Originally Posted by
Myskin
Thank you for the kind words. As for Superman editorial, well - yes, there are lot of problems of competence, but I also think that many, many copyright issues are at work here. Basically every Superboy story in the latest 15 years has been affected by legal troubles (and I think that something similar is behind the New52 as well).
However, I agree that Superman editors work in an utterly bizarre way.
If you look closely all the concepts which appeared in Superman stories after the Jurgens era, you'll realize that very few ideas are inherently bad. I'd say that the basic concept behind Grounded is terrible (mostly because it makes Superman incredibly ineffective and morally questionable) and I hate with a passion the Supermen merger at the end of Superman Reborn, which I consider one of the biggest narrative failures ever occurred in a Superman story. But New Krypton, For Tomorrow, OWAW, even The Truth, are not inherently bad. They are just interesting ideas which failed because at one point DC simply dropped the ball. I'd also say that being a Superman writer must be incredibly frustrating, because at no point you can be sure of what is in continuity and what isn't.
The last time someone tried to make some continuity changes in an organic, understandable way was during the Loeb run with the Return to Krypton story. Of course, the retcon was retconned at the end, but what was the point? They had ALREADY introduced Birthright.
So... When Johns and Busiek relaunched everything they were in a pretty fragile position, but I guess that their mindset was something like: OK, the origin is a mess, we have changed it ourselves with our bearded Jor-El and Donner crystals, so we won't touch the origin OR Luthor in Smallville. However, everything else is still relatively intact (NK Luthor is basically Byrne Luthor after his fall from grace; Ma and Pa Kents are the Byrne ones, etc.). So maybe if we just work on the Krypton lore we could create something new (I mean, if you think about it, also musclebound Brainiac is basically Johns' attempt at reconciling ALL of the previous incarnations of the character in an organic way).
However, after that New52 occurred, and then Rebirth. And now Superman universe is in the messiest position ever. Basically it's as if ALL of the details of the past continuities are relatively intact, but they are completely disconnected one from the other. We know that President Luthor occurred in some capacity, but it can't have happened the way we saw in OWAW, not it can be connected to Supergirl's arrival as it happened in Superman/Batman... What's the point of having so many details from past tales if you can't touch them or use them in any possible way within the stories?
It will never happen, but I always thought that the ONLY possible way to make this chaos a bit more streamlined was to make a 52-like weekly series where they could put every main element from Superman stories (from Lori Lemaris to Conduit) and make it work in an organic way.
To be fair, I have no idea of how close they came to do the Toyman war story - perhaps it was just an idea. Maybe Mr Busiek could give more details.
As for cyberpunk Metropolis, yes, it's a huge loss. These days we have things like Alita and Cyberpunk 2077 (the videogame), postmodern cyberpunk is everywhere and Superman keeps living in a vaguely deco New York? Hasn't anyone learnt anything from the HUGE efforts of the Batman writers to make Gotham a character in itself? I mean, that's pretty basic - every major Superman story and the core of the character himself has been about science out of control. A futuristic city would give Superman a reason to stay and live in Metropolis instead of working with a NGO in Africa, too: during Loeb's and Kelly's run it was pretty clear that Metropolis was so huge that even Superman couldn't know or understand every single detail or menace it hid, and the destiny of the world basically depended on the technology of Metropolis. I have recently reread the Superman Metropolis Secret Files (2000) and it is still incredibly interesting and fresh. And Superman Metropolis (the Jimmy Olsen maxiseries) is simply great.
Well, it took almost TWO YEARS to complete the story and that's more than enough. I think that Kubert had some health issues, but nobody knows for sure.
Johns has also a habit of being late with his scripts and he was loaded with work in those days. I think that it is way more likely that he simply decided to check the story from a distance thanks to Robinson's involvement.