A 40th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Alan Moore’s era-ending Superman classic resonates — for good and for bad… By PAUL KUPPERBERG “This is an imaginary story… Aren’t they all?” — Prologue to “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” written by Alan Moore, Superman #423 (released May 20, 1986) I have to confess, that line annoyed me then and still makes my left eye twitch a little now. It read to me like a trendy, post-modernistic wink at the reader, a pre-emptive apology for the silliness ahead. Or was that just me? Another confession: There were parts of the introduction for 2009’s Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? collected edition where I may have written some things that didn’t exactly line up with my own feelings on the story. I toed the company line about the necessity of Crisis on Infinite Earths to streamline the DC Universe and eliminate the confusion of “many different Earths set in many different dimensions, each host to many different versions of Batman or Flash or Wonder Woman or Superman” so that readers would no longer need to be “conversant with fifty-plus years of characters and continuity in order to read a title. There was to be only one Earth, existing in one universe, featuring (for the most part) only one version of any given character,” but deep in my heart I knew those 50-plus years of characters and continuity were both the company’s charm and legacy. I thought that was ridiculous, and I offer as validation for my belief that 40 years down the line from Crisis, the DCU is more convoluted and twisted than it ever was pre-Crisis. But there’s no denying that if a “last” Superman story was needed, departing Man of Steel editor Julie Schwartz chose a writer for the project who would bring the maximum exposure to the story. I interviewed Julie for the introduction and he said, “I ask this at comic conventions: ‘Who would you, sitting in my editorial chair, mid-1985, ask to write that story?’ He wrote the first one, let him write the ‘last’ one—Jerry Siegel!” At that year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Julie popped the question to Siegel, a fellow guest at the show, who responded, “Oh… boy, well, I have to think about that… no, no need to think about it. I would love...