THE MAN OF STEEL #1 – 6

”FROM OUT OF THE GREEN DAWN” | “THE STORY OF THE CENTURY!”
“ONE NIGHT IN GOTHAM CITY”
“ENEMY MINE…” | “THE MIRROR, CRACK’D” | “THE HAUNTING”
Writer/Penciler: John Byrne | Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: John Costanza | Colorist: Tom Ziuko | Editor: Andrew Helfer

The Plot: As the planet Krypton self-destructs, a scientist named Jor-El sends his embryonic son, Kal-El, to Earth in a rocket. Eighteen years later, Kal-El is Clark Kent, all-star quarterback for Smallville High School’s football team endowed with secret superhuman abilities. When his parents, Jonathan and Martha, reveal to Clark that they found him in the rocket, crashed in their corn field, Clark decides to use his powers for the good of mankind. He spends seven years secretly stopping natural disasters and saving people when he can, but when an experimental space plane nearly crashes in the city of Metropolis, Clark is forced into action in public. Soon after, at the suggestion of his parents, he adopts the costumed identity of Superman in order to act in the public eye.

Subsequently, Superman meets Lois Lane while Clark gets a job at the Daily Planet newspaper. Eight months later, he responds to reports of a dangerous vigilante in Gotham City and has his first encounter with the Batman as the pair teams up to take down an eccentric villainess named Magpie. Batman and Superman part not as friends, but with a grudging respect for one another.

Ten months pass and Superman meets Lex Luthor when he thwarts a hijacking of the billionaire’s yacht during a massive party. But when Luthor is implicated in the terror attack, the mayor of Metropolis deputizes Superman and Luthor is arrested. Two years pass and, following numerous unsuccessful attempts on Superman’s life, Luthor creates a bizarre clone of him which proves the Man of Steel’s toughest challenge yet — but in the end, Superman prevails.

Later, while visiting his parents in Smallville, Clark receives a holographic visit from Jor-El, who reveals to Clark that he is not, as he had long believed, a human launched into space as an infant, but an alien being. By way of this revelation, Jor-El instills in Clark's brain the full history and culture of Krypton.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Well… this is the first Superman story following DC’s 1985-86 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS event, which resulted in the rebooting (to various extents depending on character and title) of their universe. As a result, John Byrne retells Superman’s origin for a new era, jettisoning much of the character’s Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age baggage in the process. Gone (for now) are Supergirl, Krypto, the City of Kandor, and anything else that could dilute Superman’s status as the true sole survivor of Krypton.

Krypton itself is changed to a sterile planet of dispassionate people. Lex Luthor is altered as well, via a suggestion from Marv Wolfman that he be reinvented as the world’s richest man. Byrne’s darker, grittier version of Batman here is owed to Frank Miller’s contemporaneous reboot in BATMAN: YEAR ONE. Much of this stuff would go on to influence depictions of Superman in other media for years to come.

The series finale reveals that Clark shared his secret identity with his high school girlfriend, Lana Lang, before he left Smallville. Also in that issue, we see that the rocket which brought Clark to Earth is missing from the spot where Jonathan had stored it.

In timeline news, as noted above, seven years pass between eighteen year-old Clark departing Smallville and making his public debut as Superman. Then near the end of the series, Lois notes that Superman has been in action for five years — which should make our hero roughly thirty years of age as MAN OF STEEL concludes -- however there are two references in the final chapter to it having been twenty-eight issues since Clark was born in the cornfield. Personally, I’ll stick with the thirty-year timeline for my own preference. A Superman younger than thirty just feels wrong somehow.

My Thoughts: I’ll state now and for the record that this is my favorite iteration of Superman. I've owned THE MAN OF STEEL since I was a child, when it was released in trade paperback not by DC Comics, but by Warner Books, and my copy is about as dog-eared and battered as a book can be from countless readings (yet somehow I never bothered to check out any of Byrne's subsequent work on the character until now). But beyond that, this Superman is the Superman I grew up with in other media. Billionaire Luthor was in the Ruby-Spears SUPERMAN cartoon from 1988. Clark used to go home to chat with his living parents all the time on LOIS AND CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN. Heck, SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED series, while drawing inspiration from many parts of Superman's history, pretty clearly uses the Byrne era as its main template for characterization, continuity, tone and style.

