The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition variant cover by Ivan Reis

I still count the arrival of 1992's Superman #75 as part of my "childhood," but it's on that same sliding subjective scale of whether you consider Brett Kavanaugh an attempted rapist or just a "curious youth."* I'm basically declaring that I've touched base in a schoolyard game with my own mortality, pretending that any monumental date now three decades past doesn't mean I had to sidestep an open grave to get there. It's a little lie that I can still tell myself, though even I'm incredulous at the assertion. I officially stopped living anywhere but Texas past this point, and the anniversary is twice over any legal shielding for a felony here, plus the years needed to acutely recall the period. I am one of the olds, or in Ethan Hawke terms, “I’ve definitely made the turn from being an old young person to being a young old person.”

So anyway, I read a Newsarama article** that's clearly an unproofed first draft paraphrasing of DC's press release for the Generation X equivalent of a catalog relist for a story that wasn't that great in the first place. "The Death of Superman" was a morbid cash grab stunt that partially works as an indictment of the practice, with its threadbare story inching we(a)ekly toward an all splash page dudebro punch-out. What was supposed to be a reminder that DC was still around while drowning in Chromium Age excess got picked up by the media as the four color equivalent of the JFK assassination at the peak moment of comic book penetration of every urban and suburban area. Even then I was too jaded to fully buy in, but the hype was enough that the shady lady I was living with insisted that we travel to one of the many neighborhood comic shops to stand in line to buy a copy each of Superman #75. Quantities were limited, and I think we had to drive to Deer Park to find a shop that still had copies available to the public. When I caught a ride with my parents to go to the flea market where I had my pull box that Saturday, I was wearing the black armband. Unfortunately, the guy who ran the booth insisted that I buy my newly arrived Kelly Jones Sandman t-shirt before I got any comics, so I only had enough money for that and a spare copy of Superman #75 that I would soon trade in for store credit anyway (probably about $8 worth. Put me through college.)

I bring all this up because guys like Dan Jurgens (who takes a Stan Lee-sized portion of the credit for Jerry Ordway's tongue-in-cheek recurring suggestion at plotting sessions) love to tell you how many new readers this thing brought in, despite sales going off a cliff within two years and getting progressively worse with little abatement ever since. I'll admit that editorial and creative recognized the rising tide and offered the highly regarded "Funeral for a Friend" in the aftermath, but for many of us, Superman #75 was mostly a collection of pin-ups in a week starved for actual story. Also, the featured cover reminds readers that the Jurgens-created Bloodwynd was a separate character, despite Jurgens' own inadequate storytelling often leading online resources to assume they're one-in-the-same to this day. Also, despite my cynicism, I'm totally going to buy this stupid thing, if only to see Jon Bogdanove illustrate John Henry Irons again.

* It's academic because he's still sexually violating women with the full weight of the "Supreme" Court today. Go have a good cry at a Landry's steakhouse if you don't want to hear about it. You can't boycott what has only ever cost me money to begin with, and Martian Manhunter's story is about championing justice on this earth.

** I quit Comic Book Resources when they were forcing people to whitelist them to see articles, and stayed away because of their penchant for spoiler headlines. Newsarama is very lame, but the visual aesthetic is jazzier than The Beat and I don't go down any editorial rabbitholes, aside from mocking their moldy reheated listicles.

*** After nearly a quarter century of blogging, I still can't spell "separate" without spellcheck. Is it my accent?