2011 Comic Book News Archives

July 19, 2011: DiDio and Lee Discuss Superman, Marriage, Death and More

Superman in Action Comics In an extensive interview with Newsarama, DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee talk about the relaunch of the Superman comics, why Superman is being changed so much, why they decided that Clark and Lois would not be married in this relaunch, and how the death of Martha and Jonathan Kent will affect the character. Here's a portion of the interview...

    Newsarama: Dan and Jim, the news just broke about what's coming for Superman, and there are a lot of changes to his status. We've already been told there are few if any changes to Batman. So why change Superman so much?

    Dan DiDio: It's one of the things we were looking at, how the storylines and characters were working. We saw a number of things we wanted to change with Superman because we've gone down so many roads with the character, in regards to the "Grounded" storyline, we've looked at things that took place with the "War of Krypton." We've looked over the last few years at what we've been doing and the changes we've been making with Superman.

    But we also wanted to get back to some of the grass roots of the character. And some of the best ways to do that is to really go back to the early days of the character, where you see him in his formative years, learning his powers, and learning how people react to him, as we'll be examining in Action Comics. But also, we want to re-examine his relationships, because we think there's a lot of fertile ground about him and the people he deals with."

    Nrama: But Dan, these changes are huge. There must have been something you felt was just not working with the way Superman was going. Was it too complicated? Did he feel too old? Was it that people couldn't relate to him? Or what?

    DiDio: I think in some cases, he felt a little old. We've made Superman such an iconic figure over the years that we've lost some of the character and the ability to tell stories with that character. There's so much continuity that's been built on this character. We really wanted to get a Superman that is more accessible to the audience.

    And one of the reasons we did it with Superman is it was done once before, and very successfully. We're hoping for the same luck here.

Read the entire interview at Newsarama.com.



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