Superman: Eradication - The Origin of the Eradicator

DECIPHERING DC

Writers: Dan Jurgens, Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway

Artists: Dan Jurgens, Kerry Gammill, Jerry Ordway, George Perez, Dennis Janke, Brett Breeding, Art Thibert and Andy Kubert

Collects: Adventures of Superman issues 460, 464, 465, Superman issues 41, 42 and Action Comics issues 651, 652.

Published by DC Comics

Welcome to another edition of Deciphering DC as we continue our look into Superman as he runs through the nineties. The tone and feeling of the soap-opera stylings of a weekly book had been established some time ago to give us a more or less continuous story, as certain authors did carry on and advance a few plot points in their own series.
This would continue throughout the nineties, until every one of these creators would leave their titles. Jerry Ordway was the first to leave, then Roger Stern and finally Dan Jurgens, signaling the end of an era, all to be replaced by Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, Stuart Immonen and Mark Schultz to begin the "new look Superman" (best epitomized by Ed McGuinness' version of Superman). But here, we're get ting ahead of ourselves.

Superman: Exile!

DECIPHERING DC

Writers: Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, George Perez, Jerry Ordway

Artists: Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Kerry Gammill, George Perez, Mike Mignola, Curt Swan, Brett Breeding, Dennis Janke, John Statema

Collects: Superman issues 28-30, 32, 33, Adventures of Superman issues 451-456 and Action Comics issues 643 and Annual 2

Published by DC Comics.

Welcome to another chapter of Deciphering DC! After a lengthy gap comes the next collection in the monthly Superman series, made even more profound by the fact that the only Superman collection before this one, when it came out first, was the original Man of Steel collection....the other volumes were collected much, much later. There's a lot of catching up to be done from where we left off.

Top Ten Uncollected runs from DC Comics, Part 1 - 10 to 6

Hello and welcome back to another post by yours truly after a long gap.

With everything DCnU right now and the new 52 being the buzzword for months, it's time I think, to look to past runs that have been acclaimed as well as underrated - but largely uncollected or partly collected. Sadly, most trades of partially collected runs are also out of print. These runs were done at a time when a collection of back issues was rare unless alarmingly popular (Batman: A Death in The Family, Death of Superman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow). The trend of collecting back issues with any sort of regularity started just in the early 2000s, with Superman: Godfall and Batman: Hush, and for the most part, all the stories after these have been collected, albeit with a few exceptions. So the fault of these issues or the creative teams was, that they were just before their time. I have avoided citing multiple runs of the same character/title for the most part, mentioning other memorable runs under honourable mentions. Let's start with #10 to 6:

10. Green Lantern by Ron Marz, Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal

Fans were in a killer frenzy when DC decided that the era of Hal Jordan had passed. Then current script writer Gerard Jones turned in a last Hal Jordan script, which was rejected, and was drastically different compared to what finally saw print, by new series writer Ron Marz. Essentially, Ron Marz turned Hal Jordan into a psychopath who tried to use the ring's power to change the past, and lay waste the whole corps, leaving behind only Ganthet who delivered the ring to a young Kyle Rayner. And if you think this was a global event, it spanned only three issues.....which had more content than the recent War of the Green Lanterns (just sayin'). Then began the era of Kyle Rayner. The fall of Hal Jordon took place a little before 1994...