DC Comics had a Black Superman an queer Superman in the 1990s

It was supposed to be an easy murder, as most murders are.

The Superman braintrust created their plans for It Superman’s death in 1992, their outline was as fiendish and simple as one of Luthor’s best schemes.

Kill the Man of Steel in the pages of his own comic, and then replace him, over the course of the following year, with a slate of would-be substitute Supermans, each claiming the Big Man’s mantle but only representing a fraction of what made Kal-El great to begin with. When readers realized that Superman was a great hero and had a cool personality, they brought back Superman alive. Then, the Man of Tomorrow is shuffled into the supervillain dustbin.

As Luthor may have warned them, cunning plans rarely work as planned. Even though DC wanted to prove that Superman was superior to his successors, the truth is that the newer and younger heroes were just as inspiring and surprising as their displaced counterparts.

Black Superman. An edgy and young Superboy. A Supergirl who was low-key… trans? Each caught the imagination and loyalty of readers in ways that the older, more established, and inevitably stodgier Superman never could — and each of them flamed out, first on the chopping block when the tides of comic book fortunes turned.

However, before they left they provided a glimpse of the future for Superman comics.

Superman must… die!

Image Credit: Louise Simonson/DC Comics

Superman’s Demise Famously, a story was born out of despair. In 1992, the writers and artists behind the four monthly Superman titles — along with the line’s editor, Mike Carlin — had planned to build their yearly story arc around the long-awaited marriage of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. But when TV’s Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of SupermanAfter the project was approved, it had to be called a lateral. Photo by Adventures of SupermanJerry Ordway was the writer. He believed that one choice would win: The Man of Steel would be killed.

However, one cannot kill without motivation and deeper forces. In 1992, the world of superhero comics was very different from that in which Superman was born 54 years ago. The height of the comic-book speculator boom was 1992. This year saw the comic shop count and total comics market reach their highest point before plummeting quickly. Enticed by the foil-stamped, trading-card-polybagged siren song of Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee, the kids wanted their content, and the content they wanted was 100% X-treme.

Thus was born the plan to murder Clark Kent, introduce his temporary replacements, and ultimately restore DC’s flagship character in better physical (and financial) shape than ever. But by the time 1993’s The Supermen Rule As the storyline began, it was already clear that a strange kind of mission creep was in full swing. Even as DC set out to prove that no one could win the hearts of readers the way Superman could, they hoped, in an era of booming sales and cutthroat competition, for temporary replacements who just might have some staying power after all — and that meant reaching the new kids of the ’90s in a way that stodgy old Clark Kent never had.

Two of the pseudo-Supermans – the authoritarian Eradicator (sociopathic Cyborg Superman), were revealed to have been simple villains. However, there are two alternatives that offer something different for a younger, more diverse audience.

Steel’s color

Image Credit: Louise Simonson/DC Comics

Superman was a light-year away from Earth and born in a faraway sun. He never found it difficult to fit in. Despite his Kryptonian biology, the undeniable fact was that Clark Kent looked, acted, and was perceived as an average white American — by all appearances, the WASP-y Kansas farm boy of his fictional upbringing. So when it came time to create a new hero in the wake of Kal-El’s death, writer Louise Simonson and artist Jon Bogdanove wanted a Superman who could see America through different eyes.

Their creation was John Henry Irons, a brilliant inventor who faked his death and donned an armor-plated battlesuit to fight evil as the hero Steel, in honor of Superman’s heroic sacrifice. He was also not-incidentally Black — the first time, in fact, that DC introduced a mainline Black Superman into the comics themselves. To Steel’s co-creator, the character’s success owed itself to the way he captured something essential in the Superman legend.

“Weezie [Simonson] and I were always most interested in Superman’s heart and character,” Bogdanove told Polygon via email. “It’s not his powers and abilities that make him Superman, it’s his heart — his compassion and genuine altruism. How do you become a Superman. We wanted to create a substitute Superman without powers, someone who tries to fill Superman’s boots by dint of character traits alone. John Henry the real man seemed like a great model. Here was a real man who genuinely performed a superhuman feat of strength and endurance, for the sake of working people and the dignity of the working class.”

