The Man of Steel #1

History

DC Executive Editor Dick Giordano learned in May 1985 that John Byrne had departed Marvel Comics, and the two men began discussing what a Byrne-led Superman overhaul might look like; DC agreed with roughly 99% of Byrne's pitch and gave him the green light. The project had deep editorial prehistory: DC publisher Jenette Kahn had solicited revision proposals from multiple writers — including Marv Wolfman, Frank Miller, and Steve Gerber — all of whom independently converged on the same core ideas (sole survivor of Krypton, no Superboy career, reduced powers, a retooled Lex Luthor), though each envisioned a different approach; Byrne ultimately synthesized and executed those shared goals. Byrne immersed himself in every available media incarnation of the character — Golden Age comics, the Fleischer Studios cartoons, the George Reeves television series, and the Christopher Reeve films — before distilling a version he described as 'Siegel and Shuster's Superman meets the Fleischer Superman in 1986.' One late production adjustment with real-world resonance: Superman's debut was originally scripted as a space-shuttle rescue, but the January 1986 Challenger disaster prompted Byrne to revise the vehicle to 'an experimental space-plane' called the Constitution before the issue went to press. The series was edited by Andrew Helfer, colored by Tom Ziuko, and pre-publication ads listed the project under the working title The Legend of Superman.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Written and penciled by John Byrne, inked by Dick Giordano, colored by Tom Ziuko, and edited by Andrew Helfer; the six-issue miniseries ran bi-weekly from July to September 1986 (cover dates October–December 1986).
• Issue #1 carries a cover date of October 1986 but was published on June 17, 1986; pre-release advertising listed the series under the working title 'The Legend of Superman.'
• The issue establishes the post-Crisis first appearance of Superman's costume and introduces the revised Kryptonian 'Birthing Matrix' concept, in which Kal-El is gestated artificially and physically born only upon landing in Kansas — making Earth, not Krypton, his true birthplace.
• Clark's powers are established as developing gradually into adolescence, which erases the Superboy career from post-Crisis continuity entirely; Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) and the bottle city of Kandor are likewise written out, making Superman the sole Kryptonian survivor.
• Jonathan and Martha Kent are kept alive into Clark's adulthood — a deliberate reversal of the pre-Crisis status quo in which they died shortly after his high school graduation.
• The miniseries as a whole introduces the post-Crisis reinvention of Lex Luthor as a corrupt billionaire industrialist (LexCorp CEO) rather than a mad scientist — a collaborative reimagining by Byrne and Marv Wolfman that became the template for virtually every subsequent Superman adaptation in film and television.
• The first issue of the miniseries was released with two distinct cover variants (direct and newsstand editions illustrated by Byrne), documented by the John Byrne Wikipedia entry as the first use of variant covers by the American comics industry.
• The collected trade paperback, first released in 1987 with a new Byrne cover and a foreword by Ray Bradbury, has been reprinted multiple times; a 2020 hardcover omnibus edition (ISBN 978-1779504913) remains in print, and the story was included in Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told (2004).

Key issues in The Man of Steel

#1★

#1 Key event — Superman

★

#4 1st appearance — Mayor Frank Berkowitz

Other variants of The Man of Steel #1 (2)