Type: The real deal (since retconned)
I'd read my share of Superman stories before 1986, but I wasn't a loyal subscriber to any of his series. Then, my fave writer-artist from Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, et al., John Byrne, jumped ship and rebooted Superman for the post-Crisis era and I was hooked. Getting into Superman from the ground floor was an experience you couldn't really claim to have had before unless you were around in 1938, but here I was, holding the Man of Steel mini-series in my hands and living the dream. His Krypton was an alien wasteland, his Clark Kent a football hero, and his Lex Luthor DC's answer to the Kingpin. It was awesome.It wasn't without its problems, mind you. While it was great to see all the Superman concepts reinvented, it also played havoc with DC's timeline. Had Superman only been fighting two-bit crooks for all those years before a single supervillain came out of the woodwork? Or was he something of a rookie compared to other Justice Leaguers? Some revamped concepts didn't really work. His Brainiac was lame and his Supergirl didn't really work, but at least he threw us for a loop each and every time.
In a quest to take Superman away from the excesses of pre-Crisis continuity (what the Silver Age wrought), Byrne also changed the nature of Superman's powers, making them more psionic in nature. Superman could lift an outrageous amount of weight, but after a certain limit, would somehow project an antigravity field around the object so that it wouldn't collapse from the stress. His hear vision became a type of directed pyrokinesis, with only his red eyes the only tale-tell sign that he was using it. Over-explaining things? Yes, there's definitely a Marvel sensibility at work, where powers had to be explained to get No-Prizes or be detailed for the Marvel Universe Handbook.
In time, and with each passing Crisis, much of what Byrne (and the writers that supported or followed him) did with Superman passed into the night. Superman once again shoots beams from his eyes and freeze breath from his mouth. He was once again the Legion's Superboy. Supergirl and Krypto also survived Krypton's destruction. Brainiac is back to bottling cities. And yet, there are things he did that have become Superman canon. That Superman is a solar battery, thus explaining why his powers work under a yellow sun. The place his human parents hold in his world. Cat Grant and Ron Troupe. LexCorp. And going all the way back to the beginning, the look of the Kryptonian Science Guild and Kal-El's rocket.
No matter the realities undone since the mid-80s, Byrne left an indelible stamp on Superman and his family of books. Most of all, he's the reason a whole other generation of readers flocked to the Superman books when they were at their ebb, putting the #1 superhero back on the pedestal where he belonged.
(Two weeks in... how m'I doin'? Personally, Reign has been a great motivator. I hope you're having as much fun with it as I am.)
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