DC Nation

So, there I was, about 5 years ago now, when I came upon a bookstore named Powell Books in Portland, Oregon. I was there with Tanya perusing the stacks of new and used books and I found their comic book collection. In the vast array of Spiderman, Batman, etc. was "The Death of Superman", "A World Without Superman", and "The Return of Superman" all in their compilation/graphic novel glory. I bought them for real cheap and proceeded to get hooked into the greatest comic book comeback in history.

See, the story goes, back in the 1990s, DC Comics was preparing to finally marry Clark Kent and Lois Lane in their Superman comics, but the WB higher ups decided that they wanted the comic book wedding to coincide with the TV Show wedding on the new series Lois & Clark starring Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain. The comic writers were stuck as they had to wait a while before the TV show caught up to the comic, so in the end, they threw the idea out there that they would Kill Superman. That would give them enough time of story-writing to wait for the TV show and finally have a marriage. They created Doomsday and had him kill the most popular and greatest Superhero ever. It made CNN, Time Magazine, and probably thousands of newspapers all over the world. The Death of Superman. At the time, I wasn't a huge comic book fan or a Superman fan to be truthful, but years later, standing in Powell Books, I thought, this would be a great way to read the story after the fact. I was effectively hooked. Well, almost. I didn't know I was hooked.

A year later, I was perusing a Safeway I think and spied a Transformers Comic. Not the original Marvel comics of block drawn Transformers, but really well drawn Transformers. This was new and they were back. I proceeded to go everywhere I could to find all the issues of the 6 issue series. Even so far as stopping in Grants Pass on the way to San Francisco with Tanya to pick up some comics I bought from a guy off E-Bay. From Transformers, I added GI Joe which was also making a triumphant return. Wow, my childhood was coming back. While the Transformers and GI Joe were great for the most part, the series quickly lost interest for me.

Around the beginning of 2004, I spied a DC comic called Identity Crisis. It was a chilling 7 part series that delved into the lives of everyone's favourite superheroes. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Robin, Elongated Man (ha ha Jeremy)... and how their alter egos play havoc with their family lives. Identity Crisis was just the tip of the iceberg for me though as I was about to find out about Infinite Crisis (http://www.dccomics.com). This series, which I just bought Issue #7 for, has completely flipped the DC Universe upside down and really provoked me to think about the characters created by such ingenius minds.

What makes a superhero super? Why do people look up to these costumed marvels? Should superheroes be completely altruistic (see Golden Age of Comics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Comics) or should there be shades of grey (see Infinite Crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Crisis).