Favorite Era of Superman?

[Jon Clark]

I can find Superman stories i love in almost any age- probably even in the ages where thise on or two favorites would be the "only" stories I can stand.

If i had to choose periods to draw stories from for a "this is Superman" project I'd probably say Siegel/Shuster (1938-1948) and Bronze-Triangle (~1970- 1992's Reign of the Supermen).

And if limited to a single era 1975-1986.

[Kuwagaton]

Interesting, why 1975?

If we were talking years I gotta say, from Superman in the early 300s and Action with Karb Brak, 1976 is one of my favorite for stories

[Jon-El]

I stopped reading the books regularly 2002 so can’t really comment on much beyond that. I just lost interest. However, I loved the 1986 - 1993 period. Lots of great stories and a strong continuity amongst the books. They seemed to lost steam once they brought Superman back from the dead. Really great run though.

I always enjoy a good Silver Age story. Growing up, they were reprinted regularly so I had a lot of exposure to them. My favorite era would be the Bronze Age. I especially thought the mid to late 70’s had some great stories, albeit a much much different style than modern ones. Big fan of Karb Brak myself!

[SiegePerilous02]

Probably Silver/Bronze age. Not that the writing quality was always great (it frequently wasn't), but Superman was at his most interesting as a character and his mythos was at its best. So it at least had the potential to lend itself to some of the better stories (Miracle Monday, Moore's stuff, Phantom Zone, etc) that you really can't cleanly pull off afterwards.

Plus most of the iconic stuff that we still have today came from the output of the likes of Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton. I don't think any other era matches it in sheer volume of enduring ideas.

[Johnny Thunders!]

I think the Silver Age had the most experimental and myth building stories for the character. I like the Golden Age for the energy and bravado, I like the post crisis Grant Morrison era for updating the most out there ideas. I think my favorite era is the Bronze Age era when I first discovered Superman. The movie had just come out, there was black and white reruns on TV, even film and monster magazines were promoting the movie. One great thing about the Bronze age was all the reprints, especially the big tabloid editions and all the small digest books. The tabloid editions had great versus battles and the digest books had reprints from every decade.

[Jim Kelly]

Reading the comics for my All-Planets list, I find that while I like the stories in the late 1970s, the production quality gets much worse as I go along. You start out in the early 1970s with those beautiful comics where Murphy Anderson inked Curt Swan and the production team did a good job with the art--the printing process only sometimes failing. And by 1978, the quality is off the rails. Inks are blotchy--and when they switched to plastic presses, a great inker like Dick Giordano would see his fine inks rendered as wobbly lines, because the plastic was too fragile to print those thin lines. Tex Blaisdell was a great inker--look at some of the stuff he did with Bob Oksner on the humour comics in the late 1960s/early 1970s--but a lot of his inks look muddy in ACTION COMICS. Some people might compain about Dave Hunt, but his thick line work was probably the least likely to be ruined by the printing process. The kinds of thin inks that are common in today's offset press printings were impossible back then. This might have motivated the production chief Bob Rozakis to look for other kinds of printing processes for the books. Which leaves us with the comics we have now--I prefer vintage newsprint letterpress comics to today's slick mags, but the rapid decrease in quality in the late 1970s and early 1980s may have left the publisher with few options.

[Riv86672]

For me, Byrne era Superman, easily.

[Jon Clark]

Interesting, why 1975?

If we were talking years I gotta say, from Superman in the early 300s and Action with Karb Brak, 1976 is one of my favorite for stories

I'd peg 1975 as just about where I started reading Superman on a regular basis. Without looking at my back issue collection for the exact year I'd peg that as a point where the Maggin/Bates/Pasko Superman was distinct from his Silver-Age counterpart. More action-adventure than sit-com plots across the line.

