Jeph Loeb's Superman Run Being Collected Soon--- Thoughts on hs run?

[DragonPiece]

https://www.amazon.com/Superman-City...JAFW9JXM96NR7C

I always wanted to read this in full, for some reason I liked how the art looked and it was nice seeing married clark and lois stories from the 2000's.

[Yoda]

Is it just a reissue of the old TPB’s from that era? I have that full set leading into Our Worlds at War. It collected all the titles, which it looks like this might do as well. I’m a fan of that era, it got me back into Superman’s after dropping comics for the most part in the late 90’s.

[Eto]

Nice. I've only read his For all seasons mini series and the Superman/Batman stories.

[Kuwagaton]

The title here is a little misleading, because it apparently collects the 1999 relaunch which happened across all four titles, most prominently including Y2K.

I think it's a pretty great collection in that case because they came out in really good form. It's a strong jumping on point with cool creative teams. Largely self contained but easy to continue if they decide to do a follow up trade.

Loeb in particular is pretty good if you're wondering. Not really touching stuff like For All Seasons, more like Lex becoming president or Superman vs a giant purple Pikachu type stuff. McGuinness would eventually look better due to paper quality, coloring, and maybe other things, but he was still an excellent main artist back then and Loeb seems to be his best partner.

[Clark_Kent]

I always had mixed feelings on it. I've never been a fan of McGuinness' (sp) art, so when I was younger that turned me off of the run. Revisiting it later, the art didn't bother me as much and the stories range from 'pretty good' to 'okay' for me. So nothing ground breaking, but nothing bottom-of-the-barrel either. In some respects, it did elevate the titles a bit due to fresh ideas and fresh voices, following the original Triangle teams who had been on the books for about a decade. Highlights for me would be the Son of Mongul training Superman for Imperiex, and I do like a lot of the Lex stuff as well as Our Worlds At War. Superman 175 was fun. Other arcs, like Critical Condition & Lois missing were alright but I always hated Y2K & the B13 upgrade.

I seem to recall Loeb's run just kind of ending though, didn't it? I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall him setting up Clark being fired but never resolving it or something like that. A few ideas made their way into Superman/Batman, but I feel like Loeb left some plotlines dangling in the main title.

[Adset]

DC trades these days are so insanely inconsistent I hope this A.) actually sees print, and B.) we get his full run, not just a single trade and then no volume two.

I'm looking at you, Superman Blue vol 2.

[Rod G]

Four words:

Avoid like the Plague.

[SJNeal]

DC trades these days are so insanely inconsistent I hope this A.) actually sees print, and B.) we get his full run, not just a single trade and then no volume two.

I'm looking at you, Superman Blue vol 2.

Thank you!

I want to preorder this, as those numbers are what will guarantee it sees print, but there's no way of knowing if this will just end up another orphaned Vol. 1 on my shelf. But if I *don't* preorder, I'm contributing to the same cycle we're complaining about! Ugh!

[Patrick Gerard]

I always had mixed feelings on it. I've never been a fan of McGuinness' (sp) art, so when I was younger that turned me off of the run. Revisiting it later, the art didn't bother me as much and the stories range from 'pretty good' to 'okay' for me. So nothing ground breaking, but nothing bottom-of-the-barrel either. In some respects, it did elevate the titles a bit due to fresh ideas and fresh voices, following the original Triangle teams who had been on the books for about a decade. Highlights for me would be the Son of Mongul training Superman for Imperiex, and I do like a lot of the Lex stuff as well as Our Worlds At War. Superman 175 was fun. Other arcs, like Critical Condition & Lois missing were alright but I always hated Y2K & the B13 upgrade.

I seem to recall Loeb's run just kind of ending though, didn't it? I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall him setting up Clark being fired but never resolving it or something like that. A few ideas made their way into Superman/Batman, but I feel like Loeb left some plotlines dangling in the main title.

I was pitching DC at the time (got my name in the credits of one of those issues).

The long and short of it is that you had a few things going on:

- Jeph's son Sam had cancer. He was trying to mentor his son Sam and his daughter Audrey into writing comics. But Sam ultimately died after a few years of struggle and I think think that was the hardest thing Loeb ever went through.

