz's role, especially in Superman stories, but giving the business to Wonder Woman and other God-tier DC heroes is part of why I hated Superman events during the Triangle Number Era. I don't feel like most modern writers can tell compelling Superman stories, and there's a subset that try to make up for it by elevating Superman so far above his peers that every other hero may as well be Jimmy Olsen. Any time I feel bad for the contempt I hold against Dan Jurgens, I recall lame, derivative, condescending mediocrities like this, and feel validated in my decades of disdain.