[Kuwagaton]

Reading the comics for my All-Planets list, I find that while I like the stories in the late 1970s, the production quality gets much worse as I go along. You start out in the early 1970s with those beautiful comics where Murphy Anderson inked Curt Swan and the production team did a good job with the art--the printing process only sometimes failing. And by 1978, the quality is off the rails. Inks are blotchy--and when they switched to plastic presses, a great inker like Dick Giordano would see his fine inks rendered as wobbly lines, because the plastic was too fragile to print those thin lines. Tex Blaisdell was a great inker--look at some of the stuff he did with Bob Oksner on the humour comics in the late 1960s/early 1970s--but a lot of his inks look muddy in ACTION COMICS. Some people might compain about Dave Hunt, but his thick line work was probably the least likely to be ruined by the printing process. The kinds of thin inks that are common in today's offset press printings were impossible back then. This might have motivated the production chief Bob Rozakis to look for other kinds of printing processes for the books. Which leaves us with the comics we have now--I prefer vintage newsprint letterpress comics to today's slick mags, but the rapid decrease in quality in the late 1970s and early 1980s may have left the publisher with few options.

With quality the mid 80s coloring, like what they had on Secret Years, drives me nuts. Creatively I think my least favorites are Dave Hunt and 80s Schaffenbeger. And overall I don't love the 50 cent time. But that's only because it all compares to what I like so much from what came right before and after.

[Comics N' Toons]

I have a weird psychology with my comics collection... I try to collect a sampling of every era for the major DC and Marvel characters and read/collect the uber-famous indie stuff like Rocketeer/TMNT etc... All this is to say that my Superman run feels complete or that I'm satisfied with it. Including Peace on Earth and Whatever Happened to Man of Tomorrow/For Man Who Has Everything in other non-Superman trades, I have assembled 25 trades that, to me are definitive... it's not every story from a particular period but a smattering of random stories from every period.

The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told (80's edition)
The Superman Archives Vol. 1 (Superman 1-4 1939)
Superman: Adventures of the Man of Steel (animated series first 6 issues)
Superman: For All Seasons
Superman: Kryptonite
Superman: Brainiac
All Star Superman
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 1
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 2
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 3
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 4
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 5 -------------- The John Byrne Run
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 6
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 7
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 8
Superman: The Man of Steel Vol. 9
Dark Knight Over Metropolis
LEX LUTHOR – Man of Steel
Superman: Exile
The Death and Return of Superman Omnibus
Superman: The Wedding and Beyond
Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore (DC Comics Classics Library)
Superman: Last Son
Superman-Shazam: First Thunder
Superman Vs The Flash trade paperback


While the Golden Age and the Post-Crisis triangle era are my fav. I think the truly bright spots come out of the Carey Bates/Maggin era. This era is underrepresented and has not really been collected, YET!

[Jim Kelly]

With quality the mid 80s coloring, like what they had on Secret Years, drives me nuts.

I was kind of let down by that series when it came out--yet now I love it. If you look at the original art by Swan and Schaffenberger, the work is absolutely stunning.

In an interview with Dick Giordano, in COMIC BOOK ARTIST, he said that Vince Colletta--the art director in the late 1970s--had got hold of this paper stock for the artists that was vellum. It was so thin that they had to be careful when they were pencilling and inking because the paper would tear--which affected exactly the kind of art they could produce.

However, I don't really like the modern reprints of these comics--except for the black and white books--because the comic art back then was produced for what was possible at the time. The whole reason comic book art exists the way it does--which is a very unusual form of art--is because they had to make art that was easily reproduceable with the cheap printing technology of the day. That's why you have art shaded and outlined in black ink--if they could just photograph pencils or painted pages--then the craft of inking would have never become so important to the artform.

The art is at home in the context of the time it was produced. For instance a lot of comics in the 1950s and 1960s would leave out the yellow plate for pinkish skin tones, because they knew the pages would yellow, so a yellow plate was superfluous. The simplest colour tones represented more complex colours--orange for brown, purple for grey. There was a whole visual language that developed to satisfy the demands of the medium. You don't get that context with modern reprints.

[Thomas Crown]

The John Byrne era, the post-Infinite Crisis/pre-Flashpoint era and the New 52 era.