In an interview with CBR, Jerry Ordway reflects on "The Death of Superman" and teases details from his new story in its anniversary special.
As DC celebrates the 30th anniversary of its landmark crossover event, "The Death of Superman," the epic story is receiving an oversized special featuring new stories from the original creative teams that brought the event to life in The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special #1. Among the teams involved are Jerry Ordway, Tom Grummett, and Doug Hazelwood, weaving the tale of Jonathan and Martha Kent watching their son fight Doomsday to death on television from the discomfort of their own homes. As the two Kents watch the heartbreaking showdown, they recall their own unique perspective on raising the DC Universe's greatest superhero.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Ordway reflects on the legacy of "The Death of Superman," talks about revisiting the story he helped create, and looks back on his impact on Shazam as DC's other major hero prepares to return to the big screen. Also included is an unlettered preview of the "Death of Superman" short story focused on the Kents, written by Ordway, penciled by Grummett, inked by Hazelwood, and colored by Glenn Whitmore.
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CBR: One of the most heartbreaking pages in Superman #75 is Ma and Pa Kent hugging after watching their only-begotten son die on television. What made you want to explore that moment in The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special?
Jerry Ordway: Looking through and trying to figure out what my ten pages would be about, my gut feeling was that I would've loved to have done the Suicide Slum with Bibbo and all the offbeat characters, but I kept coming back to the fact that Ma and Pa Kent are really only seen in single panels here and there. They're not even seen that much in the four issues leading up to the death. I kept thinking how horrible it was. That's a secret that's tough to overcome. You're watching your son die or put his life on the line in front of the news media, and it seemed like such a huge thing. As a parent, you think of aspects of children and mortality, and I think that became the thread.
There's that full-page splash in Superman #75 that you were alluding to where they're just hugging each other, and this was going to be more emotional. It's not as bombastic for Tom to draw not a lot of big action, but it felt like something that was true to what we were all doing anyway back then, to try to get at the emotional aspects of any storyline. That's what "Funeral for a Friend" was all about, what "World Without Superman" was all about, and I felt like that hadn't been explored. I was also able to tie in some stuff with Ma Kent, so there are some surprises in there too that maybe the reader didn't know about because it wasn't mentioned. The impetus was seeing that they were just onlookers through that whole fight because the fight took place in Metropolis, and they were in Smallville.
I spoke with Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove earlier, and they mentioned the recurring joke you would tell about killing Superman. They mentioned that killing off the character gave everyone the chance to see the emotional fallout. How was it exploring that in the original story and now, 30 years later?
Ordway: When we did this original storyline, my memory of it is that Dan Jurgens had come, and we had an impromptu meeting to make up for putting aside the wedding for Lois & Clark. Dan had this idea. He just wanted to do this big fight like Marvel did, this knock-down drag-out fight. It pretty much got rejected in the room because that wasn't what we were about. We loved action stuff, but we were always about character. After it went around a little bit, I said, "If we ever come back to Dan's thing and do the big fight, it wouldn't just be people crashing through warehouse districts. This actually destroys Metropolis and displaces people like a hurricane or any horrible natural event."
That was what we always did with our stories, so I think that's why our storyline maybe has more resonance. It's not just about him being killed but about him sacrificing himself and this incredibly horrible aftermath of all the other heroes coming in to help out. The Justice League rebuilds this kid Mitch's house, with her mom raising these two kids, and then their house got destroyed. That was the stuff I always wanted to do in the storyline. In Crisis on Infinite Earths, stuff is happening off-planet but don't really have any time to see what's happening with an individual as people lose their apartments. This is a big deal to them, it may not be as big a deal to the overall big picture, but that's what we wanted to focus on.
The story that we wound up doing was a means to an end. Superman dies to show people how much they missed him and took him for granted. That was a parallel story to the comic stores that were not ordering our comics. We were selling most of our comics on the newsstand. DC wanted more comics to be sold in comic stores because it was more profitable, with the direct market and no returns. We were trying to tell a dual story -- that you don't really know what you have until you've lost it.
For the story that I did with Tom Grummett and Doug Hazelwood, I tried to delve into similar aspects of sacrifice and humanity. What makes Superman different? He's an alien by DNA, but he's an earthling. He was raised as the most humane and human person that they know. That was the whole key to me because that sets up all the stuff that happens after the death because he impacted so many people, and those people can then tell their story after the fact.
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Growing up watching reruns of Adventures of Superman and the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, I was used to seeing Ma and Pa Kent gone and was glad that they were both alive post-Crisis. How do you think their continued presence affects Superman?
Ordway: When John Byrne did the Man of Steel relaunch his key was to have the Kents alive because it also de-aged Superman as a character. Superman had kind of become a father figure within the DC Universe, even how he was drawn in the pre-reboot days, he was definitely a guy who had been around for a long time. Having the parents around helped de-age him, and having Ma and Pa Kent around if you're a reader in your 20s, you likely have parents who are living. So there's a relatable aspect that doesn't exist if he's just living in the Fortress of Solitude. That was something that we all embraced and ran with, that they were his moral backbone.
Something I also experienced myself, when you have a parent -- my mom was elderly at the time when the stories were coming out -- the biggest takeaway that I got after she passed away was that she was my biggest fan. That parent-child bond is pretty incredible. So much of the Ma and Pa Kent stuff related to my upbringing, not specifically, but just the feeling of having somebody who is not going to judge you and be in your corner, no matter what. That made him feel like he was a younger character but also gave him this strong tie. What we did in our new story was something to show how proud they were and horrified they were to watch him be injured on TV without having anybody know that was their son. There are a lot of emotional things going on in it, and that's what appealed to me. Tom did a great job, as always. He's a great storyteller. He just makes even what we'd call the boring pages exciting, and that's important. He always made the talking pages move well, and that's a definite skill.
