Originally Posted by
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!