Shortly before I moved out of Houston in 1987, I bought a dinged discount copy of Superman #12. I'd seen John Byrne's Man of Steel mini-series packed together as a set at the Circus World toy store, and thumbed through the early issues of the relaunch at mall bookstores, but it hadn't quite convinced me. I really enjoyed "Lost Love", and convenience stores in Vegas were much more likely to stock DC than back home. Not only did I managed to pick the book back up an issue or two later, but I also bought all the Millennium tie-ins that I could afford to broadly sample the Post-Crisis DC Universe. For a good half year or so, Superman was my favorite comics character, rekindling the love I had for the Last Son of Krypton from my earliest years, before reading actual period Superman comics put me off. For some reason, I hit a wall with Superman #19. Maybe it was the throwback Jerry Ordway cover, or the corny mad scientist in a mech, or the John Beatty inks? I've never found Byrne to be a substantial writer, and I was getting a lot of him in a short period of time. By whatever cause, I just couldn't take that issue off the rack and take it to the register, and I specifically remember seeing it on that spinner racks for multiple weeks. The overloaded but lightweight Action Comics #600 didn't help, nor did the Mike Mignola fill-in, or the abandonment of the team-up format in favor of the pricey proposition of the extra-length anthology Action Comics Weekly ("weakly.")
Eventually, we moved back to Texas, so accessibility became an issue again, but interest even more so. I still sought out Justice League International, but my other DC books fell away. Invasion! was not a draw. Toward the end of '89, I dropped JLI. A year later, Marvel was giving me Art Adams' new Fantastic Four, Tex's Ghost Rider, Peter David & Dale Keown on Hulk, Liefeld New Mutants, Starlin & Lim Silver Surfer with a resurrected Thanos, McFarlane Spider-Man, and Lee X-Men. DC wasn't even a consideration against that heat. But things started to change in 1991. The X-Men relaunch didn't hit right, with Claremont forced out, and neither did X-Force. Infinity Gauntlet got repetitive fast, especially once Perez wasn't there to dazzle. McFarlane was never that big a deal to me, but his leaving Spidey to Erik Larsen took my slim consideration with him. Barry Windsor Smith's Weapon-X serial looked gorgeous, but I was contended to read my brother's copies, befuddled. That also fed into boredom with Hama and Silvestri trying to undermine it in Wolverine's solo title. At least Portacio was moving onto Uncanny X-Men, and X-Factor stayed interesting for a different reason under David & Stroman. DC finally had some cracks to fill, including a return to JLI for what ended up being a fairly tedious "Breakdowns."
Ahh, but Tom Grummett and Al Vey blew my hair back on the (swiftly, brutally, sun bleached) New Titans #78 I'd picked up at B. Dalton. It was actually a refractory issue, but since I'd missed the first seven parts of "Titans Hunt," I needed that breather to figure out what all I'd missed. I was swiftly swept up into what would become the Team Titans, which helped fuel my interest in the Armageddon 2001 annuals, which were mostly quite good proto-Elseworlds/What If...? I'd been checking out little bro's !mpact purchases, and getting into The Sandman, which leveled-up my reading interests overall. In 1992, Marvel couldn't keep any hot artists on their books, and their editorial-dominated approach drove off the good writers. Image made exciting looking product, when they could be bothered to publish it, but they read dumb as rocks. I was sampling every publisher under the sun, but it was the DC stuff that was satisfying me the most.
I stood in a line out the door at an unfamiliar comic shop the woman I was living with had driven us to because we both wanted a copy of Superman #75 the day of release. I didn't believe that they would permanently do Superman in, but it became a cultural moment that broke out among the general public. I even wore the black armband to my actual regular comic source to get my pre-ordered copy, and little else, because he refused to sell me any comics before I bought the Sandman t-shirt that had also come in that week. Thinking of that makes me less sorry about whatever stock he got stuck with after we moved to Colorado, because I was not an unreliable customer who deserved to be treated like that. He'd have gotten his stupid $15 the next week. Anyway, beyond the spectacle, the actual comic was stupid punch-face, so I skipped the cheap emotional manipulation of "Funeral for a Friend."
I was never sorry that I committed to "Reign of the Superman," because it was a cool story overall, and I fell hard for John Henry Irons. I did regret "Knightfall," mostly jumping off with Batman #500, yet failing to learn my lesson by returning for "Knightsend." I did another big DC sampling with the Bloodlines annuals, and kept up with Ennis/McCrea The Demon because of it. Got sucked into Wonder Woman in a big way around this time. The Titans books were really starting to falter though, and I was completely disinterested in Justice League stuff after the departure of Giffen & DeMatteis. I maybe stuck with the returned Superman for a couple months, as the weekly triangle era forced you into buying four (soon five) titles, none of which were interesting to me with the restored, staid status quo.
Despite that general respite, I became a bigger DC fan throughout the rest of the nineties, which compelled me to pick up individual Superman comics over those years. I rarely enjoyed them, and came to resent the tyranny of those triangle numbers. Things picked up in the early aughts, mostly on the art front, but I've never been able to invest in the Man of Tomorrow in the same way again. After years of a super-duper, super-dull Superman Pre-Crisis, I welcomed the more grounded "Marvelized" Byrne take. But I also found that it had it's day, and the hero was made too mundane within the confines of a shared universe and comics by committee. He hasn't been super enough for me in going on forty years now. A lot of what made him super to me was his tragedy-- his ironic fragility, which he divested and Martian Manhunter inherited. That's why J'Onn's the subject of my 19 year old blog, instead.
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