Aesthetically, definitely Blue - he looks pretty similar to the standard Superman (he even keeps the red s-shield), while Red’s gaudy getup isn’t quite so easy on the eyes. Character-wise…it’s kinda weird.

In order to fulfill the story’s purpose of giving Superman the ultimate happy ending, he had to split in two, rather than just have him fix everything with the hundred-fold intellect he’s granted at the beginning which would in theory make a great story hook on its own. There were too many dichotomies built into him: Krypton or Earth (far more of a conundrum for him back then since he could remember his whole life in photographic detail, and in some tellings at the time he left Krypton as a toddler)? Being Superman forever or leading a normal, quiet life? Lois or Lana? This way, rather than resolving any of them and giving something up, he got to have his cake and eat it too, marrying both the loves of his life while Jimmy finally gets together with the abominable Lucy Lane,* returning to Krypton at last while also staying on Earth, where the latter got to retire at peace while also still having Supermen protect a mostly-saved Earth. Where it gets weird - aside from literally everything about the entire situation, not excluding the ethics of the “anti-crime-ray”** - is the relationship situation.

I think it’s more than fair to say that among the Super-newlyweds, Lois is making by far the biggest sacrifice. Lana gets to live with a Superman who’s still Superman, beloved by a redeemed world and helping raise the children who may one day succeed him. Lois traipses halfway across the cosmos for the sake of her homesick husband so they can settle down on a severely underpopulated alien museum planet where he can’t squeeze diamond from coal or cook dinner with a glance, and also he’ll grow old and get fat and die one day, a set of adjustments you have to imagine would be rough on everyone, especially given she regularly turned down other suitors back then for not having super-powers. Even though it’s hardly really that rough in the grand scheme of things (she’s following the man she loves to a technological utopia where they’ll still be protected by a magical horse, which will take her back to Earth literally anytime she wants), it frames her as giving something up in a way Lana isn’t, as benefiting that even back then she was framed as Superman’s one true love; they may have been pretty interchangeable in roles and personality back then, but only one was headlining her own book as Superman’s Girlfriend. 

Still, at least to my eyes it lends a strange air to the whole thing, where one couple gets to live this magnificent domestic dream fantasy where their kids play in the clouds and they don’t have to work anymore, while the other lives the Silver Age equivalent of settling down, getting a job, and dropping your stupid hobbies you don’t have time for anymore so you can go about being a grown-up, with all its little losses. It’s the child version of Superman’s happy ending and the more wistful, Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?-esque adult aftermath of the dream at the same time, in a way that always made its ending feel a little more significant and weighty to me than the creators probably intended. Who really did have the better life: the guy who gets to live a child’s fantasy forever and be loved for it, or the guy who grew into a messy adulthood, however informed by his childhood, but really did settle down and find happiness in that?

The first one. The answer is obviously Superman Blue, because he still gets to live in the Fortress and fly and didn’t ask his wife to pick up sticks and leave her friends and relatives for another fucking star system, while Superman Red has that pervert freak Comet The Super-Horse watching over him and his wife and children for the rest of their lives. Brrr.

* I’d assumed people were at least slightly exaggerating about her over the years, but I finally started reading some of the Showcase Archives stories where she shows up, and she really is that bad from day one on.

** I don’t think it’s surprising that sugary-sweet glossing of creepiness to this Silver Age Super-Utopia is often cited as an influence on the last issue of Moore’s run on Miracleman.

I’d write him as a separate entity from the current Superman - one who pops out of him for Mysterious Reasons, and whose memory ends at the moment that the ‘real’ guy lost his electric powers. So for all intents and purposes this guy has just woken up from a coma to find that someone just like him has gone on to live a whole life with his wife, even having a child, and while they’ll do whatever they can to help him, that’s not his life anymore.

