Superman has some of the greatest comic books of all time under his belt. I don’t even need to mention All-Star Superman, but there’s also the phenomenal exploration of how far he is willing to go in Superman: Up in the Sky, the best retelling of how his early years in Superman: Secret Origin, and new classics that redefine everything about the character like the “Warworld Saga.” Generally speaking, if someone says a Superman story is good, then it’s probably a great read. However, every now and again there will be a story that garners praise from everyone, but ultimately fails to live up to its hype when put under a microscope. Today, I am here to prove that the 1986 miniseries The Man of Steel is exactly that kind of disappointing story.
What is The Man of Steel?
The Man of Steel is a six issue limited-series written and drawn by John Byrne that was released in the immediate aftermath of DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot, and not only established the new origin for Superman, but set the stage for how his stories would be told for the foreseeable future. To repackage Superman for a new generation with a new continuity, Superman had to be almost entirely redesigned from the ground up. Major changes were made to Superman’s lore, most notably being that Superman was made the sole survivor of Krypton’s explosion, with characters like Supergirl and Krytpo written out of existence. Similarly, Superman’s hero career as Superboy was stricken from history, nixing all of his involvement with the Legion of Super-Heroes.
The series began by showing Krypton as a stark and clinical world devoid of emotion. Instead of launching a baby boy off in a rocket as Krypton explodes, Jor-El and Lara launch an artificial birthing pod, which contained the fetus of Kal-El that would be held in stasis until his ship arrived on Earth. When the ship was eventually found by the Kents, Clark was “birthed” by the ship itself. He grew up in Smallville not knowing about his origin, not even knowing he had powers until his senior year of high school. After discovering what he could do, he traveled the world to help others and eventually created his Superman persona with the help of his parents. The rest of the series tackled various important touchstones in Superman’s early history, such as meeting Lex Luthor, who had been reimagined as a businessman instead of a mad scientist, and Batman. It concluded with Superman learning of his alien heritage and accepting who he was. This comic indisputably had a positive impact on the Superman mythos and did a lot of good for the character. Unfortunately, it’s not a good comic.
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What’s Wrong With The Man of Steel?
While there’s nothing egregious about the comic on the surface, as its method of storytelling and art are both fine, it really falls apart when you read it as what is supposed to be the introduction to the character of Superman. While a lot of its reinvention is still considered good to this day, and the gutting of Superboy’s past and other Kryptonian survivors cannot be held against the comic itself, some of it is just too weird. For one, the idea of Clark being a gestating fetus until he is born on Earth feels a bit too removed for my tastes and my idea of how Superman was made. Similarly, there’s the change that Superman isn’t actually invulnerable, but rather he emits a psychic field that protects his skin and his clothes from damage, which just doesn’t fit the Man of Steel title anyways. However, these are just minor nitpicks, and the real problems with the story emerge in how it portrays its characters and the world.
One of the great changes this comic made to the Superman mythos is having Clark Kent be the real identity and Superman be something he puts on a bit. However, its portrayal of Clark Kent is entirely different from what you would expect. Instead of being a mild-mannered and well-intentioned reporter, Clark is an aggressive man who chases what he wants. He’s confident to the point of arrogance, and broods far more than Superman should. And it’s not just Superman that acts like this. The entire world seems cloaked with this strange cynical view. Take the moment in issue #1 when Clark reveals his powers to Metropolis when saving an experimental space-plane from crashing. After he saves it, the people swarm him like a hungry mob eager to have any piece of him. It is natural and understandable for him to be freaked out by this, but the way Clark recounts it to his family makes it sound like they were sharks who smelled blood. He invented his Superman disguise out of sheer terror that people would hunt him down, and while he keeps a secret identity to live a normal life, this book presented it like every single adult and child was waiting to chew Superman up and spit him back out. A moment almost exactly like this occurs in Superman: Secret Origin, but by the end of that series there is a scene where the people reconcile with this and are inspired to be better. No such uplifting scene occurs here. It’s all pessimism all the way through.
The Man of Steel offers a lot in a modernization of Superman for the mid-1980s, but while it shows the style, I think it fails to capture Superman’s heart. There’s no spark of hope for humanity in this comic, just an often grim sense of duty that Superman is obligated to follow. There’s no joy to this Superman, for him or anyone else. Not only that, but this set the tone for every Superman story that came after it for years, many of which carried this cynical, serious world view, which just feels wrong for Superman to have. Any Superman story that fails to inspire people to want to be better can never be one of his best, and that’s why The Man of Steel is entirely overrated.