Posted By Dan Greenfield on Jun 17, 2026 | 10 comments

An ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL, by a 13th Dimension reader…

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Before reading this, you might want to check out Aaron’s HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH SUPERMAN — Though He Did Need a Refresh by 1986. Click here. — Dan

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By AARON HAMMONDS

I love Superman. His costume, his powers, his friends, his city… everything about him. Superman is the ultimate example of the best we can be, with or without powers.

He’s had numerous incarnations over the decades, from the printed page to cinema, from television to Broadway, but one particular iteration of the character holds a special place in my heart. He goes by many names: the post-Crisis Superman, the reboot Superman, the Modern Age Superman, the Iron Age Superman, the Dark Age Superman… the John Byrne Superman.

Byrne was a comics juggernaut by the mid-1980s; his work on The Avengers, The X-Men, and Fantastic Four had made him a superstar at Marvel. Since he was both a writer and artist, his name was often spoken in the same breath as both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He was possibly the most revered creator working at Marvel at the time… and then he quit.

Marvel’s Distinguished Competition had lured him over to work on its flagship hero: Superman.

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In the early months of 1986, I read in Dick Giordano’s Meanwhile… column that DC was going to launch a revamp of Superman, spearheaded by John Byrne from Marvel Comics. I was intrigued: What did that mean, exactly? Was Superman getting a new costume? New powers?

I eventually found out that this would be a complete re-interpretation of the character, after DC used Crisis on Infinite Earths to clear its slate. I was curious about this new Superman we would be getting — he’d become dull, I thought — and decided to check him out.

The grand unveiling followed the end of the current Superman continuity — Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” which to this day remains one of my all-time favorite Superman stories. It was pencilled, fittingly, by Curt Swan, the king of the Super-illustrators.

Then came June and Byrne’s The Man of Steel #1. I was so excited when I got my copy, I immediately had to tell myself to temper my expectations; I remembered the many disappointing Superman stories I had read over the past couple of years.

The moment I opened it, I recognized immediately that everything I knew about Superman was out the window. Gone were Krypton’s flying cars and the multi-color suits that looked like someone had put Buck Rogers and The Jetsons in a blender.

Instead, we were presented with Krypton as an arid, lifeless, dystopian landscape that really felt like science fiction, especially the science fiction of the 1980s, the era of Aliens, Dune, Blade Runner,and Enemy Mine. It felt like what I imagined an alien world would look like, rather than the pseudo-utopian fever dreams of writers and artists who conceived of Krypton before space travel was even a reality.

Suddenly, 18 years later! We jump to Clark playing football… wait, what was that? Clark Kent a star athlete? Quarterback of the football team? Where are his glasses? Why aren’t the football players pushing him around and laughing at him? Isn’t someone going to figure out he’s Superboy? Wait, he’s not Superboy, either? And the Kents are alive into Clark’s adulthood? The hell?

This was an even bigger paradigm shift than Krypton! Clark was popular, confident, tall, muscular… he looked like a regular guy, albeit an athletic one, very much like George Reeves on The Adventures of Superman, which was still big in syndication during my elementary school days. As much as I adored, and still adore, Christopher Reeve’s performance, I’ve always been far more partial to the Clark Kent of George Reeves: a competent, confident guy who was still a leader, with or without the cape.

And I know this is going to get some hate from some of my fellow Superman fans, but I’ve never been crazy about him putting on a costume at the age of 8, 12, 15, or whenever your Superboy head canon says he did; I greatly prefer him first donning the suit as an adult. Needless to say, as of the end of the first issue, this new version of Superman was checking all my boxes. When he took off from his parents’ farm in full costume and called himself Superman for the first time (here comes one of those tried-and-true cliches), I swear I could hear the John Williams theme in my head.

The next two weeks couldn’t go by fast enough for me to get the next issue, which introduced us to Margot Kidder… uh, I mean Lois Lane. Lois had been portrayed as a strong woman before, but her history was unfortunately tinged with a lot of man-craziness in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. She was constantly swooning over Superman, crying when there was the slightest hint he might be interested in another woman, acting like her sense of self-worth depended on becoming the Metropolis Marvel’s ball and chain.

None of this was present in the new Lois, who was all about her career, and being the best at it. She spends the entire issue chasing Superman not as a romantic interest, but because he’s news. We even see her brush off the richest guy in Metropolis, one of the richest guys in the world, in pursuit of the story (more on him later).