Not to say this is a fully downer Superman comic - it’s essentially repositioning the 90s Superman some want to badly as an outright man out of time in the modern DCU, growing into his powers now that the pressure of being ‘the’ Superman is in many ways off his shoulders, and finding a new place in the world until he inevitably sacrifices himself to resolve this whole ridiculous situation. Probably I’d keep him on the more street-level side of Metropolis given his smaller-scale powers, and inevitably he and Lana would get together for awhile, both due to her own current abilities and as an homage to her marrying Superman Blue in the original Imaginary Story.

Well…I mean, this dude’s done pretty well for himself since 1986 too, I’d say.

I’d say considerably better, given that it was right around when Byrne revamped Superman that this guy beat him in the public eye now and forever, and people were generally satisfied enough with how he turned out that he’s stayed pretty much the same ever since with only a few tweaks - even the full reboot of the New 52 left him close enough to alone that it had to be retroactively established with Zero Year that anything of substance had been changed about him. Superman meanwhile went in the wake of Byrne’s reimagining from striding across the industry as a colossus, the undisputed most popular and lucrative superhero (and I’d say the most artistically successful as well up to that point other than Swamp Thing, the Spirit, and maybe Daredevil, between Moore’s work and Maggin’s novels), to a wistful kitsch afterthought at best, at worst a ‘mistake’ WB has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to correct. Obviously there’s much more to what went wrong there than Byrne’s work - I’ve written about it before - but dispensing with politeness for a second for the sake of directness? I 100% think John Byrne bears the blame for Superman’s diminished state over the years as much as any other one person alive. At minimum, he is the closest there is to an embodiment of the most destructive era for the character.

It’s a funny thing; Man of Steel was actually one of my first comics as a kid, and for years I really did love it. Superman was my favorite between picture books, the animated series and the Flesicher shorts my dad had on tape, and I guess that was the closest I had to a big, weighty story with him (it probably didn’t hurt either that my first version of his origin as a kid, The True Story of Superman, was based on it). Batman and Spider-Man eventually took the lead though, and when I really got into Superman again as a teenager and he really became my favorite character, and I reread that in light of what I had come to appreciate about him? It just left me cold. The middle chunk is still a solid little run of superhero adventure comics - even if they get a little checklist-ey - and they’re absolutely gorgeous between Byrne, Giordano, and Ziuko, but the beginning and end, how they establish him as a character, built a foundation I am absolutely willing to say has just not worked, even aside from Superman’s entire journey to heroism turning out to be “boy, I sure did ignore your moral lessons for the first 17 years of my life, mom and dad. I suddenly am The Best Person now though, so I’ll be Superman in arbitrarily-presented secrecy until I reveal myself to the world in plain streetclothes”.

I’ve talked plenty in chunks before about a lot of what didn’t work for me here, but hitting the high points:

* Streamlining the Superman/Clark divide to the point of near-nonexistence with a more ‘normal’ Clark makes sense in the abstract as a way of making him more down-to-earth and understandable, but in practice it removes an indescribable degree of character tension and definition, and also makes Clark relatively boring because he’s exactly like Superman but not doing Superman stuff.

* In an attempt at incorporating Christopher Reeve’s charming, all-loving take, one that hadn’t really been seen in the comics up to that point, Byrne settled on a guy with a decidedly limited emotional scope. While trimming out some of the neuroticism of the Silver Age version was probably a good move, what we ended up with was a Superman who, pleasant as he may have been, didn’t have much range to him beyond calm beneficence, affection, determined seriousness, and the odd moment of sadness/shock where appropriate. He may not have been outright stiff, but he definitely came off less as Your Cool Dad so much as just The Dad. Nice, but not really charming. He’s got a sense of humor, but he’s not exactly down with The Kids™ either. Great coworker, standup Joe, but you couldn’t exactly imagine having much of a conversation with the guy.