So, though I've never really read any Superman stuff past THE MAN OF STEEL, I nonetheless consider it the definitive Superman "bible". I like Superman as the honest-to-gosh Last Son of Krypton, I like Lex Luthor way more as a billionaire than as a mad scientist, I love Byrne’s very minor tweaks to Superman’s costume (mainly the much larger “S” on his chest), and I love that both of his adoptive parents are still alive for him to confide in.

Now, moving along to a look at the actual series: Byrne has said before that when he signed up with DC to revamp Superman, he had thought he’d be writing the character’s career from the start, showing him learning the ropes, making his journey slowly from unknown rookie to established, beloved superhero. What he didn’t realize until afterward, however, was that DC intended all of that to happen in a single six-issue mini-series before jumping into the ongoing books with a fully formed Superman. Thus we have THE MAN OF STEEL, in which twelve (!) years pass between the first and final installments (though the initial seven year jump is pre-Superman, entirely in the first issue).

Given the constraints of what he has to do and the limited space in which to do it, Byrne does a pretty good job here. Superman appears and eight months later, we’re told Metropolis is virtually crime-free. We get a tease of Lex Luthor in issue 2, but he leaves for South America for over a year, thus delaying his first meeting with Superman until issue 4, a couple years into our hero’s career. We’re then told that Luthor has been making attempts on Superman’s life for two more years, but that Bizarro is the first threat rivaling his own power that the Man of Steel has ever faced.

As a result, it’s pretty easy to fill in the blanks. For five years, Superman has most likely spent his time battling natural disasters and fighting common criminals — a career akin to the old ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN TV series from the fifties, which Byrne has cited as one of his major influences with regards to the character. (Byrne’s Clark Kent owes a lot to that version, at the least — he plays himself off as “mild mannered”, but he’s also a tough reporter, not afraid to stand up to bad guys when the situation warrants. As with his Superman, Byrne’s Clark is also my favorite. I can’t stand the version everyone laughs at as a wimp and a coward, who disappears at the first sign of trouble. Clark Kent, Hard-Boiled Reporter of Action, is, in my opinion, always the best way to play the character.)

I should also call out Byrne’s scripting here. This is possibly the most naturalistic writing I’ve ever seen from him. Dialogue is sharp and snappy, and overblown narration is kept to a minimum (indeed, there are barely any omniscient captions to be found here). Byrne jumped straight from FANTASTIC FOUR to the Superman books, and my recollection of his FF is that the scripts always read a bit clunky right up to the end. I wonder if the change in editors had anything to do with this? Or possibly just the change in companies? I’ve read plenty of Byrne’s Marvel work, both before and after THE MAN OF STEEL, and I feel like his post-DC stuff was just as verbose as what came before. But regardless of the cause of this change, I really like Byrne’s writing here.

All told, THE MAN OF STEEL does a fine job of presenting the earliest part of Superman’s career, the era he would likely look back upon as “the good old days” before supervillains, when his life was much simpler. With the origin out of the way and a few seeds laid for the ongoing adventures, this series pretty adeptly accomplishes its mission.

Lastly — Byrne has said that it was very important to him that his version of Superman be born on Earth. To that end, he contrives the idea that Kal-El is still an embryo when he leaves Krypton, allowing him to emerge as a baby in Kansas upon landing. I think Byrne’s justification, encapsulated at the end of the sixth issue, is that Superman views Earth as his home planet and Krypton as little more than a curiosity — and while I’m totally on board with that idea, I don’t know that this convoluted revision is totally necessary; regardless of whether he’s literally born here, I think it’s enough that Clark Kent is raised on Earth and views himself as an American and a child of this planet.

An extension of this is that in the prior continuity, Clark knew of his Kryptonian heritage practically from the beginning, during his time as a teenage Superboy. I really like Byrne’s take here, that he grows to adulthood, begins his heroic career, and spends years as Superman before finally learning about Krypton. It helps to distance him from the long-dead world and better establish him, for all intents and purposes, a super-powered human — which I, personally, find far more appealing than the pre-CRISIS Superman who had a very strong attachment to Krypton. (Put it this way: I don't expect to ever see Byrne's Superman exclaim "Great Rao!" and that's just fine by me.)

Next Week: The Man of Steel meets Metallo in SUPERMAN #1.