How would you rate the Superman run by Geoff Johns?

[Demoslider]

I see there is no omnibus, but a number of trades from theJohns run. What would be the best arcs from this run? Thank you.

[Vordan]

Talking his Pre-Flashpoint Action Comics run or his brief New 52 Superman run? His Action run is great, I easily recommend reading the whole thing, but the best arcs from that are Up, Up, and Away, Brainiac, Superman & the Legion of Superheroes, Escape from Bizarroworld, and Last Son of Krypton. His New 52 Superman run is fine although not as good as Action, it serves as something of a prologue to Rebirth, and the best issue from that is the one where Superman spends 24 hours without his powers, lot of great character moments in that issue.

[Demoslider]

Thank you. I like stories involving Braniac and Bizarro, so I will check those out.

[Frontier]

I enjoyed it .

[Myskin]

First run is nice, albeit incomplete (Johns left before New Krypton, which was supposed to be the climax of the run) and more of a "Greatest Superman hits" than anything else (it was basically used to reintroduce classic villains and allies like Bizarro, the Legion, Brainiac etc.).
But I'll never, EVER forgive Johns for reintroducing the Donnerism which has plagued the character since then (even if to a degree it was probably editorially mandated because of Superman Returns).

New 52 run - forgettable. In fact, everyone has forgotten it.

[Thor-Ul]

Kinda thorn. A lot of elements are good in the first run, but it had a overload of Superman the movie nostalgia. He did reintroduce several Silver age elements but he knew how to update them, even if some of the way I didn't agree. However he knew how to give SUperman his voice.
That was an aspect he kept in his second run. CUriously, his new52 run was far more creative. He created different concepts I suppose because he couldn't use the nostalgia. And yet, it felt a little more distant.
Neither run was perfect, but curiously, I would say than the second run was more original than the second, but the first one Iike it better.

[Vordan]

First run is nice, albeit incomplete (Johns left before New Krypton, which was supposed to be the climax of the run) and more of a "Greatest Superman hits" than anything else (it was basically used to reintroduce classic villains and allies like Bizarro, the Legion, Brainiac etc.).
But I'll never, EVER forgive Johns for reintroducing the Donnerism which has plagued the character since then (even if to a degree it was probably editorially mandated because of Superman Returns).

New 52 run - forgettable. In fact, everyone has forgotten it.

I’d take the Donner influence if it means Pa’s dead over the Byrne influence of keeping both alive.

[Dagothoth]

First run is nice, albeit incomplete (Johns left before New Krypton, which was supposed to be the climax of the run) and more of a "Greatest Superman hits" than anything else (it was basically used to reintroduce classic villains and allies like Bizarro, the Legion, Brainiac etc.).
But I'll never, EVER forgive Johns for reintroducing the Donnerism which has plagued the character since then (even if to a degree it was probably editorially mandated because of Superman Returns).

New 52 run - forgettable. In fact, everyone has forgotten it.

The Donner aspects were the best parts…especially combining it with pre-crisis mythology like Superboy and the legion of superheroes, brainiac, supergirl/krypto, and bizarro world

It was the best part of the whole damn thing

Also…making Jonathan Kent die in the present day by brainiac’s hand was quite literally the best use of Jonathan Kent’s death in ANY medium

[exile001]

The first run was a 4/10 for me. A somewhat competently written but regressive run that mostly rehashed tired old ideas (most of which I'm not a fan of) and fan wank to the Donner movie.

His characterisation for everyone was 2 dimensional (his "comics as movies" writing).

He specifically wrote an arc to rebuild Brainiac as a major threat that started as an Alien inspired space horror but left us with a thematically weaker, less complex version of the character. His "simplifying" retcons have utterly destroyed Doomsday as a character.

Secret Origin is the worst Superman origin story.

I ultimately feel he stripped so much from Superman while trying to recapture the version from his youth that we were left with a version nobody wanted. One that limped his way to Flashpoint.

In typical DC editorial fashion, this followed a soft-reboot so Johns and Busiek's books did not feel like the same version of the character at all. It was utterly incohesive.

I also find it really creepy when Clark is drawn like Christopher Reeve. Like, a little tasteless and disrespectful somehow.

The second (New 52) run was a dumpster fire. But by that point Johns had long lost any spark that had made him a decent writer.

[Dagothoth]

The first run was a 4/10 for me. A somewhat competently written but regressive run that mostly rehashed tired old ideas (most of which I'm not a fan of) and fan wank to the Donner movie.

His characterisation for everyone was 2 dimensional (his "comics as movies" writing).

He specifically wrote an arc to rebuild Brainiac as a major threat that started as an Alien inspired space horror but left us with a thematically weaker, less complex version of the character. His "simplifying" retcons have utterly destroyed Doomsday as a character.

Secret Origin is the worst Superman origin story.

I ultimately feel he stripped so much from Superman while trying to recapture the version from his youth that we were left with a version nobody wanted. One that limped his way to Flashpoint.