As someone that's an artist yourself, how is it working with other artists like Tom? How does that affect your writing process?
Ordway: Because I do it, I'm more sensitive to being on the other side of it. The minute I started writing for myself, and especially when I was writing for other artists, I would think back to bad experiences that I had as an artist with either plots that didn't make sense or the different things that would impede your workflow. Comic books are still generally a treadmill. There's always a next one coming up with a deadline. Anything you can do to make it easier to get a workflow going is important, and I'm very keenly aware of it. In this case, we still did it plot style rather than a full script where all the dialogue was in it.
We had to ask for permission because DC doesn't really do that much, but I felt that gave Tom the freedom to do his pages without having to worry about having to fit four balloons in a panel when there are five balloons in the next panel. It's all logistics, so if you do it with the plot first, he sets a pace dictated panel-by-panel. I then have to write to the space he allows. [laughs] In a way, it makes you tighten up your game. You might have a paragraph's worth of exposition going on, and by the time I see the art, it might not fit, so it makes you rethink it.
Ultimately, it makes it tighter, and you're still able to get your thing across. You just have to move stuff around. If the picture is beautiful and tells that story, the picture can do it where you don't have to add a ton of exposition. If a character looks lonely, standing there in some moody lighting, or whatever. You really don't need to get all kinds of purple prose in there. You've already painted the scene. That's the key, having the sensitivity to be towards that ultimate goal of making the artist part of the story. That's what plot style is, where they have input, to a degree, on pacing and how you tell it.
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With the benefit of hindsight, how is it looking back on "The Death of Superman" and revisiting it with this story?
Ordway: It was fun to revisit it! I think when we were doing all that, we were on that monthly deadline, so we didn't have a lot of time to think stuff through. We had to keep moving. Every week, Tom would turn in pages, and I would write the dialogue to those pages and send them off, and there were basically no redoes. When you look back at something years later, the feeling for me is less about doing things differently than it being better than I had thought. I think it does hold together well as a story. I think that's why it still has legs. It was a huge event, obviously, which is the biggest reason why we're seeing it celebrated 10, 20, 30 years later. The reason that it's so huge is that it impacted people when they were younger, in a lot of cases.
At every comic show for the past 30 years, I've encountered people saying it's the comic that got them back into collecting or the comic that made them a Superman fan. A lot of those people who are now parents probably want to pass some of that magic on to their kids, and that really does help it, more than having it in a movie. A movie gives it a different kind of audience, but comic fans are still what drives it, just like they're what drives the interest in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Crisis on Infinite Earths is a really good storyline, and "The Death of Superman" is a really good storyline. That's why people do come back to it and aren't disappointed. I think when they read the whole thing, they see it not just being a stunt. [It's] about all the ramifications -- but everybody's mileage will vary! [laughs]
This is also a big year for Shazam, with Black Adam and Shazam: Fury of the Gods coming soon. How is it looking back on your work on Power of Shazam! and your contributions to the mythos?
Ordway: I wish it was being reprinted. That is my only negative feeling towards the first movie that I wish they had started reprinting it. It was a series that swam against the tide from the mid-'90s through '98, in that era of every character having guns; just a dark antihero era. We were definitely trying to do something more light-hearted -- still serious -- but show that not every superhero is the same.
I'm thrilled with the idea of the movies, the first one captured the vibe of the comics that I did really well even though it was based on stuff that Geoff Johns had done in his series, but I feel like the DNA is there. With Black Adam, it's weird too because Black Adam has Atom Smasher, who was Nuklon, a character that Mike Machlan, Roy Thomas, and I came up with for Infinity Inc. way back in '83. I feel like I have a stake in each of them. In my Shazam stuff, I plugged Black Adam in right at the beginning, so he's more of an integral part of the mythos. All that stuff coming out about it looks great. I'm excited to see it.
Again, when you're doing these things as comics, you're not really thinking of it except when I was doing the Power of Shazam! graphic novel. The editor and I had done the Batman movie adaptation in 1989, and he and I said, "If we do this, why don't we do this as if we were adapting a Shazam movie?" That was the working idea behind the graphic novel, that this is the adaptation of a Shazam movie. I think that certainly works well in retrospect because, when you read it, it feels like a good, standalone story but also a beginning.
I'm excited, and it's always thrilling to feel like you have some long-term influence on characters because we don't own any of them. There would not be a bar scene in a Superman movie if not for what I did. [I'm] not taking away from anybody else, but I grew up in a bar and did that in a bunch of comics. It's fun and gratifying to see your name up with the end credits. It's kind of thrilling. My mom sadly passed away in the '90s, so my biggest fan is maybe seeing it from Heaven or something, but it does get back to that parental thing. Stuff is important to you, and my kids maybe don't have all the same feelings towards these things -- the relationship goes from parent to child as opposed from child to parent. [laughs]
Featuring the original creative teams behind the 1992 crossover event, The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special #1 goes on sale Nov. 8 from DC Comics.
Sam Stone is a 10th level pop culture guru living just outside of Washington, DC who knows an unreasonable amount about The Beatles. You can follow him on Twitter @samstoneshow and ask him about Nintendo, pop punk, and Star Trek.
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