Superman #656

October 4, 2006: Kurt Busiek Talks Superman

Newsarama sat down with writer Kurt Busiek to ask him about where Superman is at in the comics, what version of Superman Kurt personally likes and much more. Here's an excerpt from the interview...

    Q: Big picture - Superman has decades of stories and has lived through dozens of interpretations. What do you find yourself drawing on when you write him? Are there any particular interpretations or elements from versions that you've pulled in and are making sure resonate in your Superman?

    Kurt: I'm a big fan of the Bronze Age Superman - when Julie Schwartz was editing the books. But I don't want to re-create those by any stretch - I don't want to see Clark anchoring the news, or have him be the butt of Steve Lombard's wacky practical jokes, and so on. But I like his sense of who he is, from that era, of what the job entails.

    Beyond that, though, I like the early Siegel/Shuster Superman, I like the Weisinger Superman, I like the Richard Donner movie, I like a lot of what John Byrne and Roger Stern and Jerry Ordway and Dan Jurgens and Karl Kesel and Jeph Loeb did...

    I see the whole run of Superman over the years as a big sprawling buffet of ideas and approaches, and Infinite Crisis was the moment where DC kind of threw everything up in the air and said, "Okay, guys, pull it all back together again. You can pick bits from anywhere - from the comics, the movies, the cartoons, whatever - and polish it all up and make it go."

    It's not like we're throwing out everything that came before - and in particular, we're not changing a lot of the recent past. But we were able to rebuild the foundations, as readers will see as we explore them over time.

    In some ways, it's like what Paul Dini, Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett did with Batman: The Animated Series, where they picked and chose what worked best over the years and distilled it into one compelling portrait of the character. We're doing it as a progression from what went before, and they did it with a clean slate, but it's a similar process, I think.

Read the entire interview at the Newsarama website.


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