As many of you know I co-host a show called From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast with my buddy Jeffrey Taylor. For the uninitiated FCTC covers, month by month, most of the Superman books published between lMan of Steel #1 in 1986 and Adventures of Superman #649 in 2006. That’s a huge chunk of time and some people have expressed a desire to follow along with us. I was wondering how feasible it would be for someone that doesn’t own a complete run to find one or at the very least find most of them in trade. I’m pretty sure if you had the time, money and energy you could do it, but it wouldn’t be easy.
And that got me to thinking.
Since February of 2004 (release date not cover date) every mainstream Superman book (Superman, Adventures of Superman and Action Comics along with Superman/Batman) has been released as a collected edition of some sort. Usually in hardcover at first and then in softcover and in the case of Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee’s For Tomorrow even an Absolute Edition. The Godfall arc, all of the Greg Rucka run on Adventures of Superman, the just mentioned For Tomorrow, all of Mark Verheiden’s run on Superman, Chuck Austen’s run on Action Comics, Gail Simone’s work on Action Comics, Sacrifice, the Infinite Crisis crossovers, Up, Up and Away, Last Son, Camelot Falls Parts 1 and 2, the rest of Kurt Busiek’s run, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Brainiac, The Coming of Atlas and right up to the current New Krypton stuff. Five years worth of stories are pretty much all there give or take a once and done story here and there. Someone getting into Superman today would have a very easy time getting caught up without having to track down the individual issues.
But what about that Crisis to Crisis era?