Steel came at a time of expanding awareness of a readership of color for superhero comics — a greater willingness to acknowledge and reflect it on the page, if not an actual broadening of the readership’s demographics. Simonson, Bogdanove, and Derek T. Dingle were creating John Henry Irons. At the same time, Milestone Comics was established as an independent imprint of DC Comics. Although they used existing superhero templates to provide a jumping-off point, the characters reflect a more racially diverse and socially inclusive landscape than Marvel Comics and DC. As it happened, this included a hard-edged Black Iron Man pastiche of their own, in the form of McDuffie and Cowan’s HardwareThis coincidence was not known to the Steel or Hardware creators until a few years later.

Image Credit: Louise Simonson/DC Comics

While Steel was a product white creatives may not have made it, Simonson & Bogdanove did their best to challenge stereotypes. John Henry’s background as a working-class Tony Stark was not only a nod to his folkloric namesake, but also a deliberate rejection of Black cliches in superhero comics and elsewhere. But even their best efforts ran the risk of appearing pandering or, worse, inadvertently offensive — a risk that became more pronounced when Steel was eventually given a spinoff series, with a status quo now set in the gritty, gang-filled “urban” confines of Washington, D.C.

Steel still struck a chord among a young generation of comic-fans, many of which were indeed from Black or other minority communities.

“The only negative pushback I’ve ever heard of about Steel is that he isn’t ‘urban’ or Black Enough,” Bogdanove said. “I think it means different things depending on who is making the criticism. If what you mean is that the two white people who created him lack first-hand understanding of the Black experience, I’d say that’s valid. Louise and I grew up in the South, but our entire understanding of what it means to be Black comes from learning about it — and from having a little basic, human empathy and sympathy — but we are on the outside looking in when portraying Black people, just as we are when writing about anyone whose lives and circumstances are different from our own.”

Boy crazy

Image: Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett/DC Comics

Steel was pushing Superman’s mythos in an area that could attract new audiences of readers. At the same time, there was no question that it was a roll of the dice: Black lead characters had historically struggled to maintain readership in a still-conservative direct market, and John Henry’s fate as a new hero remained uncertain.

A pseudo-Superman was a safer option. Conner Kent, the Metropolis Kid, was to be a Superboy for the Fox Kids generation (but don’t call him that to his face). Light-years away from the sweater-wearing Boy Scout from Smallville, Conner was a brazenly loud and thoroughly unapologetic product of ’90s youth culture. Conner, with his smart jacket, sharp shades, smart mouth and inept attempts at finding anything and everything that could be matched by two legs, tap into the zeitgeist at an uncanny level.

One sequence that is completely typical (from Adventures of Superman #501 by Karl Kesel and penciller Tom Grummet), he makes the acquaintance of Lois Lane by propping his feet up on her late husband’s desk, tipping back in a swivel chair, and insouciantly declaring, “Y’know, I would have gotten rid of Doomsday, too…! Was gettin’ around to it.” (Lois, equally typically, responds, “I don’t have time for this. The real Superman was at least old enough to shave.”) It all approaches a gleeful, self-aware silliness that resembles something like punk-rock camp.

As Kesel remembers, it happened without even trying: “I didn’t make any conscious effort to capture the youth culture of the time,” Kesel told Polygon. “Mostly I was going on the gut feeling that if you were a teenager saying you deserved to be Superman, you must have a pretty high opinion of yourself. The rest just fell into place.”

It might have been sufficient, at least temporarily, if that was all it had. The ’90s are littered with the detritus of hip, young characters who momentarily caught the affections of a new and youthful readership, from Night Thrasher to Franklin Richards to Adam-X the X-treme. But there was more going on with Conner Kent than met the eyes of his creators — and on this topic, I can speak with some personal experience.

Conner Kent made his debut in comics when I was 7 years of age. Adventures of Superman My parents pulled #501 from a spinner rack in a supermarket back when they still had spinner shelves. This was some years before I and everyone else would openly recognize that my sexuality might not be quite as straight as initially imagined, yet l couldn’t help, even then, thinking that there was something about the Superboy I saw in that issue. Something about those skintight spandex pants, those endearingly boyish features… that Earrings for oneYou can decorate one ear.

