Guide to Superman, 1987 - Present (New for Patrons!)

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s one of my biggest single-character guide pages of all time exclusively for Pledgeonaut Patrons of CK. That’s right, folks, it’s my second super week in a row, because today I bring to you my Guide to Superman (Post-Crisis, 1987 – Present), including a full issue-by-issue reading order for the Triangle Era!

Guide to Superman (Post-Crisis, 1987 – Present)

For the past seven years this Guide to Superman has existed somewhere between being my white whale and my albatross. I knew I had to tackle Superman at some point. But, he is the Justice League hero who I knew the least about. Plus, I could never make heads or tails of his publishing history – with how his titles traded names in 1987 only to swap back in 2006.

Oh, plus, there was the little matter of THE TRIANGLE ERA. From 1991 to 2001, every Superman comic was coordinated in perfect reading order by a brain trust of editors and authors, with their covers clearly labeled with their absolute placement within each year of continuity.

That meant I had to make a guide that was even better at explaining The Triangle Era than the hundreds of comic book covers from the actual Triangle Era.

😬

Over the past few years I’ve made a few half-hearted starts at this guide, but each time I felt like I was just listing Triangle Era issues in order. People have created very handy spreadsheets for that. My guide had to do something more.

Plus, I was mindful of not repeating the past mistakes of my Guide to Spider-Man – Peter Parker (1963 – 2018), which is so dense with reading order notes that it can be hard to use it as a guide to anything!

Two things changed that let me find my way into this guide. Well, really just one thing separated by 30 years: I read a lot of Superman.

I read all of Superman’s titles in DC Rebirth starting in January 2017 when I began to build my DC Guides. I devoured Superman: Lois and Clark (2015) #1-8, which established Clark & Lois as parents to their own young superboy Jon Kent.

Suddenly, Superman clicked for me like he never had before. I don’t think it was because I was also a parent to a toddler at the time. It was more that this character who has always been expressed as having a boundless amount of love and empathy for the world finally made sense to me when he was portrayed as a father.

I fell in love with Superman as a dad and his comics moved up my digital pull list month by month until they were some of my most-eager reads by the time we moved to New Zealand later that year. However, my enthusiasm for his books dulled from 2018 onward, as writers started tinkering with Jon Kent and the family-oriented tone of the comics. They weren’t bad – they just weren’t the Superman I had suddenly fallen in love with.

That’s why I went back to start reading Superman’s Post-Crisis comics from the very start – from The Man of Steel (1987) #1-6, John Byrne’s reintroduction of Superman to a Post-Crisis DC Universe (parallel to George Pérez’s similar work on Wonder Woman (1987), one of my favorite comic books of all time).

Sometimes in the process of building and maintaining 200+ comic guides I lose touch with actually reading the source material. Digging into Byrne’s Superman relaunch was a revelation. I don’t have an opinion on whether Byrne is a “best ever” Superman writer, but I do have a soft-spot for the iconic late-80s artwork and colors on those comics.

Also, reading the books finally helped me understand Superman’s publishing history. The Man of Steel (1987) with no “Superman” in the title was just a mini-series. Afterwards, Action Comics (1938) kept running, uninterrupted. What used to be Superman (1939) became Adventures of Superman (1987) so that Byrne could launch a new Superman (1987) #1 to give people a fresh place to start (as was the case for every DC hero except for Batman from 1987 to 1991). Then, later, in 1991 DC launched a fourth Superman ongoing title – Superman: The Man of Steel (1991).

From there, it was much easier to follow the titles as they wove together in the Triangle Era, spread apart afterwards, and eventually collapsed back into simple Action Comics and Superman after Infinite Crisis in 2006.

With a newfound love for Superman comics and an understanding of the puzzle of his Post-Crisis publishing history, it was finally time for me to tackle The Triangle Era in the Crushing Comics style. What could I bring to it that was more than the iconic cover triangles?

In working to figure that out over the past month, I have fallen in love with The Triangle Era – which I previously only knew from “Death & Return of Superman.” Is this is the Stockholm Syndrome of working through one of my biggest single-characters guides talking? I’ll never be sure. But, after building this guide I feel like The Triangle Era is the most-impressive feat of editorial coordination in all of modern American comic books.

The Triangle Era coordinated four or more titles every month in perfect order across three or more authors for an entire decade. That’s close to 50 issues a year, or nearly 500 issues in a perfected reading order that works just as well today – 30 years as it began – as it did as it released monthly at the time.

X-Men could never!

Not only that, but the stories were often great. So many people know The Triangle Era just for “Death & Return of Superman,” but gave us such a richness of Superman stories – a richness the character never had before. We got to see Superman from every angle – as a hero, as a reporter, as a partner, as an alien, and as an American. And, as a Blue version of himself!

Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, and more created the most-compelling patchwork of stories any single character has had in the American comics medium.

Batman was never so well-coordinated for so long. Spider-Man’s titles often wholly ignore each other. And, as for team, X-Men can barely manage this sort of thing for two years at a time – that’s why I have so many comic guides to begin with.

I picked the perfect time to finally work through this guide, because DC Comics is finally beginning to collect The Triangle Era in omnibus later this year – along with the tightly-coordinated period directly preceding it! Before the past few months of solicits, The Triangle Era was only sparsely collected outside of “Death & Return of Superman” and some outdated paperbacks covering the late 90s. Now, we have a hope that DC could cover all 10 years in a dozen omnibuses rivaling Marvel’s dedication to comprehensively collecting X-Men, Spider-Man, and Deadpool.

This is a rare guide that isn’t totally complete upon launch. That’s because for now it is focused only on Superman’s ongoing series. If it’s an ongoing solo Superman series from 1987 and onward other than Action Comics, it’s in this guide! However, as I continue to edit the guide when new Superman (2023) issues come out each month, I’ll be weaving in all of Superman’s in-continuity mini-series and one-shots – even if they never got included in Triangle order.

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