8 Real-Life Events That Forced Comics To Change
2. Challenger Plane – Man Of Steel #1 (1986)
John Byrne is known for two things - being an awesome comic book collaborator and predicting tragedies in his storylines.
In 1977, he wrote a Spider-Man comic about a blackout in New York the same week the city suffered an electricity malfunction. In 1978, he wrote an X-Men issue where Japan was hit by an earthquake months before it actually happened. Three days after writing a comic where Wonder Woman, aka Princess Diana, dies, the real Princess Diana of Wales died.
Another freaky coincidence like this happened while John Byrne was preparing the 1986 Superman reboot series, Man of Steel. Months before the comic was published, the Canadian artist had prepped a drawing of Superman flying into the sky to save a NASA space shuttle.
On 28 January 1986, NASA's Challenger exploded almost immediately after launch, killing all the passengers onboard. Not wanting readers to relive this horrific tragedy, Byrne redrew the vessel that Superman saved as an 'experimental space plane'. Although the vehicle bared no resemblance to a space shuttle, Byrne knew having a more realistic ship would have been in poor taste.