What I was detecting, even if I didn’t have the words for it, was an early inkling of a surprising but increasingly common fan refrain over the coming years: the perception of Conner Kent as an implicitly, if never textually, bisexual character. The earliest, oblique fan speculation about a queer Superboy can be found on the now-defunct Usenet comic message boards as early as 1996 — the year Conner was first teamed up with Robin Tim Drake, in a close friendship that would becoming a defining aspect of his character during the next decade. The impression was so widespread that even a seemingly innocuous scene could be seen from 2003. Titans/Young Justice: Graduation DayConner and Tim shared a closet with each other. It sparked an avalanche of Twitter speculation that Judd Winick felt compelled to publish. winkingly respondIt’s been more than a decade since then:

The closet doors opened wide after that. Writer Geoff Johns’ stint on the Teen TitansThe series featured many knowing glances between Conner, Tim and memorable shared moments. Meghan Fitzmartin featured Conner and Tim holding hands in a very intimate friendship in her debut issue of her Tim Drake solo comic. Archive of Our Own’s Conner/Tim romance section currently contains 4,288 tags stories. (Heaven knows how many more it might contain, if the site existed in the time of Timcon).

The obvious question is: How much of Conner was this, and how much was it us? Winick, writer of the aforementioned Conner/Tim closet sequence, cautions that Conner’s sexuality is largely a product of reader hindsight:

“For context, you really need to understand the climate of the time,” Winick told Polygon via email. “As of 2003, I had written, if memory serves, one gay character in superhero comics. That was Terry Berg who was Kyle Rayner/Green Lantern’s assistant for his day job. So Terry wasn’t even a superhero. After that I was given a reputation of being the writer who ‘made all his characters gay.’ This was absolutely a climate of homophobia, and a fair amount of straight up bigotry. It was a much more conservative time.”

But whether or not a queer Superboy was the intent of his authors, that doesn’t make the perception any less real — and Kesel was quick to agree. “I have no problem with it. Although — if it was up to me — I’d have him bisexual, since I think his sexual appetite would be quite large and far-ranging,” Kesel said. “Which I don’t think is that much of a stretch, considering that sort of passionate, joyful celebration of sexuality is what Knockout had (as Gail Simone showed while working with that character, which I completely agreed with), and Conner was clearly infatuated and influenced by Knockout.”

Superboy Steel and Steel captured new aspects of what would make Superman great. And they weren’t alone.

Secret identities and gender identities

Image: Roger Stern, Jackson Guice, Denis Rodier/DC Comics

DC used the opportunity to make Superman’s absence a more visible presence for their newly launched and completely revamped Supergirl. This, however, was a far different character from Superman’s horse-loving cousin who had been a staple of the DC Universe in years past. Originally created by writer/artist John Byrne, this Supergirl was a shapeshifting mass of protoplasmic clay: the product of an alternate dimension, molded by that reality’s Lex Luthor into a form resembling a female Superman (Lex in any dimension is a Freudian psychoanalyst’s dream).

Fascinatingly, at a time when gender fluidity and nonbinary identities were largely absent from mass media, Supergirl’s first writers and artists made a deliberate point of exploring the complicated relationship to sexuality that emerged from this origin. In one early story (by Roger Stern, George Pérez, and Brett Breeding), the character known initially as Matrix (or Mae for short) became so enamored of Superman as to assume his body, gender, and identity for a time. Indeed, Mae’s struggle to define her own body, name, and purpose against the demands of those around her became the vital core of the character’s heroic arc.

This fact was both confusing and intriguing to readers back then: One 1989 letter column by Action Comics, a slate of unanimously positive fan mail managed to use three different pronouns to refer to the same character — in one case, over the course of a single letter. So even after Mae’s look and gender were largely set in stone, she nevertheless remained an early touchstone for a trans and gender-fluid readership just beginning to make themselves known.

