All-purpose, running Geek thread (formerly Battlestar Galactica thread)

I'm a Doomsday apologist, because he has his uses and wasn't as bad a concept -- not a character, but a concept -- as people make him out to be. Not every villain has to be a schemer. Sometimes they just need to show up and smash stuff for no other reason than that's what they do. Doomsday, in his original form, was a force of nature. That's enough to make him a mortal threat even to Superman. I'm good with that. Once they tried to give him the Kryptonian origin story was where things went off the rails.
But I digress.

Doomsday could have worked as a cinematic villain in much that same vein.
After Superman is down and people doubt him following the events of "Man of Steel," Doomsday punches his way out of the Earth and goes on his rampage. Sacrifice some D-List heroes to show just how badass this creature is and offer up some fan service. Then Superman rises to the occasion and stops Doomsday at the cost of his own life.
Then we get a couple of the solo films to introduce the other Justice League members and see the aftermath of Doomsday. The destruction, the "World Without a Superman," and just how much the world did in fact need Superman. Along the way, we get some hints that Superman might not be dead after all.
Finally, around 2018, the Justice League comes together -- arranged by Batman -- to stop another huge threat. Maybe follow the Mongul/Coast City storyline to introduce or showcase Green Lantern. That's when they bring back Superman and truly form the Justice League.

So, after all that, Doomsday could have had a very important place in the DCCU instead of as a throwaway secondary villain. The problem with Doomsday in movie form is that audiences want the "cool" bad guy. If using Doomsday as the main villain, the movie has to very much be about the heroes — what drives and motivates them, how they interact with their world and what they mean to it. Doomsday isn't going to carry a movie with witty banter. In that way, Doomsday can be a tremendous villain. The director and cast just have to make you care enough about the heroes to not care that the villain isn't throwing out one-liners every 30 seconds. They have to get the audience to change the way they think about superhero movies, and that's hard to do.

 

They screwed up when they introduced Doomsday. They should have introduced Justice League first and had that going so when Superman finally dies at the hands of Doomsday we don't know if he's coming back. They could have had a Justice League movie dealing with not having Superman when they are dealing with a big bad they don't know how to beat. They could either resurrect him through the codex of Krypton or as all hope seems lost, Superman returns but he isn't the same man. You follow that with a second movie that deals with the consequences and try to bring Superman back. I think there are plenty of post death comics they could have taken stories from.

The problem with how they did it, apart from knowing he returns in the comics, is we all know he needs to be in the Justice League. The stakes are gone and that's why Doomsday was disappointing.

 

Agreed on pretty much all points. Many of the criticisms I've seen of Doomsday as he was initially introduced in the comics are based in hindsight. Deaths of major characters in comic books are far more common now and almost never permanent. That wasn't the case in 1993.

 

The whole concept of Doomsday is moronic.

Doomsday was created for one purpose: to "kill" Superman when some bright boy at WB/DC came up with the brilliant idea to "kill" him off as a massive publicity stunt.

Once the decision was made to "kill" Superman, immediately the next question was who gets to do it and how.

The first suggestion was archenemy Luthor: after years and years in the comic storylines and 50 years in publication history, Lex finally succeeds in "killing" Superman.

However they decided they did not really want to see evil "triumph" and Superman's arch-foe succeed in "killing" him, and if Luthor didn't deserve to do it, none of his other arch-villains should either, so it was decided they needed to create a brand new villain to do it.

So how should he do it? Well the hallmark of all the Luthor-Superman battles, whether Luthor was a gangster crime king, a warped evil scientist, or a completely corrupted corporate boss, was that it was always a Battle of wits, brains vs brawn, Luthor's cunning against Superman's power.

So they decided the battle to the "death" with Doomsday would NOT be a battle of tactics, of wits or resourcefulness.

No no no. The battle with Doomsday would be the dumbest thing possible. Doomsday would smash smash smash Superman until he was "dead." Smash smash smash, blast blast blast until Superman was "dead."

The only problem was they never had any plan to REALLY kill off Superman. They were never going to do it. And they knew it.

So any and all arguments over the character, his back story, etc etc etc, became moot anyway.

They're never going to kill off Superman. They just aren't. So any character created with the specific purpose of "killing" Superman is a complete waste of time.

 

You do know comic books are a business, right? The story sold. People seemed to like it, not just the death, but the stories that followed, right through the return.

 

Carrie Fisher Reveals She Had an Affair With Harrison Ford on ‘Star Wars’: ‘It Was So Intense’

That scoundrel!

 

You know this is a "running geek" thread right?

 

A lot of people didn't. Millions who bought the "death" issue on the belief it was going to be some enduring collector's item were pissed as hell when the whole thing turned out to be a massive jack-off of the audience. They threw their copies down, said "fuck it," and resolved never to buy print comics again.

And a lot of them didn't. After the huge boom pumped up by the stunt "event," print sales collapsed, a collapse that has continued pretty much to this day.

 

Actually, the collapse was coming anyway, making the boom seem even more effective.

 

Superman "died" 24 years ago today.

As a kid, I though, "No way, he's not really dead." I had comics in which he fought the Silver Banshee and the cover was a skeleton in the Superman suit. Great covers sell single issues. Bit I did love, and now as an adult I really appreciate, how it allowed the writers to open up new story possibilities.

I think one thing that gets lost on many people: When a character like Superman is "killed" a lot of viewers/readers roll their eyes, knowing he'll be back and complain about the lack of suspence or intrigue. But I think the people forget that part of the fun of storytelling is showing how other characters react to a major event. Our point of view is not the same as the characters' point of view. The fun for me is seeing the fall out among characters that don't know something like "oh, he's coming back to life in the next movie/episode/issue."

Same feelings for the DC movies. Everyone knows Superman is coming back. But the other characters don't, and I want to see the reactions as part of the stories.

 

The creative powers at DC at the time also did a really good job of making that have an impact across the DC Universe. Flowing out of that event you had the introduction of Steel; the rise of Cyborg Superman as a strong and major villain; the introduction of Superboy; Coast City's destruction and Hal Jordan's fall (and rise later on), which gave us Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern; and the introduction of Parallax, which became a major Green Lantern villain. That's just the big stuff I'm aware of. There might be a dozen other things.
DC got a lot of storytelling mileage out of killing Superman. It essentially shaped their universe for the rest of the decade.

 

The decade in which print comic sales crashed and burned (never to recover) immediately following the momentary spike produced by the "death" fraud/ stunt.

They tried another big stunt a couple years later with the Lois-Clark wedding, but by then the readers, what few there were left, weren't going to fall for it again.

Although they stuck with the idea that Lois and Clark were married for half a decade or so, they got the idea their entire audience was made up of 14 year old horny jackoffs who thought girls had cooties, couldn't figure out how to write stories with L/C having an actual married relationship, so they gave up on that too.