- Loeb was one of DC's hotter writers at that point. He was doing a LOT of work that went above and beyond what a typical writer does although it's maybe not AS unusual for folks like Grant Morrison, Dan Slott, or Bendis. He was reviewing art portfolios and basically headhunting the whole team lineups. Kinda makes sense for the guy who had been a Hollywood producer and would later be VP of Marvel TV. (He was the publisher for a lot of Rob Liefeld's Alan Moore's Supreme and drew a lot from that.) He was all but hiring the writers and artists. It was a lot. A fair assessment would probably be that Berganza was making more of a mark on books like Young Justice and Loeb and Berganza were practically co-editing although Loeb was neither paid to do that nor could he always get final say after making a decision.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman. Emperor Joker wasn't planned as an event by DC and wound up doing event sales. So the teams had a 4-8 part story planned called Our Superman at War. DC didn't have a big event and basically offered them keys to the kingdom (basically, pet projects and bonus pay) to turn Our Superman at War Into Our Worlds at War. Tie-ins were added.

- Here's what you should know about event stories -- whether something is planned as an event or gets "upgraded" into one. Publishers have lists of characters they want dead or changed and a condition of doing an event is that you have to hit those marks. Often 10-20 characters the company wants to kill off. Maybe some they want to de-power. This doesn't originate with writers. If you take something like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer scripts the scenes and writes the dialogue and comes up with the mysteries but he's ASSIGNED to kill off Firestorm and Ray Palmer and Jack Drake and so on. Events are assigned so that you get "kill lists" and "change lists" and you have to shove those into a story that was envisioned without them or without ALL of them. Sometimes a writer can get a stay of execution by writing a character into retirement or having them just vanish. (Like Ray Palmer in Identity Crisis.)

- So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.

- DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Ediie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told... NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.

- So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar nvited him to go to Marvel.

- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

[Vordan]

Fascinating read Mr. Gerard. It’s really weird to me that they didn’t want Luthor knowing Superman’s Identity. It seems that once upon a time DC editorial was fairly strict in what they allowed whereas now it’s a free for all. I’m sorry Loeb got screwed over like that while dealing with his son’s cancer. Also that bit about event “kill lists” makes HiC a lot more understandable for me now.

[Kuwagaton]

I think it's hard to both say "screwed over" and "strict" with the Superman titles of the time, especially where Loeb was concerned. There were a few things walked back or denied, but that's comics. There are always going to be times where an editor says no if they care about their job. Return to Krypton was a very fun story and the idea of returning the comics to a pre crisis origin had appeal, but it was also pretty nonsensical the second you took out the magnifying glass. Yet they ran with it for just a bit.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

Hey welcome back. These line up with what I remember. Up until a few years ago, dunno what changed, but the first printing of Superman #166 was worth decent money. It was a pretty outrageous comic in the moment. Waid as you describe him reminds me of Underworld Unleashed. And maybe it took a year or so after Loeb but things really went off the rails in organization. In a way that didn't seem to make sense with the same editor being listed in the credits.

[Clark_Kent]

I was pitching DC at the time (got my name in the credits of one of those issues).

The long and short of it is that you had a few things going on:

- Jeph's son Sam had cancer. He was trying to mentor his son Sam and his daughter Audrey into writing comics. But Sam ultimately died after a few years of struggle and I think think that was the hardest thing Loeb ever went through.

- Loeb was one of DC's hotter writers at that point. He was doing a LOT of work that went above and beyond what a typical writer does although it's maybe not AS unusual for folks like Grant Morrison, Dan Slott, or Bendis. He was reviewing art portfolios and basically headhunting the whole team lineups. Kinda makes sense for the guy who had been a Hollywood producer and would later be VP of Marvel TV. (He was the publisher for a lot of Rob Liefeld's Alan Moore's Supreme and drew a lot from that.) He was all but hiring the writers and artists. It was a lot. A fair assessment would probably be that Berganza was making more of a mark on books like Young Justice and Loeb and Berganza were practically co-editing although Loeb was neither paid to do that nor could he always get final say after making a decision.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman. Emperor Joker wasn't planned as an event by DC and wound up doing event sales. So the teams had a 4-8 part story planned called Our Superman at War. DC didn't have a big event and basically offered them keys to the kingdom (basically, pet projects and bonus pay) to turn Our Superman at War Into Our Worlds at War. Tie-ins were added.