This was the first era of strong female action characters (Ellen Ripley’s a big example, or Sara from Day of the Dead), and the new Lois fit right into that mold — which explained why she was so pissed at the end when she finally got the interview she wanted… only to find out some new guy named Kent had beaten her to it, leading to years of resentment and professional rivalry. This was very much an ’80s Lois Lane.

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Issue #3… this was the one I was probably the most excited about. I finally got to see the new version of Superman and Batman’s first meeting. Unfortunately, this was the one that let me down the most, possibly because the guest star was my favorite character at the time and maybe my expectations were a little too high.

Don’t get me wrong, it had its highlights: Batman managing to disappear from Superman’s view just by knowing the city like the back of his hand; Batman surreptitiously using himself as a human shield to keep Superman at bay; and of course, Magpie was a bit of a letdown as a villain for the World’s Finest to tackle.

But the biggest impression this one left on me, and a change that I instantly loved and embraced, was the establishment that Superman and Batman were no longer friends. We were seeing this in The Dark Knight Returns, but that was set at some indeterminate point in the future; they could have been friends in the past and had a falling out at some point.

The Man of Steel #3 established that this was the new status quo; they are, at best, uneasy allies, which I found made total sense given their radically different worldviews and methods. Clark is the eternal optimist, always trying to see the good in people; Bruce eyes everyone with at least a hint of suspicion, expecting the worst in people and usually finding it.

When I glanced at the cover for Issue #4, I wondered, “Who is this red-headed guy in the suit, smoking a cigar?” Then I saw the caption at the top of the cover: “Lex Luthor Strikes!” My mind went back to Issue #2, when Lois blew off Lex’s offer of a ride in his limo, our first hint of the new Luthor’s background — a rich megalomaniac who thinks he can buy or sell anything and anyone… until he encounters Superman.

This was the perfect villain for the ’80s: not a hokey mad scientist breaking out of prison every 10 minutes to attack Superman with some sort of fantastical machine that could just as easily make him rich if he just patented it, but an utterly corrupt businessman who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. The real-life news was full of guys just like this. The following year, when I saw Wall Street (still one of my all-time favorite movies), I almost immediately thought of Gordon Gekko as a thin Lex Luthor.

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Issue #5 was a perfect story for the era, dealing with the inherent dangers and questionable ethics of cloning. Bizarro as a failed experiment rather than born from an imperfect duplicator ray was a brilliant update. No more crude, giant medallion with “Bizarro #1” on it, no more cube-shaped Bizarro World, just a pitiful creature who doesn’t realize the threat he poses: He actually thinks he is Superman and that the real one is some kind of imposter to be attacked.

The final issue serves as a perfect bookend for the series by returning to both of Clark’s homes: the one that raised him, and the one that spawned him.

The brilliant juxtaposition of Clark visiting the farm where he grew up, then being bombarded with strange images of the alien world on which he was conceived, echoes cinematic classics such as War of the Worlds and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and predates later films like Super 8 and Signs.

It was also compelling to see the now-adult Lana Lang and to hear from her how knowing Clark’s secret unintentionally damaged her life. 13-year-old me, already having spent years on a steady diet of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, was riveted by stories of normal people dealing with the abnormal. This issue, sometimes seen as a throwaway or one of the weaker of the series, was a perfect ending to me.

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One other important aspect of this final issue is how Clark deals with the information he has received; he now knows everything about Krypton, but he doesn’t really care. He knows where he came from, but his emotional attachment is to the loving farm couple who raised him. We’ll no longer see exclamations of “Great Krypton!” or “Great Rao!” in the coming pages of his monthly adventures, because this guy has no emotional connection to them.

The Man of Steel was, in many ways, a product of its time, but, then again, so was I. The comics, movies, and literature I was absorbing primed me to buy exactly what Byrne was selling that summer. I’m not saying that other iterations of Superman’s origin are invalid, or useless, or wrong, but no other version will hit me quite the way this one did. It came at the perfect time in my life when I wanted to love Superman, but just couldn’t latch on to the one appearing monthly in the mid-’80s up to that point.

Byrne made Superman fresh, original, and exciting again. It wasn’t my introduction to the character, but it was the one that made me want to stay. John Byrne made me a Superman fan, and for that, I will forever be in his debt.

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MORE

— HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH SUPERMAN — Though He Did Need a Refresh by 1986. Click here.

— Why JOHN BYRNE’S SUPERMAN Was the Greatest Man of Steel Ever. Click here.

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AARON HAMMONDS fell in love with comics and superheroes over 40 years ago; his passion was reignited in 2025 by James Gunn’s Superman. He resides in Pensacola, Florida, with his beautiful wife.