Commentary: Can Dan Slott Breathe New Life Into Superman?

Early yesterday, a new Superman ongoing series was announced from Dan Slott and Rafael Albuquerque. It’s an incredibly fun sounding pitch, but we have to ask if it will breathe new life into the Man of Steel?

Now first of all, it has to be said, the timing of this announcement and debut obviously are both tied to having a new and exciting Superman book out before the July debut of the DCU’s first film, simply titled Superman. However, DC has tended to be less “tie-in” driven than their main competition at Marvel. Except for the Flash and Superman, all of the leads of the DC/CW Arrowverse were without an ongoing comic series for at least one season of each of their shows. Creature Commandos only got a few reprints with some comics featuring close ties to the characters of the series. So we can’t say it’s entirely driven by outside media.

But getting into the meat of the issue, I don’t dislike this announcement, but it is difficult to get excited. The Superman titles have floundered at DC for years. I became a fan in the original triangle era led by Dan Jurgens, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Karl Kesel, and others, and continued to love the franchise with the soft relaunch led by Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, Mark Schultz, and Joe Casey. It’s undeniable that those years were consistently good-to-great, with more than one story that could be considered amongst the greatest Superman stories ever told. It’s been a series of ebbs and peaks since that time though.

The Infinite Crisis lead up was one of the strongest eras of the franchise, but it had the black eye of the beautiful-but-confusing For Tomorrow. Post-Infinite Crisis, the line was reduced down to only two titles for the first time in decades, but those two titles were some of the best Superman stories we’ve ever seen, featuring Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco on Superman, with Geoff Johns and a murderers’ row of superstar artists like Adam Kubert, Eric Powell and Gary Frank on Action Comics.

Since that era ended, though, it’s been an absolute crapshoot whether Superman would even be good or not, and the franchise has suffered for it. The J. Michael Straczynski run was essentially a wet rag on the torch Johns lit for him. The less said about the New 52 era, the better (at least until Charles Soule, Greg Pak and Aaron Kuder came along). The Rebirth era helped regain some of the lost momentum of the line, but those stories haven’t aged well and are full of impenetrable continuity issues.

In the more recent past, we can look at the Bendis era. Frankly, the Brian Michael Bendis Superman is some of the best Superman since at least the heights of the Johns run. However, if you believe industry insiders, it did not help sales at all outside of the initial relaunch bump. (Unfortunately, since DC switched distributors halfway through the run, and sales numbers became much less transparent, there’s no real way to verify this.) The Bendis era was also plagued by the problem that even though he was writing both core titles, the quality pointed towards only being truly good one at a time (ie, when Action was good, Superman was middling at best and vice versa).

Scott Redmond and I talked about the issues of the line most recently about a year ago. Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Joshua Williamson most recently wrote (and are writing) some of the best Superman stories in a very long while. But the line has otherwise struggled to find an identity. Johnson tried, mostly successfully, to expand Kal-El’s supporting superheroic cast, both with his family and with other heroes like Manchester Black and Midnighter. Williamson has tried doing new things with the world of Metropolis.

Now, those world expansions have often fallen by the wayside. Until the most recent Action Comics story by Mark Waid and Clayton Henry, the expanded Superman family vanished for about nine months. Williamson’s SuperCorp and villainous additions haven’t even made a scratch on the wider universe. And that’s before a mention of how Action Comics has essentially shifted into a Legends of the Dark Knight style anthology, and not even names like Jason Aaron, Gail Simone, John Ridley, and Waid have been able to make a significant difference for the title.

So that’s a long way to say … Superman isn’t in a good place right now. Creatively, Williamson’s series is consistently solid, often great, but it has little-to-no buzz, even with superstar artist Dan Mora joining the series. Unfortunately for that series, the creative change happened right as Diamond began having its recent issues and Amazon’s Comixology began having unexplained issues of its own, overshadowing what should have been an infusion of excitement. After an experimental weekly story by Waid — which was good, but came and went so fast I fell behind almost immediately and couldn’t catch back up — Action Comics is back to the rotating creative teams. Weekly comics series are just not a great idea.

And now this series, Superman Unlimited.

Now, I’ve lost a lot of respect for Slott, who used to be one of my favorite writers, there’s no sugar coating it. Outside of his Spider-Boy series, his output for the last five or so years has felt like nothing but pointing to older stories of his and saying “hey remember this? Here’s a sequel you didn’t ask for!” or doing a victory lap for his years of work at Marvel. At the same time, Spider-Boy may point to how, creatively, Unlimited might go. When he’s doing something new, it’s still sharp, funny and entertaining. And the cover does feature a great mix of new and old elements, even if the concept of “more Kryptonite” seems like a step backwards.

But will bringing in a former-fan favorite veteran writer who’s lost a lot of goodwill breathe new life into the characters? Or will this just be another blip in a long line of half-hearted attempts to restore excitement in what was once DC’s crown jewel?

I hope DC can figure it out. Superman from James Gunn’s new DC Studios promises to be a return to form for the Man of Steel, and I just hope the comics quickly follow suit.