How did Superman benefit from Flashpoint/ New 52?

[Stanlos]

My fellow Kryptonians! I hope you are all awesome this evening during the COVIDPocalype. I was reading through a number of threads and saw mention that 52 'fixed' Superman.

Might you share what was going bad for Supes prior to Flashpoint and what happened after to fix it? Did those repairs survive Rebirth?

[manwhohaseverything]

He got back into wearing jeans and tshirt..his mission statement was brought back.."i fight for those who can't fight for themselves"...he was a leaping champion for a while...

[The World]

Reminded people that Post-Crisis Superman is ultimately just a fanfic character himself of the Superman that came before him.

[kryptonian]

Destroyed any delusions that a darker tone Superman was viable within main continuity by falling flat on its ass so hard that they brought back the classic Superman and gave him a hard to erase son and marriage to truly double down on him


Confining darker tone Superman within elseworlds stories like injustice

[bat39]

The one unquestionably good thing that came out of the New 52 for Superman was the Morrison run and the now-iconic image of ''T-shirt and jeans Superman''...and that's gone now.

That apart, I don't think Superman particularly benefited from the New 52. Yeah, people who loved the 'classic' status quo of a single Superman and Lois not knowing his identity got what they wanted for a while. That's about it.

Oh, and the New 52 did get rid of the trunks...even though they're back in the mainstream comics, the trunk-less look has become standard in other media and it looks likely to stay that way. So if you really wanted Superman to move past the trunks you kinda got your wish...that said, the best trunk-less Superman looks have been outside the New 52 comics...

[Vordan]

New Krypton was completely wasted, all the worldbuilding of Kryptonian society and Zod’s development got undone for a boring poorly written conclusion in War of the Supermen which reset things back to status quo. Then Grounded came along and that was crap. Reign of Doomsday was crap too aside from Rocafort art. Only good book was Action which starred Lex.

But even before that you had the constant continuity ****ery of DC messing with Superman’s origin, the marriage basically hitting a dead end because they didn’t want to make Clark & Lois parents but didn’t know what to do with them otherwise, Johns and Busiek bailing so DC getting Robinson and Rucka to write C-Listers which neither were that enthused about, etc.

At least Morrison Action was about Clark and seemed custom built to tackle multiple criticisms of Superman. He’s too perfect? Well here’s his original personality back so he’s not the corny perfect Boy Scout in the ding dong big city who can’t ever drink alcohol the way some people think of him. Too powerful? He gets wrecked and beat up multiple times but powers through it to show he can take some punishment and dish it out. He fights classic villains like Metallo, Kryptonite Man, and Brainiac alongside new ones. He gets to do journalism stories and make that an active part of who he is. He’s proactive rather than just reactive.

Too bad he sucked everywhere else but Morrison Action sold really well whereas Superman’s sales were in the dumpster by the end of the Pre-Flashpoint era. It got people reading and caring about Superman again. DC completely wasted the opportunity the New 52 offered as they waste everything, it really should been an “Ultimate DC” line, but it got people reading comics and invested in DC again.

[manofsteel1979]

In the Past I've had a love/hate relationship with the New 52. While I thought then and still think it was generally a poorly planned gimmick to boost sales (and was possibly partly a way for Warners and DC to skirt around certain elements of the Superman copyright during that whole clusterfuck legal fight with the Siegel heirs), there were some positives. We got 20 ish issues of Grant Morrison writing a mainstream Superman book whilst giving one of the freshest reinterpretation of the golden age version of the character. It (for awhile) cleaned up the convoluted quagmire of a continuity Superman had accumulated over the previous decade,and my second favorite run of a Superman comic ever,which was Greg Pak's Action Comics. We also got some new characters and concepts that I enjoyed.

However, I think the biggest boon that came out of the N52 , or really it's failure when it came to Superman, was forcing DC to finally move the Superman/Lois marriage forward instead of running away from it as they did for years by then and give them a child which led to the rebirth era,which in turn, inspired the single best live action incarnation of Superman in at least 20 years, namely Superman and Lois the TV series. While we are entering another era I'm lukewarm about (Jon becoming the new Superman while Clark getting sidelined a bit), I'm overall grateful we got the New 52 and the chain of events that resulted. For me,it both ruined Superman and also saved him,if that makes any sense.

But,man...every time I see those early depictions of the New 52 Superman suit,I still cringe. Thankfully it eventually looked better under different interpretations.

[manofsteel1979]

New Krypton was completely wasted, all the worldbuilding of Kryptonian society and Zod’s development got undone for a boring poorly written conclusion in War of the Supermen which reset things back to status quo. Then Grounded came along and that was crap. Reign of Doomsday was crap too aside from Rocafort art. Only good book was Action which starred Lex.

But even before that you had the constant continuity ****ery of DC messing with Superman’s origin, the marriage basically hitting a dead end because they didn’t want to make Clark & Lois parents but didn’t know what to do with them otherwise, Johns and Busiek bailing so DC getting Robinson and Rucka to write C-Listers which neither were that enthused about, etc.

