The Death of Superman | Dan Jurgens - Comic Book Writer/Artist

Can it be true Superman will die November 18th at the hands of a villain named Doomsday? What is happening in your mind? What do you see happening in the world that leads you to believe, I think now is the time to kill Superman?

Superman died Wednesday.

Well,

yes, we are always aware of what is happening in the world around us, that popular sort of zeitgeist, if you will.

Now, if we go back to the death of Superman, so that came out in November of 1992. at that time there was a fair amount of cultural change i think we had seen culture getting darker the anti-hero had sort of become a big thing i wouldn't say that superman had become outdated or anything like that but it was more like some of those values that he embraces i think had been put to the side

and i'm an anti-superman fan i don't like him he's like a boy scout compared to other superheroes

It's from a guy who wears a tattoo of a bad guy, the Joker.

And even as we talked about doing the death of Superman, one of the things we really realized is by taking the main character out of a book, out of a comic series or whatever it is, you're very much making a statement about them.

By removing Superman from the book, we could say, something about him and say, this is who he is.

He is not the anti-hero that everybody wants him to be.

And by studying the reaction of the characters around him after he was gone, we could very much explore that aspect of Superman and really reinforce what he is about all the time and those qualities that some people might have been looking at as being sort of passe.

My guest today is, without exaggeration, one of the most influential architects of modern superhero mythology.

He is the creator of arguably one of the most important comic book stories ever told in the death of Superman.

I've got it right here.

I've held onto it for quite some time.

And if you've read my new book based on a true story, you know I've got a chapter entitled The Death of Superman, in which I explore in that chapter the significance of the Superman archetype as America's, arguably America's most important mythological hero.

So I thought, who better to talk about that with and what it meant for Superman to die than the man who wrote the story himself.

Dan Juergens, welcome to Good Makers Podcast.

Thank you, Paul.

It's very good to be here.