Well, it looks like we can forget about
Superman: Birthright having any meaningful impact on the monthly books....
http://comics.toonzone.net/solicitations/2003-10/It looks as if DC going to go ahead and reissue Byrne's
Man of Steel and early Superman work in TPB form
at the same time Birthright is still running. Am I the only one who can't understand this? I know the Byrne material eventually has to be collected in TPBs, but why now, especially with
Birthright being intended to be a fresh intro to the character for newcomers? By timing it this way, isn't DC shooting itself in the foot? I mean, if a completed origin story's being reissued alongside a new version in progress, the completed one's most likely to get bought instead of the new one. I mean,
Birthright, even though it's selling well, is already highly suspect as far as having any importance to the Superman mythos. This move pretty much renders it useless and a waste of Waid and Yu's time. Why should they kill themselves refurbishing the character when DC's just going to reprint the older version and sell it and Waid/Yu's book at the same time? This move is only going to hurt
Birthright in the end.
I guess those of us who were at least hoping for an "Ultimate Superman" book to come out of this can kiss that dream good-bye. And those of us who were hoping
Birthright would be the jump-start Superman needed can just forget about it now. Color me disillusioned with DC, because this was a supremely dumb act of bad timing that's only going to sink Waid's book like a rock. He might as well have not even bothered writing the thing.