All of it must have been much more than DC could hope for with a few placeholders in caps. After the completion of the Superman’s deathThe storyline was that both Superboy and Steel were made into separate ongoing series while Clark Kent returned to his original books. Supergirl also received an ongoing miniseries and an ongoing the year after. They were also approved as important additions to DC Universe. Conner was cast as a member of the popular Young Justice series, while John Henry was added to the iconic lineup of Grant Morrison’s JLA and given the immortal gift of a feature film starring Shaquille O’Neal himself. For a brief, optimistic moment, it seemed like the future of Superman — and Superman readers — was now.

However, it wasn’t to be.

Tomorrow’s Supermans

Image by Tom Taylor/DC Comics

By the year 2000, the exuberant mood of comics’ boom years were a distant memory. DC was unable to sustain the growing number of titles it published each month, which led to sales dropping to an all-time low. The characters that had less established followings and were less likely to be licensed as names and faces fell hard. This was not a good turn of events. These characters also happen to be some of the most diverse and modern in DC’s pantheon.

It was in fact a restructuring of DC’s entire line. Characters like Conner, John Henry and Matrix were forced into an indefinite hiatus. Steel was the first one to be cut in 1998, despite Christopher Priest’s and Denys Cowan’s game plan (an all-Black creative group, which is still rare in Big Two comics), to save the title in the final issues. Superboy was also canceled in 2002. Supergirl survived the most, though her fate was perhaps the worst. In 2003, a newer Supergirl — herself a reboot of the original, not-shapeshifting lass deleted from canon in the 1980s — was introduced, and Matrix was effectively banished to the oblivion of lost continuity from whence her unambiguously cis replacement had been rescued. This is what tomorrow’s men and women will look like. Superman’s line was a lot like yesterday.

But you can’t put off the future forever. Even if there were solo series or characters who followed, you can’t put off the future forever. Superman’s Demise have never quite managed to regain their mid-’90s prominence, the readership and concepts they represented have only grown bigger with time. Steel may have been the first Black Superman, but he certainly wasn’t the last: From Calvin Ellis, the alternate-universe Superman introduced in 2009’s Final Crisis series, to Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s turn as Doctor Manhattan to the Hollywood screenplay recently commissioned for writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, the notion has proven itself to be not only enduring, but increasingly inevitable — a counterbalance against the classic blue-eyed Superman that feels even more necessary now than ever.

“As a light-skinned Kryptonian in the United States, Clark enjoys all the perks of white privilege,” Bogdanove reflected. “Aside from his strangely blue-black hair and anomalously steel blue eyes, Clark can pretty much pass for a big, handsome, healthy white guy, and as such, he is the gold standard in our culture. John Henry Irons is a large, attractive, and healthy Black Guy who has been exposed to all that the U.S. brings. Besides the ever-present physical danger from the police and others, he’s had to struggle for every achievement more than if he were white. […] Yet, despite all the many aspects of racism and assumptions he’s endured, John Henry Irons remains just as kind, forbearing, compassionate and protective of others as Superman himself.”

Conner is renowned as a leading icon of bisexual and gay superheroing. His role has been a hot topic among his legacy characters, such as Green Arrow Connor Hawke, Tim Drake and Green Arrow Connor Hawke. Indeed, while Conner has since been largely displaced by yet another Teen of Steel in the form of Clark and Lois’ son Jon Kent, Jon is both officially and openly bisexual and just finished a stint as a temporary Superman in the original’s absence. And while we are only seeing the leading edge of trans and gender-fluid DC heroes, the ’90s Supergirl remains an early and memorable shot at inclusion for an identity still too often relegated to subtext.

Devin Grayson/DC Comics

“The fact that Conner has lasted this long is because — like any good concept — there are layers and facets to him that can be highlighted at different times in different ways to better reflect the world around us,” said Kesel. “To me, Conner is an archetype of the Arrogance of Youth — and all the energy and excitement and joy and missteps that are part of that — and I don’t see that changing. Not for Conner, not for any of us.”

Superman’s Demise was intended to prove the Man of Steel’s value to the world; maybe DC’s only mistake was failing to recognize just what that value was. What if we had a wider, more inclusive definition of what it means to be a hero. This could be called justice, truth and a better tomorrow. Superman’s DemiseOne possibility was that they tried to get us the Supermans we lost. However, 30 years later its radical alternatives may have brought us the Supermans (and Women) that we deserve.