Originally Posted by
godisawesome
I think the foundation for the loss of New 52 Superman was a fairly subtle thing grounded in that point of the New 52 where the honey moon ended and a bunch of DC's editorial boards went a little bit crazy for a bit. I mean, I personally disagree with a lot of New 52 Superman's defining traits, and am a whole hearted supporter of SuperMarriage, Bussiness Lex, and pretty much all the Post-Crisis trappings of the 90's and the ones that snuck into Man Of Steel and BvS. But I'm going to have to admit that aside from my personal biases, there wasn't anything wrong with the Superman books until it became clear that writers could not control the franchise because editorial was too assertive.
There's only three writers who seemed to be able to do what they themselves wanted to do with Superman while they themselves were writing him, and their names were Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, and Geoff Johns. No one held the writing job immediately after Morrison for long enough to really exploit the good will from his work, Snyder was mostly just given a miniseries publicity stunt, and Johns's run seemed like a desperate attempt to get some super star talent on the book. As a result, nothing seemed to really stick from arguably the best writers in the business, while guys like Andy Diggle and George Perez publicly dropped the book because editorial couldn't manage them properly.
As a result, the Superbooks never really hit a true nadir of horrific writing, but they seemed perpetually stuck in a restricted and inconsistent format. I think Scott Lobdell epitomizes the problems the books faced. I'm a Lobdell hater thanks to Teen Titans, but I also know that he's been turned into editorial's hatchet-man more often than was healthy for his writing. I personally don't think he was good enough to be the main Superman writer, but he seems to have been the only one with a strong relationship with editorial, and it still kind of screwed him over. He came in with a lot of ideas, but still had to shill what editorial wanted him to, got his run overstuffed, and eventually left most of his ideas stillborn because there were too many demands on him.
So in hindsight, the switch back to the crossover heavy format for the books was editorial trying to clean up its own mess. No one can stand to work under the editorial board long enough to build their Superman? Okay, then editorial will build their Superman in the same, largely successful, way that the 90's books pulled off. It's just that the 90's in DC saw outrageously good writers holding editorial positions, while simulataneously employing all the ambitious writers the artist-favoring Marvel and Image had kicked out, so their weekly story format was strong, and the New 52's...wasn't.