Superman General

The Aquaman and Azrael tie-ins of the Genesis crossover in the nineties played with that too.

Lois and Clark is Tom Brevoort's favourite title over at Marvel

...Which interests me, Tom's a guy firmly on the "anti-marriage" side of the Spider-Man books, and he's on record saying the Super-marriage was a mistake as well

It's not that weird. You can think something that would be a 'mistake' to do with the 'main' Spider-Man or Superman in an ongoing context to be an interesting experimental thing to do with an alternate version of the same hero. For that matter, this is exactly what happened with Earth Two Superman compared to Earth One's in the Pre-Crisis.

edited 6th Mar '16 7:38:40 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

Brevoort isn't just looking at the marriages as a fan the way we are, he's coming at this from the perspective of a content manager. Marriage is limiting to a character in the sense that now they can't be with anyone else anymore, and does age a character to a degree.

I liked the Super marriage because let's face it, it was always going to be Lois. It was Lois for 48 years before they got married, but as the years have gone on I've started to realize that it might have been a good idea to end the Spider marriage, despite the way they did it being hot garbage that tainted the series for years.

edited 6th Mar '16 10:15:58 AM by Mr.Badguy

The thing is, Marvel's never went a year without the spider-marriage in print in one form or another, after OMD you could find it in Mayday's book and the Mr and Mrs Spider-Man strips over in ASM Family, then when those books ended, the newspaper strip carried on with it. It's out of Marvel's hair as far as the mainstream books go, but they're still stuck with it.

There's nothing wrong with ageing a character either. And short of reviving the overrated Gwen Stacy or turning Black Cat good again, nobody has come close to matching MJ's legacy and development. So long as the aforementioned daily strip is running, so long as the marriage has a regular presence, MJ will always be cemented as Peter's endgame.

To me and many others, the mainstream Spider-Man books have remained hot garbage since OMD, with very little redeeming value, and the characters have become completely unrecognisable as well as largely unlikeable. I feel the Spider-Marriage had a lot more life in it and last year's Renew Your Vows series from Slott did a lot to show just how better off Peter is as a husband and father. I'd easily take it over the slop being served to us now with "Peter Starker".

edited 6th Mar '16 11:05:37 AM by Zarius

OMD is probably the prime example I'm aware of of a comic written out of selfishness - then-EIC Joe Quesada and others were actually prepared to sacrifice sales (oh boy did they ever) to make Spidey the way they wanted him to be. This was a comic written for a very small audience, and that audience was not the people buying the comic.

With Spider-Man, I think it serves the character better to have him NOT be married. If he's married, then he has a confidante and a support structure, which only makes his life easier. Peter can't have his life be easy; it's kind of essential to Spider-Man that his life be difficult. It would be more in keeping with the tone of Spidey history that, if he was married, his wife wouldn't know he was Spider-Man. But I can't really see Peter doing that.

The same is true, to a different degree, with Superman. Having Jonathan and Martha be alive, and having him be married, gives him far too much support. He's no longer a man against the world, he's got his own little tribe to look after, and to help him out. I understand, though, that there is the camp that loves the notion that he should have Lois to run interference for him, and his parents to counsel him. It's a matter of taste, but there seems to be no middle ground for it. You either like it or you hate it. I remember, even on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, which was one of the keystones for the Lois and Clark era, there was a character who once opined, after seeing the degree to which Lois helped Superman out, that he was clearly incompetant at functioning on his own. This points out another problem: having the support structure necessitates writers finding a use for it, which frequently ends up making the hero look like he's incapable of functioning on his own.

edited 6th Mar '16 11:45:59 AM by Robbery

Peter's life wasn't made easier by marriage by any stretch though. He and MJ had ups and downs just like any real-life couple. They did'nt have an idealized union. Yes, they eventually made up, but they still went through things like seperations, arguments over health concerns (Peter's injuries and bouts with depression, MJ's smoking), endured the miscarriage/abduction of a baby etc. Peter's core "essentials" were not compromised in any way.

Hell, even the continuity with the most positive outcome for him, Spider-Girl, saw Peter coping with a handicap as he lost his leg and had to retire, and his baby son almost lost his hearing during Mayday's skirmish with Carnage. Struggle has always been a core ingredient, whether Peter's a father, husband, single or otherwise.

Frankly, I always preferred Peter being a bit better off, that's what I was raised on at a young age, seeing his struggles earlier on in the classic runs were a bonus as I viewed the story as one of a man who had endured so much hard luck in his life but ultimately managed to overcome his struggles to find an ideal balance. It's why I'll always regard Spider-Girl as the "true" epilogue to the story. I don't view Spider-Man as a perpetual everyman loser tragedy (god, how boring is that to bloody read?), but as an optimistic saga of life over fear and weaving a stronger web in life.

At least I still get a relatively stable Peter and MJ in the daily strip, but while that's an altogether more wholesome beast, it's by no means "idealized" either. MJ was willing to become someone else's wife in order to save Peter's life in the last arc for one thing.

edited 6th Mar '16 12:02:22 PM by Zarius

Seriously the people who claim marriage makes life easier have far too much of an idealized image of marriage.

