The revamp of Superman in 1986 is one of the biggest events in the history of the character. It was the right move at the right time with the right creator leading the charge. John Byrne made his bones in comics on celebrated runs of Uncanny X-Men and Fantastic Four and now he was over at DC drawing the first, most important super hero ever.

As popular as the revamp was and as well as the Superman books sold at the dawn of the Post Crisis era there were detractors. Superman’s entire pre-Crisis history was set aside, which put a lot of noses out of joint and as someone that went through the same thing in 2003, I can now relate to that feeling. Add to that the fact that I’ve come to love the pre-Crisis history of the Man of Steel and find it to be a fascinating place full of cool characters and concepts, I totally see where the pre-Crisis fans were coming from. It complicates things because I can argue both sides and proves that just about every jumping on point for a comic book reader in the past forty years came at the expense of something an older reader loved.

Nuance. It’s a thing.

As much as I’ve grown to love the Man of Steel’s Pre-Crisis history, I also like, for the most part, his post-Crisis history as well. Byrne filled in the gaps that was caused by only having six issues to set up the new world order with three mini-series. World of Krypton, World of Smallville, and World of Metropolis were four issues each and gave us the backstory on…well, Krypton, Smallville, and Metropolis. Over the course of the year, we learned everything that Byrne felt we needed to know about Superman’s birthplace, where he was raised, and the backgrounds of his friends at the Daily Planet.

To be honest, if you went through all three of these series back-to-back, you’d be in for an uneven read. World of Krypton changed that planet from a science-fiction utopia filled with fire falls and jeweled mountain to a world filled with unethical cloning, a weird caste system, centuries of war, and a society that became cold and sterile. The Mike Mignola art gave the whole thing a stylized feel, a nearly 180-degree turn from the art that Byrne and Jerry Ordway were giving us in Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Action Comics. Of the three series it was the most consistently enjoyable.

World of Smallville starts out strong but falls down starting with issue three. I loved the backstory that Byrne gave Jonathan and Martha Kent. Seeing Jonathan return from the war and finding the woman he loved married to another man and then to have that man, who was dying, ask Jonathan to take her away from him…it was compelling stuff. Things fall apart quickly when the story shifts its focus to Lana Lang. Byrne’s version of Lana is problematic in general, but the whole “Lana and just about everyone Clark went to school with were Manhunter sleeper agents” thing has aged like milk left in the back of a car in the middle of August on the surface of the sun.

I’m…not a fan.

World of Metropolis is mostly okay. The Jimmy Olsen issue is a little dull, but I liked the Clark Kent issue, mainly because Man of Steel #1 goes from Clark leaving home to him in Metropolis with only a cursory explanation of where he was between those events. Perry’s issue is my absolute favorite. I love the whole Lex and Perry were friends as kids thing and the soap opera addition that Alice, Perry’s wife, was also involved with Lex…it’s just so good. The issue showing a 15-year-old Lois starting her journey to be a journalist was good, but there is a thing that happens towards the end of the issue involving a strip-search and video tape that is…creepy.

The house ads for the three series are things of beauty. It’s a shame that they were just run as advertisements and not the covers to the first issues of each series.

During the early days of my collecting career these series were history texts. Now they are artifacts. The timeline has been reset so many times that they don’t have the same weight they used to but are still well worth reading. It’s like reading the Krypton and Smallville centric stories in the pre-Crisis era. It’s not the “current continuity” but cool in its own way.

More to follow…