- Here's what you should know about event stories -- whether something is planned as an event or gets "upgraded" into one. Publishers have lists of characters they want dead or changed and a condition of doing an event is that you have to hit those marks. Often 10-20 characters the company wants to kill off. Maybe some they want to de-power. This doesn't originate with writers. If you take something like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer scripts the scenes and writes the dialogue and comes up with the mysteries but he's ASSIGNED to kill off Firestorm and Ray Palmer and Jack Drake and so on. Events are assigned so that you get "kill lists" and "change lists" and you have to shove those into a story that was envisioned without them or without ALL of them. Sometimes a writer can get a stay of execution by writing a character into retirement or having them just vanish. (Like Ray Palmer in Identity Crisis.)

- So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.

- DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Ediie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told... NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.

- So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar nvited him to go to Marvel.

- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

First, I just want to say thank you for such a great reply, and for replying to me in general. Without getting too "geeky", I really do consider all of you who work in the industry to be rock stars, so any time someone responds to something I've said I just wanna high five the person next to me, even if they're a stranger lol

I did not know about Loeb's son, and having to go through that while also having such large responsibilities with many titles...now that I do, it certainly helps put a lot of his run into better context for me so I appreciate that. We've also heard rumors for years that events come with "kill-lists", but seeing it confirmed is certainly an eye opener, at least for myself. Often, you'll see a writer on twitter proclaim "don't blame editorial, that was all me!", but it never quite feels like the truth. Interesting stuff. I'm happy to know the reasons behind the dangled plots, as well, and how certain things get walked back when editorial changes their mind. It was just an extremely interesting and enlightening post, so thank you sir!

[madmodpoetgod]

I was pitching DC at the time (got my name in the credits of one of those issues).

The long and short of it is that you had a few things going on:

- Jeph's son Sam had cancer. He was trying to mentor his son Sam and his daughter Audrey into writing comics. But Sam ultimately died after a few years of struggle and I think think that was the hardest thing Loeb ever went through.

- Loeb was one of DC's hotter writers at that point. He was doing a LOT of work that went above and beyond what a typical writer does although it's maybe not AS unusual for folks like Grant Morrison, Dan Slott, or Bendis. He was reviewing art portfolios and basically headhunting the whole team lineups. Kinda makes sense for the guy who had been a Hollywood producer and would later be VP of Marvel TV. (He was the publisher for a lot of Rob Liefeld's Alan Moore's Supreme and drew a lot from that.) He was all but hiring the writers and artists. It was a lot. A fair assessment would probably be that Berganza was making more of a mark on books like Young Justice and Loeb and Berganza were practically co-editing although Loeb was neither paid to do that nor could he always get final say after making a decision.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman. Emperor Joker wasn't planned as an event by DC and wound up doing event sales. So the teams had a 4-8 part story planned called Our Superman at War. DC didn't have a big event and basically offered them keys to the kingdom (basically, pet projects and bonus pay) to turn Our Superman at War Into Our Worlds at War. Tie-ins were added.

- Here's what you should know about event stories -- whether something is planned as an event or gets "upgraded" into one. Publishers have lists of characters they want dead or changed and a condition of doing an event is that you have to hit those marks. Often 10-20 characters the company wants to kill off. Maybe some they want to de-power. This doesn't originate with writers. If you take something like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer scripts the scenes and writes the dialogue and comes up with the mysteries but he's ASSIGNED to kill off Firestorm and Ray Palmer and Jack Drake and so on. Events are assigned so that you get "kill lists" and "change lists" and you have to shove those into a story that was envisioned without them or without ALL of them. Sometimes a writer can get a stay of execution by writing a character into retirement or having them just vanish. (Like Ray Palmer in Identity Crisis.)

- So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.

- DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Ediie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told... NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.

- So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar nvited him to go to Marvel.

- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

Did he bring Joe Casey in? I really love the last year of Casey.

[manofsteel1979]

I was pitching DC at the time (got my name in the credits of one of those issues).

The long and short of it is that you had a few things going on:

- Jeph's son Sam had cancer. He was trying to mentor his son Sam and his daughter Audrey into writing comics. But Sam ultimately died after a few years of struggle and I think think that was the hardest thing Loeb ever went through.