* It scaled his world to exactly the wrong degree for an ongoing comics version of the character. I may be onboard with a cosmic Superman, but bringing him closer to square one for a total overhaul makes sense. But instead of taking the logical step of bringing him all the way back to near the Golden Age and having him fight ‘realistic’ threats again, he fought the same array of supervillains as ever. So you got neither the catharsis of a champion of the oppressed battling real-world ills or the awe of a godlike superbeing battling unimaginable perils from beyond the stars; instead he was a very strong (but not too strong, that’d be silly) guy in a generic city who fought bad guys and won, and never struggled too hard in that because again, he’s the clean-cut Superman, so you can never show anything getting too intense. Not that it’s impossible to tell satisfying stories with that setup, Mark Millar did great stuff on a similar scale in Superman Adventures with clever adventure stories, but in practice most writers took the easy out of regular villain brawls - an inevitability for something as long-running as comics with creators not being forced to push themselves in one direction or another - and it ended up a worst-of-all-worlds mix in that regard.

* The soap opera approach of those years led to a ton of what’s commonly regarded as the dumbest stuff for the character, and I think led pretty directly to the neverending crossover setup that’s done so much to hobble him over the last decade. And when that approach ostensibly driven by emotional drama was paired with the reduction of internal conflict in Clark himself, I think the attempts at forcing that necessary conflict again while staying in line with how Byrne had established things ultimately led to a lot of the hand-wringing “What does it truly mean…for me to be…a…Superman?” moping of the last twenty years.

* Much like its years-later namesake, this version of Superman pushes a fairly hardline assimilation take on his relationship with his heritage where the place he came from was bad and wrong, and the climax of what emotional journey he has is embracing his status as a real human/American, which cuts out a lot of the idea of him as an alienated figure showing us to accept the strange and different. It also hasn’t particularly aged well in how blatant it is as an 80s Cold War metaphor: there sure is a lot of talk about how the Kents imagined the cold, isolationist, inhuman, deservedly-doomed-to-die place Clark came from might have been Russia.

* It’s the first set of Superman comics to start to internalize in a big way the idea that Superman, or at least most of the mythology of his world, is silly and dumb and need to be fixed, even as creators wanted to bring all the fun old stuff back, squaring that circle by way of making everything either tremendously more boring or infinitely dumber. A square world is stupid, Bizarro’s just a sad grunting Frankenstein who dies in his first appearance now. Invulnerable? That makes no physical sense, so he’s got a forcefield, that somehow totally explains it all. He’s gotta truly be the sole survivor of Krypton now, that’s heavy and realistic, but what about Supergirl? Well, she’s, ah, a fire-angel protoplasmic clone of Lana Lang from a pocket universe. Sure. Also Brainiac’s a carny possessed by/possibly hallucinating the classic villain. And later on, following in those footsteps, Krypto’s from a fake Phantom Zone Krypton, and Kandor has no Kryptonians, and there were no other Kryptonian survivors because of genetic manipulation by a nationalist Kryptonian supercomputer, and the Supermen Red and Blue were electric energy beings brought about to fight the Millennium Giants, and Toyman’s a pedophilic serial killer, and Zod’s a mutant dictator in power armor who absorbs red sunlight and may be in telepathic communion with the original character. Yes, all that’s dribbling fucking idiocy removing every ounce of charm from the basic concepts with almost surgical precision, but at least it’s all quite serious.

I know Byrne’s era has a ton of support - it’s an 80s soap opera comic, those tended to accumulate die-hard fans. I understand it was better from a craft perspective than its immediate predecessors, since the Superman titles had been intentionally kept in a holding pattern (except for Moore’s work) of simple adventure stories as introductory stuff for kids. I imagine the focus on his personal relationships did a lot for people, it introduced a handful of genuinely good ideas (Wolfman’s corporate baron Luthor ended up meshing well with the best of the established take, and him drinking in solar radiation over time to explain his changing powers was inspired, for instance), and this particular brand of smoothed-out clean-cut pleasant superheroism is easy to look back on as a brighter, lighter time. But it was a creative dead zone - just about every major beloved Superman story either came before this period, or after its influence notably started to wane. And boy did it wane: people have been trying to reboot away from this thing constantly, over and over again, restoring every old element Byrne and company discarded. There have been three major origin reboots in the last decade-and-a-half, each farther away from the last, with Mark Waid (one of Byrne’s loudest critics for decades) bringing back the conceptual baseline stuff Byrne had missed in Birthright, Geoff Johns bringing back all the Silver Age mythology he could, and Grant Morrison (who while appreciative of aspects of Byrne’s take, also commented it had a “whiff of prefab plastic smugness”) pulling things all the way back to the Golden Age. And, with absolutely no caveats, Waid and Morrison’s word on Superman carries more weight than Byrne’s ever will. DC’s finally tried going back to Byrne’s version lately to grab on nostalgia dollars, and they’re even rebooting away from that next month less than a year after it began in earnest.

