Alan Moore Month: Good-Bye, Superman! We'll Miss You!

"Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is a two-issue comic book story by Alan Moore and Curt Swan, edited by the legendary Julius Schwartz. Its two issues were both published in September 1986.

Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that would later be collected into a single trade paperback and become easily one of the best-selling and most-acclaimed graphic novels of all time. Its first issue was published in September 1986.

It's tempting to read boatloads into that largely coincidental symmetry (although I can't prove it's coincidental; I guess maybe someone in scheduling at DC was aware of the rich meaning in the shared month of publication, but I doubt it). Watchmen really begat the modern era of superhero comics, among other things; "Whatever Happened" was designed from the outset to act as the curtain call for a dead era in superhero comics: The Silver Age, as defined by a specific editorial and storytelling style at DC.

If my blogging compatriot Chris Allen is right and "Watchmen is about escaping the petal-soft death grip of nostalgia to live in the moment," then what is "Whatever Happened" about? On its surface, the story seems to have some nostalgia for the past. Moore frames the tale as an "imaginary story," employing this descriptor to poetic effect. Swan's art instantly evokes the Superman of the 1960s and 1970s. The story drags in every element of the Superman mythos and then some, in the style of other "imaginary" tales like "The Death of Superman" from 1961.

Yet even as he's using common silver age story beats, each gets twisted into some dark version of itself. Bizarro isn't a harmless buffoon; he's a mass murderer. The new Luthor/Brainiac "team-up" involves Luthor's death at the hands of the robot, who digs his metal claws into Luthor's brain and takes over his body; it manages to be especially creepy as drawn by Swan in his traditional Superman style.

In fact, it turns out there's very little nostalgia in the nuts and bolts of Moore's "Whatever Happened." Instead, each element from the past is subverted to more sinister ends than ever before. In a sense, Moore is commenting on the transition in mainstream superhero comics from the light-hearted frolicks of the silver age to the more "reality" based storytelling of the modern age. Those elements had already begun to leak into DC's titles but would fully dominate the publisher's storytelling from post-Crisis onward.

For Moore himself, it's an interesting utilization of these building blocks of the silver age, because it's always seemed clear that he has warm feelings toward the Mort Weisinger school of comics; aside from occasional comments in interviews, his Supreme run could be viewed as a massive modernized love letter to Superman's silver age, pulling off a similar trick of repurposing the era's storytelling fundamentals but with more obvious affection.

On the surface, it's a nostalgic wrap-up to the silver age; dig deeper, and it's a dark dissection of the impending era in superhero comics. Moore seems to be illustrating a gradual creeping of the modern into the stories of the past, creating a bridge of sorts between the pre-Crisis tales that have come before and the tone of the post-Crisis era of DC comics. In "Whatever Happened," the true archenemy of superheroes everywhere, "reality," infects the fantasy world of the pre-Crisis DC universe. Through his villains, Superman experiences vengeance and evil at a level he's never before encountered. The "innocence" of the silver age is abandoned forever.

Also infecting the Silver Age is a new fascination with character development and emotional truth. There were certainly emotions expressed between characters in the silver age, but it's all very surface and subservient to the plotting and ideas. To make a possibly unfairly broad generalization that will surely be refuted with gusto by fans of silver age books, those stories are incredibly clever and creative, and scads of fun...but don't seem very interested in creating real emotional lives for their characters.

In "Whatever Happened," Moore shows us Perry White and his ex-wife reconnecting in what they believe is their final living moments, a touching moment between those two characters that would be virtually unimaginable in any silver age Superman story. The sharpened purpose of Superman's villains raises the dramatic stakes; when members of the Legion of Super-Heroes (who seem to have knowledge of Superman's "end") appear for a final encounter, their *chokes* and *sobs* actually pack an emotional wallop for readers.

Or maybe not. Maybe Moore is just taking the piss a bit, slyly messing with the volume controls on the various elements in an average Silver Age Superman story toward making the whole enterprise more dark and "gritty." It could even be read as parody in spots, rather than affectionate satire.

I'd believe that to be the case, if not for Superman's final moments, the sadness with which he seems to step into the gold Kryptonite room, how he vanishes silently into the arctic mists, never to be seen again...except by us, the readers, who see "Jordan Elliot" wink at the readers, as if to say, "Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."

And he hasn't. Pre-Crisis DC, and the Superman stories created throughout the Silver Age, live on, in reprints aplenty and the fond memories of fans. That attitude of anything-can-happen fun lives on too with modern twists, in books like Incredible Hercules and Batman & Robin.

So is he saying you can take the comics out of fun, but you can't take the fun out of comics? If so, that's a pretty damned nostalgic point of view. Oh, how the ghost of you clings...