At least Morrison Action was about Clark and seemed custom built to tackle multiple criticisms of Superman. He’s too perfect? Well here’s his original personality back so he’s not the corny perfect Boy Scout in the ding dong big city who can’t ever drink alcohol the way some people think of him. Too powerful? He gets wrecked and beat up multiple times but powers through it to show he can take some punishment and dish it out. He fights classic villains like Metallo, Kryptonite Man, and Brainiac alongside new ones. He gets to do journalism stories and make that an active part of who he is. He’s proactive rather than just reactive.

Too bad he sucked everywhere else but Morrison Action sold really well whereas Superman’s sales were in the dumpster by the end of the Pre-Flashpoint era. It got people reading and caring about Superman again. DC completely wasted the opportunity the New 52 offered as they waste everything, it really should been an “Ultimate DC” line, but it got people reading comics and invested in DC again.

You definitely lay out well just how bad things were that last year leading to the New 52. New Krypton held so much promise and DC nerfed it so throughly,all to basically do Grounded,which was just....bad. The line needed a refresh for sure. I still think it could have been accomplished without the radical reboot,but ultimately at the end of the whole experiment everything sort of worked out fairly well . I still think the even under Bendis and now the current status quo the main titles are in a better shape than they were circa 2010-early 2011.

[Adekis]

Prior to Flashpoint, there was this trend of making Superman out to be kind of a sad sack with a lot of self-doubt. Maybe that trend is back again now; I got some of that vibe from Bendis in the issues I read of his before I dropped the title, though I would hope that BvS' failure would discourage DC from pursuing that characterization too much.

Post-Flashpoint Superman, by contrast, was a pretty decisive and self-assured character. He usually knew what he thought the right thing to do was, and then he did it! This isn't universally true across the board - it wasn't true for the initial run on the "Superman" title for example. But it was true for almost the entire 52 issues of Action Comics. Superman's doubts tended not to keep him down and out for long in the New 52, and I really value that vibrancy.


Morrison's Superman was and is my absolute blueprint for how to make Superman work in a contemporary world, but very little of it seemed to last beyond his run, and not much of what remained lasted beyond the New 52. That's why I started with Kal's more decisive attitude - it stuck, at least throughout Rebirth, and I really appreciated that. Like I said, don't know how much his backbone weathered Bendis, or if we're back to what Morrison derisively called "that weird emo Superman," but at the very least it stuck for a while.

I also admire the down-to-Earthness of New 52 Superman's social awareness. He's not sitting there going "If I do X or Y, how does it look on an international stage? Is it right for me to be an American citizen? Is it right for me to stop a war?" etc etc. Instead he's got the Golden Age attitude of "obviously I should stop a war," but also it comes up less often because a lot of his more personal attention is on his own city. He helps with community construction, he stands with his neighborhood when they're besieged by cops, stuff like that. A lot of Superman comics treat the Man of Steel as kind of remote from his community, because he's so literally above them, and he spends a lot of time flying around the whole world - but I love the moments we get with him in his neighborhood community in the New 52, and it's very rare elsewhere.

The other thing I like, and this is a lot more fanboyish, is the sense of a return to the pre-Crisis world, reformulated to fit contemporary sensibilities. My go-to-example is the Fortress of Solitude that Kal gets from Brainiac at the end of Action Comics # 8. Later he's using his traditional arctic one, so what happened to the space fortress? Well, it was infested by Urko the Terrible in Action Comics # 261, all the way back in 1960! As with the pseudo-Golden Age standing in for the real one, it seems that Morrison allows for Superman's history to occur off-panel, in between the time jumps of their non-linear Action run. And Rao, I just absolutely love that!

[Doctor Know]

New Krypton was completely wasted, all the worldbuilding of Kryptonian society and Zod’s development got undone for a boring poorly written conclusion in War of the Supermen which reset things back to status quo. Then Grounded came along and that was crap. Reign of Doomsday was crap too aside from Rocafort art. Only good book was Action which starred Lex.

But even before that you had the constant continuity ****ery of DC messing with Superman’s origin, the marriage basically hitting a dead end because they didn’t want to make Clark & Lois parents but didn’t know what to do with them otherwise, Johns and Busiek bailing so DC getting Robinson and Rucka to write C-Listers which neither were that enthused about, etc.

At least Morrison Action was about Clark and seemed custom built to tackle multiple criticisms of Superman. He’s too perfect? Well here’s his original personality back so he’s not the corny perfect Boy Scout in the ding dong big city who can’t ever drink alcohol the way some people think of him. Too powerful? He gets wrecked and beat up multiple times but powers through it to show he can take some punishment and dish it out. He fights classic villains like Metallo, Kryptonite Man, and Brainiac alongside new ones. He gets to do journalism stories and make that an active part of who he is. He’s proactive rather than just reactive.

