There's no denying just how iconic the Death of Superman is, both as an event in the DC Universe and on the comic book industry, but to say that fans enjoyed Kal-El biting the bullet against Doomsday would just be wrong.
By all means, Superman's passing in the battle against the Kryptonian super-weapon proved to be a massive hit, and fans lapped up every cover they could get. However, Supes' death was also the perfect example of everything that's wrong with the genre's attitude towards death, with a clearly planned roadmap for his return having been laid out long before his demise.
The Reign of the Supermen followed, it too an iconic story, but there was only ever going to be one outcome. Low and behold, when Kal-El returned with a black suit and a fancy new mullet, literally no one was surprised.
The Death of Superman might not be the archetypal death/resurrection (Jean Grey, Professor X and pretty much half of the X-Men are equally responsible there), but they don't get much worse.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
