Superman Reborn Discussion

It’s Superman’s first big crossover event of the Rebirth era and it engages in some major retcon comic book nonsense shenanigans. What are your thoughts?

On it’s own, I found it to be a pretty good tale. It was satisfying in and of itself. It paid off the plot lines about the other Clark Kent and continued to lay out hints for the Doomsday Clock story. It’s always great fun to see Mr. Mxyzptlk. It was a good time.

However, the whole retconning the Post-COIE and New 52 Supermen and Lois Lanes together rubs me a little funny. This seems like the obvious answer to the split caused by the New 52. How do you build a bridge between the fictional world of the two universe’s characters and heal the divide in the fanbase? Blend the two universes together and just say it’s fixed. I’ve been rooting for something like this to happen for quite awhile, but now that I’ve seen it, I’m not completely sold.

I think my concern is that it makes less sense for Superman and Lois Lane to blend while the rest of the universes stay separated. I have very little idea of what is and is not supposed to be legit anymore, and I’m not sure it makes sense for these two to be reset while the rest of the universe stays the same. I know it’s overthinking it, but it leaves me with a little, “Meh,” feeling. It also feels like an easy reset when they actually had some interesting stuff happening with Lois and Clark living the rural life instead of doing their regular Metropolis routine, and it would have been more interesting to see the characters find a solution for their predicament instead of having the universe change back to the status quo. I’m not sure the reset was needed or helpful.

The crossover stories were mostly meaningless. Superwoman is just a waste of ink and paper in my opinion and the Trinity crossover felt like it could have been condensed into four pages. The Supergirl crossover was pretty good, but it does continue to slap you in the face with the problems of just blending characters. They basically just invented a brand new version of Superman with a brand new relationship with Kara, so it’s strange to try and be invested.

I guess that’s about it. Good on it’s own but weird in its impact.

I guess they didn’t want the New 52 Superman’s stories to be irrelevant. I could’ve gone either way with it. The biggest advantage of Superman Reborn is that it allows the DC writers to pull in other characters’ material from the pre-Flashpoint era and re-canonize it.

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For that to work though they would have needed to make all characters reborn due to all character interactions.

For example, you can’t have New Krypton recanonized without pre-new 52 Kara whose parents were instrumental to that arc. But current Kara has the messed up Cyborg Superman as father.

The reborn arc made everything worse imo.

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Considering I just had two responses to this thread, I guess the answer to what people thought of Superman Reborn is…not much.

@AlexanderKnox,

I get the idea. I just don’t know that they stuck the landing.

@Coville,

I haven’t followed Superman comics closely enough to know what specific continuity craziness this would cause, but I know there has to be a lot of stuff that doesn’t line up like the New Krypton thing, and these continuity hiccups are always annoying. I also keep thinking about how cool the setup was with the Kent family living in rural America. It would have been nice to get to see more time with that. I agree, it was a poor decision. They should have waited until the entire universe could be folded back together. At that point, I think it would work. It’s another soft reset. Now, it kind of resets the entire universe without resetting the entire universe, and that’s just weird.

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I know I’m in the minority, but I liked the New 52 era, and thus far have enjoyed Supes in his solo book-but have lost interest in Action Comics. Glad they kept the 52 stories “alive” while bringing in Jonathan Kent and the Superman we grew up reading

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