Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 20, 2026 | 14 comments

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.

Version 1.0.0

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 to write it!” Unfortunately, the ongoing legal disputes between the Superman creators and DC made that impossible, but fortunately, he found a resolution to his problem the next morning.

“I happened to be having breakfast with Alan Moore,” Julie recalled in 2009. “So, I told him about my difficulties. At that point he literally rose out of his chair, put his hands around my neck, and said, ‘If you let anybody but me write that story, I’ll kill you.’ Since I didn’t want to be an accessory to my own murder, I agreed.”

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? — which began 40 years ago in May 20’s Superman #423 and ended in June’s Action Comics #583 — was a tough story for me to read, much less write about objectively. DC Comics was essentially killing off “my” Superman. Yes, it might be difficult to see the connection between the juvenile stories of the Mort Weisinger era that I was raised on and this darker version, but the connective tissue was all there, in the comfortable familiarity of the Curt Swan art (here inked by George Perez and Kurt Schaffenberger), and the characters and concepts originally created, let’s face it, to appeal to 10-year-old readers.

I had been part of that lineage not just as a reader since around 1960 but as a writer as well, having contributed countless pages of stories to the pre-Crisis Superman family of titles and the syndicated newspaper strip in the early 1980s. Man of Tomorrow represented a clear break from that lineage, a fatal finale to a 48-year-run that left no doubt everything I knew and loved about Superman, all the stories I wrote about him, were going away.

And yet, for all its darkness, there was something satisfying about Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? I may not have liked what it represented, but I could appreciate that Moore had been handed a lot of plot threads that had become loose ends to be tied up, and he did the job, offering thorough and often shocking closure to the old guard.

Superman wasn’t going to go out with a whimper, that was for sure.

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?:

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1. The Superman #423 Cover. Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson — the “Swanderson” art team of legend — offer a loose homage to 1960’s Superman Annual #1.

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2. That issue’s splash page features another nod to another of those early giants, 1963’s Superman Annual #7, the classic 25th Silver Anniversary Issue that sported an eye-catching silver statue of the Man of Steel at its center.

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3. I admit it: I was jealous that Moore got to do the Bizarro story I always wanted to do, taking the credo of these imperfect duplicates — “Us do opposite of all Earthly things!” — and having him realize that the true opposite of existence was nonexistence. Hello!

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4. An awesome use of superpowers! “Prankster… Toyman… Let me ask you one question: Do you know what radio waves look like? Because I do!”

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5. The prostitute who approaches a guy outside the Daily Planet building, offering that “For twenty bucks I could break your heart,” just so Moore could reveal him to be Metallo so he could tell her, “I doubt it.” See, ’cause… Metallo doesn’t have a heart. Get it?

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6. It was just a couple of panels, but the rapprochement between Lois and Lana in the Fortress was kind of touching and cool.

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7. It was great seeing Swan drawing the Legion of Super-Heroes again, as he’d done once upon a time, long ago and far away, in Adventure Comics in the 1960s.

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8. The Swanderson cover for Action Comics #583. Superman isn’t crying! You’re crying!

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9. The mounting tension of Part 1 explodes, beginning with the super-powered Lana Lang snapping the Brainiac-possessed Lex Luthor’s neck and Jimmy Olsen/Elastic Lad being murdered by Luthor’s animated corpse under Brainiac’s control.

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10. Good boy! (>Sniff! Choke!<)

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11. Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, and the Legion of Super-Villains proved to be no exception!

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12. The instigator of all of Superman’s woes is revealed to be — SPOILER ALERT! — Mr. Mxyzptlk, whom the Man of Steel defeats with the Phantom Ray Projector, the idea given him by the golden statue of himself holding said Projector that was gifted him by Brainiac 5 on the Legion’s visit to the past. It was a very Mort Weisinger/Julie Schwartz denouncement, complete with Superman’s musing, “(Mxyzptlk was) Torn in half between dimensions. He panicked when he saw the ray… just as I knew he would.”

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13. The story, published in 1986, is supposedly set in 1997, so the only reason I can imagine why the “Elliots” would have a bucket of coal in their living room was so their toddler son — who looked nothing like baby Kal-El — could squeeze them into big old diamonds. >Wink!<

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MORE

— 1986: Comics’ Watershed Year — 40 YEARS LATER. Click here.

— DARK KNIGHT RETURNS TURNS 40 — But 1986 Was Even Bigger for BATMAN Than You Realize. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

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