Isn't Clark and Lois one of DC's best sellers? Marriage (and pre-Flashpoint characters) may not be as much of a turnoff as DC seems to think...

Not being able to relate to a married character was far more of an issue when the overwhelming majority of readership was made of children and teenagers. Not so much nowadays.

They do want to attract children and teenagers, though, so it would behoove them to at least keep around a version of the character that younger readers can relate to.

I think it depends on the character. Hawkman and Hawkwoman (Hawkgirl, whatever) I think work better as a married couple (I find it irritating that the popular trend recently has been to portray them as at odds with each other or, as with most of the run on Justice League and now with Legends of Tomorrow, to remove Hawkman entirely). Elongated Man with Sue Dibney worked beautifully as well, as do Reed and Susan Richards.

Superman, though, I feel, works better as a single man. As does Spider-Man. Batman, I think, works better with a surrogate family rather than a traditional one. That's just me though.

edited 6th Mar '16 12:58:48 PM by Robbery

It's also an issue with middle-aged man children who hate their exes.

Which Joe Quesada supposedly is.

I mean, allegedly; I've long learned to be skeptical of rumors about creators on the intranets.

It was pretty funny back in the day when we had the Small Name Big Ego page for real life content creators, a page that could charitably be described as nerds with axes to grind.

Ah, those were the days.

I recall John Byrne being the very first entry on that list.

That was accurate, at least.

@Robbery I think the reason Hawkman and Hawkgirl being in conflict is due to the implications of them literally being forced to being lover because of reincarnation.

Personally, I'd just make them aliens instead of reincarnated lovers.

There were two different Hawkmen/Hawkgirls prior to the New 52.

There are the originals, Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders/Hall, the Golden Age characters who were revealed in their first story to be reincarnations of ancient Egyptian lovers. And after that, as far as I know, it was never mentioned again. So much Golden Age Hawkman is unavailable to read that I can't say for sure.

Then there are the Silver Age versions: Katar and Shayera Hol, the married alien police officers from the planet Thanagar. These are the two who had their continuity screwed up because of the Hawkworld series. I think Zero Hour is where Carter Hall and Katar Hol were merged into one Hawkman, but I lose track of what happened to the character at that point. I don't even know what happened to Shayera. At some point I think they were all killed off.

The modern day Hawkgirl, Kendra Saunders, first appeared in JSA. She's a "came back wrong" form of Shiera, who doesn't remember her past lives, and here is where the modern emphasis on the reincarnation of Hawkman and Hawkgirl really becomes a major part of who the characters are. Carter Hall returns to life during the JSA series, and the "he remembers, she doesn't" dynamic first comes into play as an ongoing plot point for the characters.

Brightest Day resolved that ongoing plotline after Kendra died in Blackest Night. She was resurrected by the life entity, and was Shiera again. It was out and out stated during Brightest Day that Hawkman and Hawkgirl had finally broken free of the cycle of reincarnation, and that their current life would be their last. But then the New 52 wiped all of that out.

Isn't Hawkman back to being an alien policeman (The Savage Hawkman), while there is no Shiera and Shayera? Kendra is Hawkgirl in the Earth 2 series, so it's a major change in status quo for both. I can't say I really care for it.

edited 8th Mar '16 10:51:01 AM by andersonh1

If I must be honest Carter and Kendra's relationship kind of gave me the willies. Kendra is a much younger relative of Shiera, and thus one of Carter's by marriage, and even though his reborn body isn't much older it always gave me a sort of Creepy Uncle vibe. Her death solved that, I guess, but I sort of wish there was a non-fatal way it could've been solved.

I don't know what to make of this cover. Kalibak seems to be right behind Superman, which would imply they both are in the same scale. They look more or less the same size too. Yet Kalibak can hold a boy and his dog in a hand as if they were dolls, which would imply Superman could hold them just as well in his own hand and aaaaaaaarrrghhhhh Neal Adams is your art going to start making as much sense as your writing now?

Oh hey, American Alien got a 5 star review by CBR.

American Alien really is so much better than it has any right to be. I mean, I like Max Landis's stuff and even I didn't expect it to be this good and I've heard from people who think Landis is a dick and they like the book.

It's interesting to look at the book as both a deconstruction and reconstruction of Superman — it deconstructs Superman by, well, not being about Superman at all, but by being about Clark Kent. Who he is as a person, how he was raised, him hanging out with his friends, worrying about being different, figuring out his life, and so on. We see him as a human being first, rather than a superhero.

And then this reconstructs Superman as a concept because we can see the steps he's taking to become the Superman we know even as we see the person he is. The fifth issue was his first appearance as a proto-Superman and it was interesting that Lex Luthor was the one who actually named him in this continuity.

And his proto Cape is Batman's cape that he ripped off when Batman tried to scare him.

When American Alien is done I'd like to see Landis do a Superman/Batman miniseries with the same sort of rotating art teams. He seems like he could do it with a little more nuance than Jeph Loeb style "we're different, but also the same" monologuing.

I also want more interaction between Superman and Dick Grayson in general. Dick's scene in issue 4 was maybe my favorite thing in the whole series.

Superman legends revealed.