Death of Superman

The Craftsman: Celebrating The Art Of Jerry Ordway
The Craftsman: Celebrating The Art Of Jerry Ordway
The Craftsman: Celebrating The Art Of Jerry Ordway
Since breaking into the comics industry in the early '80s, Jerry Ordway has gained a reputation as one of the industry's great multi-faceted craftsmen. He's an artist's artist, as adept at portraying emotion and expression as he is at illustrating intergalactic action sequences. He's a world class penciller, a respected writer, and well renowned for his inking and painting work. He's contributed to some of the most influential and best-selling superhero stories in history, and his work on Superman and Shazam over the course of a decade defined DC's two mightiest heroes for a generation of readers. And he's still going strong.
Ask Chris #287: The Death And Return Of Superman
Ask Chris #287: The Death And Return Of Superman
Ask Chris #287: The Death And Return Of Superman
Q: I’m reading The Death and Return of Superman, and it's way better than I've remembered. Why do people hate it if it works? And am I crazy to say this was the last time DC did right trying to contemporize Superman? -- @robotfrom1984 A: It seems like a lot of people have been working their way through the Death of Superman over the past few weeks, which probably has a lot to do with DC recently putting the entire saga out in four gigantic paperbacks. I even spent the last week reading through it for the first time myself --- I'd read Death, of course, but I never made it through the rest of the story to get the whole weird picture. That said, I'm not sure that it's actually all that hated. I mean, sure, it's easy to dismiss it for its excesses, but it's a hugely successful story that, for better or worse, defined Superman for a decade. And like you said, when you read it all at once, you can see that it does a whole lot that goes way beyond just having Superman get punched to death by a bone monster.
The Biggest Event Of All Time: 'The Death Of Superman'
The Biggest Event Of All Time: 'The Death Of Superman'
The Biggest Event Of All Time: 'The Death Of Superman'
"Let's just kill him." That was Jerry Ordway's solution to the problem that the creative teams behind Superman were facing in the early '90s. After building for years to a wedding between Lois Lane and Clark Kent --- something that had been brewing in comics since 1938 --- plans were put on hold so that the storyline could coincide with the upcoming wedding on TV's Lois and Clark. The idea was that timing the two versions of the wedding to run at the same time would lead the show's audience into comic book stores and boost sales, but it left the comics with a year of space to fill, and finding something that would take up time and keep readers interested while the TV storyline caught up proved to be difficult. It was so frustrating, in fact, that Ordway's solution ended up being the best idea, and on this day in 1992, DC published 'The Death Of Superman'.