The Death of Superman

I just saw someone walking around wearing a "Superman: 1938 - 1992" tshirt.

I was kind of embarrassed for him. What is that t-shirt commemorating? A comic book story from last decade that received mainstream national press, and contributed to a collectors bubble? Or... some sort of hypothetical death of Superman that kind of did but kind of didn't happen in 1992?

I google in search of, perhaps, an image of this t-shirt. I find commentary regarding the death of heroes... a hi-faluting and preposterous essay:

I guess that I've been wondering whether he was destroyed by a creature called Doomsday, just so the comic book publishers could make a fast buck, or is it a sign of the times? Are most of our Heroes and Heroines being sold out or not living up to our expectations? This sudden departure of Superman and some recent attitude changes on my own behalf has really caused me to review Superman's life and my own ideals on heroism as well.

As I showed earlier, Superman was not a hero. He could be positively genocidal at times. (Though I guess you can't accuse him of being Saddam Hussein -- Saddam Hussein, you know, killed his own people... Superman is incapable of killing his own people, as they have the same powers or don't have the same powers and have the same achille's heel to Kryptonite as he does.)

Never mind. I remember Ruben (he of "Justin Bustin" fame) brought a bunch of comics from this era to Camp Cispus. Some boys in the bunk borrowed, and read through them. Supergirl evidentally took over the comic of Action Comics, and so we got a lot of skipping over those ones.

Whatshisname -- and by whatshisname I'm referring to this smart kid named Francisco -- read the novelization of the whole "Death of Superman" arc. (I don't think he did a book report on it.) A product that seems kind of absurd to me -- akin to the novelization of "Itchy and Scratchy the Movie".

The comics the company is most proud of are of the funeral to Superman, eulogizing him. The love here comes with showing what an icon Superman is, and why he's so very important, when as a general rule fans kind of view the title as a silly after-thought -- published out of habit. Nay. It is and has always been a silly comic, and it's incapable of being anything else. See... he fought nazis, then he fought Lex Luthor, then he fought gorillas (no -- strike that. Every gorilla cover I've seen the gorillas have been friendly), then he fought Myz-something or other (the subject of my favorite episode of, and the only one I remember, the WB cartoon series), then he fought Lex Luthor again, then he fought Doomsday, and now I don't know what he's doing.

(This looks like a cool comic, all that being said. A "Planet of the Apes" with the Statue of Liberty sequence, it looks like. Beyond which, Evan Dorkin wrote a few comics and tv episodes... though the cartoon I mentioned I looked hard at the credits, and no he did not write... the one I identified as being written by Dorkin and Dyer -- I had no opinion of and do not now remember.)

I won a prize at a County Fair for a drawing of Superman. I was 5 -- it looks like what you'd imagine a 5-year old drawing Superman looks like. The drawing was on my parents' wall -- a curiosity as to what childhood items were kept and weren't, this one was. I don't know if it's still there.