Obviously, Superman’s comics can only have so much impact on his public profile at this point. But Byrne’s ‘clean slate’ constricted possibilities and character, deadened the titles creatively for years, threw the line into a constant state of chaotic push-pull between creators who love essentially two different characters calling themselves Superman, and judging by how Superman’s lagged behind in other media since then, failed to inspire much in those charged with bringing his adventures to a larger audience, poisoning the brand far beyond the people still picking up his regular printed adventures. The film that did bring major aspects of Byrne’s vision to a larger audience in Man of Steel was…well, it was Man of Steel. Love it or hate it, there’s no argument to be made that the world broadly accepted it as an iconic, recognizable take on the character.

And that’s why, petty as it may be, I’ll always smile when I remember that Dick Giordano once pulled Byrne aside to explain to him "You have to realize there are now two Supermen – the one you do and the one we license.“ Still damn good art though.

I could see that; he needs to at least initially wear the classic suit as a symbol of what he thinks he’s fighting for, but once he shifts the only real requirement is that he wear a doofy, dumb version of the Superman costume only a dumb teenager (and Jim Lee circa 2011) would think was cool. Electric Blue would fit for that, although it’s harmless enough in the grand scheme of things as a temporary silly transformation that I don’t think it’d work as well as Prime’s overdesigned, armored-up, vaguely militaristic version of the suit, even ignoring the extra weight that carries in the wake of the New 52.

I figure they’d get along just fine - they have a lot in common, most importantly values, and Superman would appreciate meeting someone who’s been in his position for so long, while Marvel’d be happy to meet a superhero who doesn’t make the regular compromises and ethical lapses of his ‘coworkers’.

Probably not. There’s a canon of acknowledged major stories, and creators, even ones not trying to just coast on acknowledging better comics, are going to tap into that to put their own spin on it or add a new context, whether through references or even straight-up reimaginings or revivials. Granted you can roll with that too far - yes, I have my own take on Superman’s origin, we all do, but that doesn’t mean we need to see another one for the next 15 years or so.

Red and Blue’s a funny example though, since you can’t reference that one directly. It seems like you should, it’s a seminal Superman story with an obvious and easily repeatable visual hook, but not only was it ‘imaginary’, it can NEVER be allowed to happen. It doesn’t just end Superman as we know him, it concludes the entire DC Universe as we know it. But it’s too well-known and too easy and obvious to not reference at all, so people keep finding weird new ways of bringing back the basic color symbolism while dancing around the story itself (and everything that actually made it interesting, but like I said, they can’t do that). And then those homages, built to actually fit into the structure of the ‘real’ DC, are easier to bring back than the source material, until you get Superman Reborn where it’s visually homaging the homage with no explanation, because the reader can at least in theory be trusted to know what it’s getting at at this point.

