Osaka117 said:
I gotta be honest, none of what you described in this video or part 1 sounded that particularly bad to me, in fact it sounded pretty boss. Of course I don't actually read comics so I guess that makes my opinions less than worthless, but I just felt I needed to say that after watching both videos. Well okay, that reborn superman did look like a dumb punisher wanna be, and that mullet was way too much, but other than that you only made me more interested in the death of superman.
Also I have to ask, Bob, is there ANYTHING you like or even deem passable that existed in the 90s, which seems to be just a decade long entertainment sinkhole in your eyes?
I won't pretend to speak for Moviebob but I'm definitely from his same generation, although 2 or 3 years older. The Death Of Superman is a great entry level comic book story and I always recommend it to anyone who's looking to get into them. It's not literature and it's highly melodramatic, but you definitely come off it knowing a lot of not just how comic book stories operate, but the business of it as well.
Fans who've grown slightly jaded or have taken themselves out of collecting comic books for whatever reasons they can either look back on these stories with either rose-tinted glasses or a deep loathing of what they, in their maturity, have now realized were exploitative or manipulative business schemes. But the truth is that you get that from anything you enjoy in entertainment, because it's a business. What you shouldn't forget is that in all this business/entertainment there's also a lot of creative people who do their job because they are passionate about it. So, whatever reason DC comics had for coming up with the Death of Superman, you get comic books with good art from Dan Jurgens, Jackson Guice, Jon Bogdanove and Tom Grummet, who each channel in their own way the best about the visual language of comic books.
Superman 75 has some of the most beautiful pages Dan Jurgens has ever drawn and the fact that he chose to go splash pages for the whole issue makes the last moments of the battle the most epic. It's an attempt from the artist/writer Jurgens for the reader to let the whole sequence sink in.
Bob doesn't give credit to Doomsday because he only sees it from the "business ploy" POV, but the truth is that Doomsday is the perfect Cave Troll/Dragon/Godzilla/Midgard Serpent that our St.George/Hercules/Superman couldn't slay, which makes the whole Death of Superman one of the finest ways the Bronze Age of superheroes gets thrust into the Postmodern/pastiche world of the 90's...even better than some of Grant Morrison's convoluted chaos magic,meta-reality attempts. Because they played it with a straight face and an unrelenting story that didn't take breaks for the narrative.
It is very reductive and superficial of Moviebob to compare Cyborg Superman to the T-800, when he's about one of the few supervillains with a REALLY AWESOME backstory created in recent years and a respectable power set. Most other supervillains are from previous decades. If he knew anything about the Cyborg Superman he would've compared it with the classic Wolfman story because all Hank Henshaw wants to do is die so that he can end this atrocity that has happened to him. But Moviebob went by Cyborg's look. He keeps turning up in stories because every time he does it's just badass, like in the Sinestro Corps War and even now on DC New 52's Supergirl comics.
I could go on and on, but the more sensible thing is that I simply vouch for the idea that there's a whole of things to like about the 90's and it's worth to check it out if some of you guys haven't. Yes, there's a lot of REAL CRAP, but also good things that even oldies like Moviebob and I didn't really consider at full light, which any of you could probably find redeeming aspects.
I will agree with Moviebob though that Batman's Knightfall was a much better event. But I assume it's because DC learned a few things from the icebreaker Death of Superman