It’s Superman, Superman and more Superman at Comics Daily this week. For plenty of good reasons - the recent judgment regarding Action Comics #1, obviously, and the publication of the brilliant All-Star Superman #10 are on our minds. But - and I can imagine you’re dying to know - what does John Byrne think of it?

So the heirs of Jerry Siegel have won a landmark ruling that means they are now officially the co-holders of the copyright of Superman - and, indeed, have been retrospectively since 1999, when their original 1938 agreement with DC expired. I’ll have to admit that a lot of the legal issues surrounding copyright and ownership are beyond me - Newsarama have a pretty good attempt at breaking it down here, though - so I can’t really comment too much on the situation, or what it means for the future of the character, and so on. Personally, though, my gut instinct is that I can’t see a huge amount changing - beyond a significant amount of money going to the Siegels rather than Time Warner. It’s been suggested that the Siegels (and possibly the Shusters, if they get their half in 2013, as has been speculated) could even, technically, license the character out to other companies - but could you really see that happening? Alright, so perhaps it would mean that someone other than Warner could use the character in films or TV - but when it comes to comics, I’d be fairly certain that Time Warner would simply come to some kind of agreement with the respective estates to ensure that the character would only be licensed to DC, with DC given a similar measure of creative control to that which they now possess. It’s just… it’ll cost them, that’s all. Let’s hope so, anyway - it’s great that Siegel’s heirs will be getting a fair share of the vast income that his creation generates, but it would be very easy for the name and character to be diluted by overuse should he be licensed out elsewhere - and that would be damaging. (SP)

Interesting that Seb should mention the potential dilution of the character. There’s a school of thought that says eventually, characters like Superman and Spider-Man will become so visually popular that they’ll one day end up like Mickey Mouse - icons without substance. Everyone knows who Mickey Mouse is, but when was the last time anyone watched a Mickey Mouse cartoon? If Superman licensing was ever left unrestricted, this could be the fate of the character. Though, that said - do Siegel’s heirs actually have any stake in the most recognisable part of the Superman mythos - the S-shield? Or do they only have the elements of the character as created in Action Comics #1? In which case, a Siegel/Shuster Superman film isn’t going to have quite the same impact - you’ll believe a man can jump! (JH)

Of course, it’s faintly ironic that in the week that DC’s right to create Superman comics in perpetuity was questioned, they happened to put out arguably the best issue of one since Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? I’ve already made my feelings on the latest issue of All Star Superman pretty clear, but there were a few points of analysis I wanted to look into which didn’t really fit into the framework of a daily review - so you’re getting ‘em here, instead. There’s been a fair bit of discussion, naturally, about the “Earth Q” that Supes creates in order to observe the development of the human race in a world without him - but I’ve noticed that people’s interpretations of that final panel in which Joe Shuster (well, we presume it’s him - and, again, quite amusing that it should be shown, given what’s happened this week) draws Superman for the first time seem to fall into two main camps. The first, and most widely posited theory is that, simply put, Earth Q is “our” world (what the main DCU universe would call “Earth Prime”). And that’s a fair enough and straightforward assumption to make - but I don’t really think it squares with the work of this nature that Morrison’s done in the past. After all, he’s quite fervent in his belief that the DC Universe is a living, breathing entity - but he knows, obviously, that our world isn’t one that exists within it. Compare this, for example, to his “appearance” in Animal Man - a more simplistic writer might perhaps have simply stated that Animal Man had crossed over into “our” world, but we know full well that he didn’t; Morrison, instead, was a bit more honest in claiming that he’d created a facsimile of our world on the comics page.

And that’s what I think he’s done here - he’s created an Earth within his own fictional universe that just happens to have evolved upon the same lines. Rather, therefore, I think the point he’s making is that, to paraphrase Voltaire… “If Superman did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”. In other words, any world that does not have Superman (or superheroes in general) in reality, is therefore drawn towards creating them as fiction instead. This, really, is simply a logical extension of one of All Star Superman’s strongest themes - that superheroes are a true and legitimate form of mythology. And yet it’s very rare that they’re actually treated as such in their own pages - indeed, All Star is arguably the first comic since Whatever Happened… to willfully put forward a genuinely mythological take on the character, at the same time as it’s passing comment on that status.

All of which, I think you’ll agree, makes something of a mockery of John Byrne’s infamous assertion : “I get no sense from Morrison’s work that he has any ‘love for the genre.’ I get the same vibe I get from Moore—a cold and calculated mixing of ingredients the writer knows the fans like, but to which the writer himself has no eviceral connection. Nostalgia without being nostalgic, as I have dubbed it.” Er, right. Unfortunately, Byrne himself has yet to pass any kind of comment on All Star itself that I can see - but if you fancy having a look at just how wrong-headed it’s possible for people to be, you can check out a number of his acolytes toeing the party line here. Just make sure you’ve got a spare wall handy to punch afterwards. (SP)

In other Superman-related news (because what else has been going on this week, really?) Neil Gaiman amusingly suggests the possibility (if not probability) of a Marvel-published Superman. That joker. Though far more hilariously, he makes a throwaway request as to whether anyone wants to put out an Angela or Medieval Spawn comic. Genuinely, I can imagine someone taking him up on that. (JH)

So, has anything happened in the comics world this week not relating to a 70-year-old man in a blue leotard? Well, not a lot, quite frankly. But if you’re a fan of Warren Ellis and/or the X-Men who for some reason doesn’t read Rich Johnston’s Lying In The Gutters, it’s worth heading over to this week’s (somewhat truncated) edition, as Rich has got his hands on the script to the first issue of Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men run. And it all sounds rather exciting. It’s one of the most endlessly-repeated bits of received opinion in comicdom to say that Ellis doesn’t “get”, or “can’t write” superheroes - it seems to be based on his not-unreasonable suggestion that their dominance of the industry might not be a good thing - but in actual fact, whenever he does turn his hand to them in completely unironic fashion, it usually makes for some of his best work. His Ultimate Fantastic Four was tremendously entertaining, we’ve espoused the virtues of Ultimate Human on here repeatedly already, and even if you didn’t like the points that were being made by The Authority, it still existed on its own terms as a cracking superhero yarn. So the idea of him on X-Men sounded good to me even before the promising noises made by RJ. Certainly count me in on this one. (SP)

Tags: Angela, Grant Morrison, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Medieval Spawn, Neil Gaiman, Superman, Warren Ellis, X-Men
Publisher: The Sunday Pages