Too bad he sucked everywhere else but Morrison Action sold really well whereas Superman’s sales were in the dumpster by the end of the Pre-Flashpoint era. It got people reading and caring about Superman again. DC completely wasted the opportunity the New 52 offered as they waste everything, it really should been an “Ultimate DC” line, but it got people reading comics and invested in DC again.

Never stop reminding people of where Superman was before the New 52.

The abortion the New Krypton storyline. Two and a half years in set-up, flushed by Reign of the Supermen. Reign of Doomsday, Grounded, Johns’ Secret Origin (mostly there to hype New Krypton and set the antagonist status quo of General Lane and foreshadow Lex’s death on Action), Up, Up and Away, Johns’ Last Son (Superman II Redux with Richard Donner co-writing), etc.

The events at the time weren’t really about Supes at all. Countdown, Final Crisis, Batman RIP, Blackest Night/Brightest Day, Cry for Justice. I couldn’t tell you what the JL was even about at the time.

A lot of books were underwater pre-New 52. New 52 gave a shot in the arm for a lot of titles and characters. I would say Supes made out a lot better during the New 52 than most. The lack of planning, some mediocre stories and the writers running out of ideas did them in.

[superduperman]

It gave him one of the best origins he ever had. I'm still pissed they didn't make at least some effort to keep it. Better than Johns watered down "homage" to the silver age. It also gave him, at least at first, a clean slate to fix a lot of the continuity problems that occurred during the post-Crisis era. Superman post IC was a mess history wise. The costume was ass, though. Jim Lee's a great artist but he needs to be kept miles away from costume design. His bandolier of pouches for Cyclops on the X-Men should have been a clue. Don't get me wrong, New 52 had a LOT or problems. Editorial was a mess. And I have no doubt Didio's mandates and micromanaging (at least according to Gail Simone) had a lot to do with that. But at least at first he had the potential to do great things.

[Quinlan58]

Served as proof-of-concept that incorporating more of the Golden Age ethos to current Superman comics didn't have to be just a fun reference or a "times have changed" moment, but something genuinely exciting. That's how we got Superman Smashes the Klan (probably the most acclaimed Superman story of the past decade), and it's also seemingly influencing the current direction of the comics, not just in the obvious "get Morrison to write a Superman mini" way but also in how everything we've heard about Jon Kent's upcoming solo comic makes it sound like Tom Taylor's take on a modernized Golden Age Superman.

[SiegePerilous02]

Pretty much what others have said. Maybe a full reboot wasn't necessary, but Morrison's Action run is still the best modern Superman run we've had in a while and has yet to be topped by what has come after. By returning the character to his roots, it showed what a joke he had become by the time Flashpoint gave him a mercy kill. It showed he could be cool and relevant, had flaws but they wouldn't keep him down. It distilled him down to a perfect fusion of the Golden and Silver/Bronze ages with an eye to the future. Of course, DC is just really bad at capitalizing on anything, so the rest of the New 52 spun its wheels despite the odd good thing here and there. I don't think it helped that the most prolific thing New 52 Superman was in aside from Morrison's run was Johns' JL where Johns continued to write him as a bland muscle head focused on the misfire that was his romance with Wonder Woman. And the Jim Lee costume totally sucked.

So the New 52 run as a whole maybe wasn't great, but I wish Morrison had been brought on board to do a run similar to their Batman run: an "everything counts" run that would allow them to make a modernized origin re-telling with several pre-Crisis elements re-worked in while the modern Superman would be married to Lois and have his broad continuity still in place while heading in a new direction. There really is nothing about T-shirt and jeans Superman that precludes him from becoming the current guy who is married to Lois and has a kid.

Johnson seems to be setting up a lot of neat stuff for the Super mythos and consulting with Morrison gives me hope that New 52 Action Comics will be quietly re-worked into being his starting point again. If nothing else, that's all from the New 52 we need to preserve.

[Sacred Knight]

Off my head:

It gave him the best origin he's had ever since the simple but effective pre-Crisis origin in Superman #53.
Revamped his overall character back into a rough and tumble, hard-hitting but still kind social crusader. Dampened the boy scout persona which had just gone too wild.
Erased the marriage.
Showed you could quite easily update his costume, that its not a sin to do so.

Unfortunately all these things are gone now, but that's a whole other discussion. Along with the fact they didn't optimally build on these things during the era anyway.

[Stanlos]

Thanks so much, fellow Kryptonians! It looks like the rough spot for pre Flashpoint was in the section of my collection I am still trying reacquire. It sounds like after the Infinite Crisis and the first (and lauded) 52, there was some loss of direction? I do remember being excited for New Krypton and the re-establishment of DC extra solar stage. But I cannot remember what became of it. Hopefully it fared better than the similar innovations that Rucka had initiated in WW preIC.

I am surprised to read about his origin having become a mess. I thought it had more or less been constant. But with wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much ridiculous Jesus stuff added.

As for the T-shirt and jeans, it looks like my top 2 continue to suffer similar fates. Whereas WW was given Wonder Girl's origin with Flashpoint it seems Superman was given Superboy's costume. It never quite jived for me as both seemed like demotions of a sort