10 Comic Book Deaths That Angered The World
6. Superman
In 1992, the world's media reported that Superman, the first and greatest of the superheroes, was about to die. People went, to put it mildly, absolutely apesh!t. Now, it seems odd to remember just how insane people were about all this, but they really did go utterly crazy. Outraged journalists and magazine columnists (the vast majority of whom hadn't read a Superman comic since childhood) poured their anger into ill-researched editorial columns, whilst gullible consumers queued up around the world to buy multiple copies of the collectible commemorative issues, with visions of luxury cruises and penthouse suites dancing in their heads.
Fans, for their part, were mostly just very excited. Everybody wants to be present at a moment in history and this was to be the biggest thing that could possibly have happened, or ever would happen, in their time reading comics. Or so they thought. In reality, The Death of Superman was a neatly told event that encompassed 7 issues, culminating in the slobberknocker that was Superman Issue 75, where Supes and Doomsday both apparently died from their respective wounds.
The real story was told in the World Without A Superman story arc, which was both poignant and moving, while the third act of the story, the aptly entitled Return of Superman, was used as a springboard for more stories in the DCU than could be adequately listed here. The sad legacy of Superman's death and subsequent return, however, is not the amount of money it generated, or how many lives it touched, or even how many enduring stories, scenarios and characters emerged from it.
No, the true tragedy of Supermans demise was that it taught the bean counters at the parent companies of comic book publishers that death is good for business. The Death of Superman story cycle ignited our imaginations and drove sales into the stratosphere, it was a key foundation stone for the aforementioned comics boom of the 1990s. It also inexorably shaped today's comics, for better or for worse...