Superman #75
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeSuperman #75 stands as one of the most culturally penetrating single issues in American comics history: it delivered the in-continuity death of the medium's first and most enduring superhero, a narrative event so unexpected that it broke out of the direct-market bubble and dominated mainstream television and newspaper coverage worldwide. Its formal conceit — every page rendered as a single full-splash or double-splash panel, accelerating from a multi-panel pace established across the preceding chapters — turned the physical act of turning a page into a countdown, making the storytelling structure itself an expression of unstoppable momentum. The issue also served as the full debut of Doomsday as a named, completed character, launching a villain who would recur across animation, live-action film, and decades of comics. Retrospective opinion remains genuinely divided — some historians regard it as a bold creative risk, others as a 1990s speculation-era publicity stunt — but its influence on how publishers stage, market, and narratively frame the 'death' of major characters is impossible to overstate.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The story emerged from a collaborative Superman editorial summit in which writer-artist Dan Jurgens arrived with two separate ideas on a legal pad: a raging, purely physical monster and the death of Superman. Editor Mike Carlin and the four Superman writing teams — also including Louise Simonson, Jerry Ordway, and Roger Stern — fused the concepts, deliberately planning that the death would land on Superman #75 and the resurrection on Adventures of Superman #500, both milestone-numbered issues. Carlin had previously resisted Jurgens's pitch for an all-splash-page fight issue, feeling it needed the right narrative context; once the death framework was in place, the device clicked. The creative team also sought and received the blessing of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel before proceeding, and Siegel later told Carlin he considered the story a worthy shakeup for the character he had created.
Trivia · 9 facts
- Story title: 'Doomsday!' — written and pencilled by Dan Jurgens, inked by Brett Breeding, colored by Glenn Whitmore, lettered by John Costanza, edited by Mike Carlin with assistant editor Jennifer Frank.
- Cover date: January 1993; actual on-sale date: November 18, 1992 — the seventh and final chapter of the 'Doomsday!' arc, leading directly into the 'Funeral for a Friend' storyline.
- Every page of the issue is a single panel or splash page, a formal device deliberately escalated across the preceding chapters of the crossover (earlier issues used progressively fewer panels per page) to build a sense of relentless, real-time catastrophe.
- Both Superman and Doomsday die in this issue: Superman snaps Doomsday's neck, receiving a simultaneously fatal blow — the name 'Doomsday' itself was coined in-story by Justice League member Booster Gold.
- Doomsday's full debut as a named, active, on-panel antagonist (his prior appearances were teaser cameos of a fist punching a vault wall); Dan Jurgens created the character specifically because Superman's existing rogues gallery was considered too cerebral and technology-dependent for a purely physical confrontation.
- The direct-market first printing was polybagged in a black bag and sold as a 'Memorial Collector's Edition,' including a black armband, a Daily Planet obituary written by Roger Stern, a Dan Jurgens/Brett Breeding death poster, commemorative stamps, and a trading card; the newsstand edition featured a different cover image of Superman's tattered cape on a pole.
- A separate Platinum Edition, limited to 10,000 numbered copies with the number visible through a clear window in the bag, was distributed as a retailer thank-you exclusive.
- The issue went to at least four printings and has been reprinted in numerous collected editions including The Death of Superman trade paperback, The Death and Return of Superman Omnibus (2007, 2013, 2019), a Millennium Edition reprint (2000), a Dollar Comics reprint (2019), a 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (2022), and a Superman: The Death and Return of Superman Compendium (2025); the events were loosely adapted in the 2007 animated film Superman: Doomsday and more faithfully in the 2018 animated film The Death of Superman.
- The story's release generated mainstream media saturation — coverage on national news broadcasts and in major newspapers — and Superman's death became a subject of discussion on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, with Leno appearing on air wearing the memorial armband included with the issue.
Reprints
Reprinted in Superman - La mort de Superman #[nn] (2002)
Key issues in Superman
Other variants of Superman #75 (6)
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