MAN OF STEEL #1-6 (1986)

IN HONOR OF JOHN BYRNE’S BIRTHDAY, I’M POSTING A DAY OF REVIEWS OF HIS CLASSIC SUPERMAN WORK TODAY!

When I was a lad, my parents bought me a phonebook-sized collection of Golden Age Superman books. It was awesome. But other than that, I remained mostly a Marvel guy. My exposure to Superman was either in the pages of JLA or Christopher Reeve’s movie version.

Then came John Byrne’s reinvention of the world’s first superhero. At a time when Superman had gotten stale, and far too powerful, DC realized they needed a reboot.

He started with “Man of Steel,” a six-issue mini that “reintroduced” the character after Marv Wolfman “collapsed” the DCU in Crisis on Infinite Earths.  It retold and modernized the origin and early years, but it wasn’t a full reboot.  It was more of a tweak.

MoS was the first Superman comic I bought religiously–and it was mostly because Byrne was my favorite writer/artist at the time. He’s still in my top 10.

But when you’re dealing with classic source material that is both familiar to and beloved by generations of readers, you don’t want to change too much. You want to see the classics…

At the same time, Byrne’s vision has lots of “big” drama and reads like a Richard Donner movie.  But that kind of tone is perfect for a Superman book.

Even Luthor looked like movie Luthor, a bit.

Like, he had hair.

He goes bald by the time Byrne moves out of this miniseries and starts writing both Superman and Action, though.

Bizarro in the John Byrne world isn’t nearly as much fun.  He’s actually a complex bacteria.

MoS also played with some of DC’s other characters…

This was a ballsy move, turning Batman into a creepy a$$hole.  This was the Batman of Frank Miller, not the Batman of the past. This further reflected DC’s attempts to modernize their universe.

The miniseries ended with the classic pose…

From here, DC handed over the reins to John Byrne of both Superman and the longest-running comic book of all time, Action Comics.  A third Superman book, Adventures of Superman, by Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway, fit in with Byrne’s continuity but wasn’t nearly as good.  I know, because for some reason my “Man of Steel” trade books include the Wolfman/Ordway issues with Byrne’s.  I guess it’s so that they could ship seven volumes of them, knowing that the real reason people are buying them is for Byrne.

Anyway, we’ll keep it going from here to Superman/Action.  I’ll be skipping the non-Byrne Adventures of Superman stuff.  It just doesn’t interest me.