- Loeb was one of DC's hotter writers at that point. He was doing a LOT of work that went above and beyond what a typical writer does although it's maybe not AS unusual for folks like Grant Morrison, Dan Slott, or Bendis. He was reviewing art portfolios and basically headhunting the whole team lineups. Kinda makes sense for the guy who had been a Hollywood producer and would later be VP of Marvel TV. (He was the publisher for a lot of Rob Liefeld's Alan Moore's Supreme and drew a lot from that.) He was all but hiring the writers and artists. It was a lot. A fair assessment would probably be that Berganza was making more of a mark on books like Young Justice and Loeb and Berganza were practically co-editing although Loeb was neither paid to do that nor could he always get final say after making a decision.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman. Emperor Joker wasn't planned as an event by DC and wound up doing event sales. So the teams had a 4-8 part story planned called Our Superman at War. DC didn't have a big event and basically offered them keys to the kingdom (basically, pet projects and bonus pay) to turn Our Superman at War Into Our Worlds at War. Tie-ins were added.

- Here's what you should know about event stories -- whether something is planned as an event or gets "upgraded" into one. Publishers have lists of characters they want dead or changed and a condition of doing an event is that you have to hit those marks. Often 10-20 characters the company wants to kill off. Maybe some they want to de-power. This doesn't originate with writers. If you take something like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer scripts the scenes and writes the dialogue and comes up with the mysteries but he's ASSIGNED to kill off Firestorm and Ray Palmer and Jack Drake and so on. Events are assigned so that you get "kill lists" and "change lists" and you have to shove those into a story that was envisioned without them or without ALL of them. Sometimes a writer can get a stay of execution by writing a character into retirement or having them just vanish. (Like Ray Palmer in Identity Crisis.)

- So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.

- DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Ediie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told... NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.

- So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar nvited him to go to Marvel.

- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

I always find your posts about that era insightful. I always learn something new.

It explains a lot. I didn't realize Loeb was basically defacto co-editor with Berganza. It explains why everything sort of quickly went off the rails when Loeb left the monthly.

Also the confirmation of DiDio's editorial philosophy explains the up/down/sideways nature of DC's publishing the last 17 years or so, especially in regards to Superman. The sad thing is he's not completly wrong that a happy contented readership sometimes leads to stagnation and controversy often leads to increased sales. The problem is eventually people get so turned off you cause permanent damage to a franchise. I'd say Superman is still struggling even though between Bendis and his immediate predecessors the books have never been better quality wise,at least in the last decade or so.

[andersonh1]

I was pitching DC at the time (got my name in the credits of one of those issues).

The long and short of it is that you had a few things going on:

- Jeph's son Sam had cancer. He was trying to mentor his son Sam and his daughter Audrey into writing comics. But Sam ultimately died after a few years of struggle and I think think that was the hardest thing Loeb ever went through.

- Loeb was one of DC's hotter writers at that point. He was doing a LOT of work that went above and beyond what a typical writer does although it's maybe not AS unusual for folks like Grant Morrison, Dan Slott, or Bendis. He was reviewing art portfolios and basically headhunting the whole team lineups. Kinda makes sense for the guy who had been a Hollywood producer and would later be VP of Marvel TV. (He was the publisher for a lot of Rob Liefeld's Alan Moore's Supreme and drew a lot from that.) He was all but hiring the writers and artists. It was a lot. A fair assessment would probably be that Berganza was making more of a mark on books like Young Justice and Loeb and Berganza were practically co-editing although Loeb was neither paid to do that nor could he always get final say after making a decision.

- So the teams outperformed expectations. The Return to Krypton prelude (166?) was the bestselling Superman comic since Superman #75 and would later be beat by Superman/Batman. Emperor Joker wasn't planned as an event by DC and wound up doing event sales. So the teams had a 4-8 part story planned called Our Superman at War. DC didn't have a big event and basically offered them keys to the kingdom (basically, pet projects and bonus pay) to turn Our Superman at War Into Our Worlds at War. Tie-ins were added.

- Here's what you should know about event stories -- whether something is planned as an event or gets "upgraded" into one. Publishers have lists of characters they want dead or changed and a condition of doing an event is that you have to hit those marks. Often 10-20 characters the company wants to kill off. Maybe some they want to de-power. This doesn't originate with writers. If you take something like Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer scripts the scenes and writes the dialogue and comes up with the mysteries but he's ASSIGNED to kill off Firestorm and Ray Palmer and Jack Drake and so on. Events are assigned so that you get "kill lists" and "change lists" and you have to shove those into a story that was envisioned without them or without ALL of them. Sometimes a writer can get a stay of execution by writing a character into retirement or having them just vanish. (Like Ray Palmer in Identity Crisis.)

- So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.

- DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Ediie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told... NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.

- So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar nvited him to go to Marvel.

- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.

This explains a lot. Thanks for the insights.