Crisis Weekly, nine installments completed.

I was barely a dozen years old when Superman died.

Nowadays, it's almost difficult to remember, the seismic impact a fictional event like that had, even if there have now been two animated and one live action movie adaptations of the story.  Sure, DC had created a media frenzy over the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, a few years previous.  But sensational superhero deaths became almost a matter of course in later years.  Captain America died, in the aftermath of the original Civil War comic, and that got some pretty good coverage.  Johnny Storm died, and his passing merited a special black bag edition of Fantastic Four, much like Superman's.  It started to seem that if you wanted the public to pay attention to comic books, you had to kill off a major character.

Because the death of Superman was huge.  It coincided with a massive boom in comic book buying.  Marvel had struck big with comics drawn by artists who somewhat promptly left to start Image.  A whole speculator market flooded the medium, and of course the bubble burst, and really, comics are still struggling to emerge from the fallout.

The story everyone remembers, though, from that time is the death of Superman.  Like I said, I was a kid at the time.  I can't say that I was emotionally affected, but it was a powerful formative experience, a touchstone event right there near the beginning of my reading life.  It's impossible for me not to think of it in relation to Superman and comics in general.  The story itself quickly segued into another grand adventure, four impostor Supermen appearing only to make room for Superman himself, returning from the dead.  Lots of people now like to believe it happened at all as a crass publicity stunt, but the creators insist it was a way to delay the wedding of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, since the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was about to launch, and the comics had only just got around to letting the silly lovebirds approach a happy ending to their decades-long romance, and they didn't want to get there before the show could.  So they threw a crisis at Superman, the biggest imaginable.

The comic book creator most synonymous with the whole thing is the guy who wrote and drew the pivotal issue, Superman #75, Dan Jurgens, and he's freely returned to the story whenever he's had the opportunity over the years.  But I figured there was still room to play around with it.  So this edition of Crisis Weekly begins to make clear how this particular story dives into that one.