When your first impulse is to describe them with more than a single sentence starting with “they’re Superman, but…”. Hyperion and Sentry have never been meant as anything other than Superman-but-he’s-more-alien/Superman-but-he’s-an-asshole/Superman-but-still-Silver-Age; by contrast, while I maintain a lot of Spider-Man’s early building blocks are conspicuous mirrors to Superman, any connection there may have been is something he’s grown far beyond. For some more borderline cases, I’d say Supreme and Blue Marvel are prime examples: by the end of Ellis and Lotay’s Blue Rose, Supreme’s more about commenting on superheroes as a whole rather than Superman specifically, but he himself as an ‘entryway’ to that discussion will always deliberately resemble Superman, so he’ll never not be that. Blue Marvel on the other hand, while still overtly sharing a lot in common with Superman in terms of powers, personality, and mythology, has had enough totally unrelated history, development, and a unique enough place in the scope of Marvel as a universe (even if that placement seems at least somewhat determined with the original what-if-Superman-was-a-Marvel-character question in mind) that it’s easy to talk about him and what his deal is without referring back to his inspiration, even if it’s still a convenient way of framing him.

Thought about it for a good long while based on the shitload of factors in play with the map, and what would be interesting enough to bother having around, and here’s the rough ideas I came up with:

Earth 24: The opposite of Earth 30 - a world where a dictatorial Soviet Superman takes over and everything actually turns out pretty much alright in the long run - this would be home to a Superman who attempted to bring freedom to the masses, but instead brought about every one of the ‘main’ Superman’s fears about what would happen to the world if he interfered with mankind’s destiny too thoroughly, eventually leading to a ruined, depleted Earth he wanders across alone and in shame, forever wondering how to correct what he has wrought.

Earth 25: The home of Superman Red and Superman Blue, the most popular Superman Imaginary Story of them all (and the biggest Elseworlds-type Earth missing from the Multiverse) as opposed to…well, what was supposed to be the biggest for Batman in DKR before 31 became Earth-Waterworld/Earth-Pirate, but I suppose this still works as a Batman-centric apocalypse vs. a Superman-centric utopia. Maybe the two aren’t on such good terms these days - perhaps a life without powers on New Krypton has made Red wonder if what amounted to mass-brainwashing was really such a hot idea.

Earth 27: The most bitterly, cynically ‘realistic’ DC imaginable. Batman died his first night out when his grapple gun failed, Barry Allen burned to a crisp with his first super-speed step, Themyscira was bombed to ashes, and Green Lantern was exiled to the furthest reaches of the universe when his pitiful human synapses were unable to properly control the power ring. This could well be the home of Animal Man’s version of Overman, though I’ve mostly just visualized this as the home of Movie (at least in terms of general impression)/Earth One Superman taken to his allegedly logical extreme, a mopey selfish asshole who never actually bothers getting around to saving anyone.

Earth 28: An Earth of anime archetypes, defended by a martial arts, chi-wielding warrior Wonder Woman, the spirit of vengeance titled the Bat-Man, a young Clark Kent inheriting a Kryptonian space-watch allowing him to command the mighty Super-Mecha, a magical Green Lantern in the style of Sailor Moon, and an Astro Boy-type robot gifted life and a connection to the Speed Force in a lightning storm becoming the super-swift Flash.

Earth 46: A swords-and-sorcery Earth ruled over by superhuman dynasties entering its first industrial revolution.

Earth 49: Home of the JLAngels, including the Spectre, Lightray, Deadman, Doctor Fate, Dove, Willoughby Kipling, and Superangel, aka Zauriel.

Earth 14: I thought about this one long and hard as the implicit most important Earth in the Multiverse, the closest in it to the realm of Dream, the font of every parallel world, the opposite of the world of broken-down imitations of Bizarro World…but when it hit me, it was obvious. Earth 14 is Danny the World, growing outwards forever, with some of his territories sometimes breaking off and forming their own new realms elsewhere in the Orrery. You could still easily do this, saying the Earth 14 we just saw in Superman was either part of his territory, or in the process of splitting off from him (I think the Justice League of Assassins world would make a fine new Earth 15).

Maybe throw out some of the odder realms from Doom Patrol to fill up the other blank spaces on the Map where the Sphere of Gods interfaces directly with the Orrery (such as where Skyland meets the Multiverse, becoming Kwyzz), and I think you’d be pretty much good.