In typical DC editorial fashion, this followed a soft-reboot so Johns and Busiek's books did not feel like the same version of the character at all. It was utterly incohesive.

I also find it really creepy when Clark is drawn like Christopher Reeve. Like, a little tasteless and disrespectful somehow.

The second (New 52) run was a dumpster fire. But by that point Johns had long lost any spark that had made him a decent writer.

“Stripped clark of a lot of things”

There was nothing to strip because thanks to the awful Byrne era…most of everything interesting about Superman himself was already stripped from him

If anything Geoff Johns didn’t write Superman enough in his first run

[Sacred Knight]

Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes was great. Brainiac was good, misses out on great because of the kinda clunker ending setting up the bad World of New Krypton initiative. Secret Origin is terrible (Not for its ideas, most of the stuff brought back indeed I support, but it wasn't a story, it was a cliffs notes checklist), New 52 run was meh.

[godisawesome]

I’d have to say I found it very readable at the start, but needlessly divisive as it went on, eventually over-reliant on obnoxious levels of Pre-Crsis nostalgia, and a bit of a dud at the end, especially around Clark/Superman himself.

I didn’t mind most of the early nostalgia hits; I’m of the opinion that nostalgia is a very useful tool if you’re also good at execution, and the way Johns wrote the first few issues and stories he had wan’t bad. I could even just roll my eyes and ignore the gratuitous sadness-porn of killing Jon Kent to satisfy Pre-Crisis fan bloodlust - because Johns at least made sure to dedicate most of his time doing so to the execution of it, rather than just relying on “My fans think everything old is better.”

But by the time his new version of the Legion of Superheroes showed up, I was getting really fucking annoyed at how empty, vacuous, and ultimately shallow the concept of this new new *new* reboot of the LOS was, and how the same laziness started being applied to a bunch of stuff with the other Kryptonian stuff.

Johns got better again when he started trying to write actual substance again with the New Krypton plot… but then we got even more shallow stuff like General Sam “Johns really wants to write Thunderbolt Ross and doesn’t care about differentiating me” Lane.

[exile001]

“Stripped clark of a lot of things”

There was nothing to strip because thanks to the awful Byrne era…most of everything interesting about Superman himself was already stripped from him

If anything Geoff Johns didn’t write Superman enough in his first run

That's your opinion, and a big problem with Johns' Superman in general. The Superman he loved had been gone for over 20 years but he just plastered his nostalgia over the (then) current one.

It is a massive **** you* to all the fans Superman drew after the reboot while also being utterly blind to modern sensibilities/innovations. It's why shoehorning Clark as Superboy back in doesn't stick. A modern audience finds the concept silly and Smallville (for all its faults) showed a more modern and interesting way of doing that.

The way to return those elements is to examine what could and should work in a modern context and organically reintegrate them over the things that didn't work from the reboot. But also taking a critical eye and acknowledging some of what came after the reboot was (then) much needed modernisation and should be kept. He also should have had an eye on what could be further updated looking towards the next decade.

Loeb was doing exactly that and it worked.

If your head is stuck in a childhood nostalgia that's all you have to offer, and that is Johns' first Superman run.

*I understand Crisis was that to those fans but we're talking about Johns' Superman run not Byrne's.

To put this in some context, I was born in 1980, so I was 6 when the reboot happened (25 for Infinite Crisis/One Year Later). There was no readily available expansive collections or online databases for pre-Crisis Superman so that version was pretty much irrelevant to my generation of fans. Sure, we had Donner's movie but there was also Superman III and IV. That Superman was painfully uncool by the time I was 10. It is a big reason why Superman Returns failed, even if WB/DC refuse to admit it.

I get a lot of older fans want their childhood Superman, but that doesn't mean that version is universally relevant or can pull in new fans today (or 2005 as the case may be). 1981 Superman is a completely different thing to 1951 Superman, so where do you draw the line? The answer is at your childhood because that's the one you think is perfect. That's the trap of nostalgia.

I feel the same about bringing back Barry Allen, btw. Dude was dead before I knew The Flash even existed and, by the time I started reading, made Wally's motivations way more interesting than Barry's ever were. It's why Johns felt he had to kill off Barry's Mum.

Also, I speak of nostalgia but it's just as bad when modern writers want to age these characters along with themselves. That's definitely been a trend we've seen the last few decades.

Mike Grell's Green Arrow is the exception to that rule and a bloody masterpiece.

[phonogram12]

I hated post-Crisis Superman up until the Loeb/McGuiness run, so you would think I would've been all over Johns' Supes. Except he did here what he does to nearly every other comic he touches - he just rewrites great stories from his childhood without ever offering anything new or fresh to them, resulting in a very bland and middle of the road comic book run. His Secret Origin put me to sleep despite the fact that it hit nearly every note I like in a Superman story, mostly because it was nothing I hadn't seen before done better.

[Vordan]

The Donner influence is very clear and obvious with Secret Origin but I totally disagree with the rest of you claiming that’s the entire run. Johns Superman while incorporating that influence is not a one to one copy:



This is not how Chris Reeve acted in the role.