I stand corrected. For some reason, I remembered Knightfall (1994) as coming first, but that's not accurate.

Such a good job that it was the key event in the speculator boom than bust that drove sales down over the next two decades by large percentages necessitating event after event, reboot after reboot type events to try to bolster jobs. It may have generated money in the short term, but the trickle of revenue coming in doesn't make up for the years of lost revenue this type of publishing stunt precipitated. So yes, good job Super-team, the unintended consequences of your work are staggeringly impressive, though not necessarily in a good way.

-M

Neither Marvel nor Image made outreach to major media outside comics to announce they were killing of a major character in an attempt to get people outside the comics industry to come in and speculate on the issue, Marvel and Image were trying to shift market share within the existing audience, which is what had been happening for time immemorial, DC went to news outlets with press releases about how much Action #1 was selling for and that they were killing Superman and how much would this book be worth. Yes, you can point fingers at others, byut DC was the one openly going outside the comics field promoting the book as an investment in the future, juxtaposing it to Action #1's worth on the market which was just beginning to spiral, and try to woo people into buying the book as an investment. It was a deliberate strategy to sell people who didn't know any better a bill of goods to get them to buy the book on what in reality was false pretenses. The death of Superman hoopla more than any other single event brought a mass of "civilian" speculators into the market and caused the boom which would then bust. So not absolving Marvel or Image of blame in the matter, but DC is the one who upped the ante by courting the mass media and the civilian investor who didn't know jack about the comics industry or collector's market. The media didn't just happen upon this story, they were courted and invited in by press releases to major network media outlets, and that was far from the norm at the time. Today we see Marvel using USA Today as a press organ as well as traditional comics media like CBR, in the early 90s that was absolutely unheard of and it was DC alone who took it to that level with the Death of Superman, then the breaking of the Bat (which had diminished returns compared to Superman because a number of people were already in fool me once, shame on you mode and were't going for it this time), then the fall of GL but by that point the world had already done the fool me twice we're done thing and no one paid attention outside the hardcore audience (and that at that point unless you watched Super Friends or listened to Donovan songs in the early 70s you had no idea who GL was if you weren't a comics reader).

Image and Marvel may have been playing with fire but DC deliberately doused the industry in accelerant to try to make a buck at any cost.

-M

Oh you mean the trend started by DC in 1989 with Legends of the Dark Knight #1 (before Image was ever founded and before Marvel did any multiple covers) with the multi-colors of cover wraps outside the same cover so people would buy multiple copies of the same book in the wake of the Batmania following the Burton film? Or in 1987 with the test market covers for Justice League and Firestorm creating collectibles for people to buy the same comic multiple times, or the multiple covers for MAn of Steel #1 in 1986/1987 when Byrne came on board, or...

people like to point to Marvel and Image and their marketing hijinks, but most of those marketing tricks were first put out there by DC, others just did them bigger and better and DC took it on the chin when others used their own tactics against them, and kept trying to up the ante to keep up a game they started and couldn't keep up with.

-M

Began, no, the tipping point where it was flipping over to go belly up...sure. But it began with DC, pretty much all the things that caused the issues were brought into the game by DC, but others took them and did them better and more successfully leaving DC to constantly try to go bigger and bring even more new things in, such as what they did with the Death of Superman where they broke the camel's back. They would start a trend, fall behind, then get desperate and try to play catch up by upping the stakes again, inevitably ham-handedly until it all fell apart. Marvel and Image were only doing what DC started, bigger and better, until DC tried to counter by pushing the envelope more and more with crap like the Death of Superman and courting more and more naive suckers into their game. The Superman office were just doing typical DC stuff, the problem was it was typical because DC introduced it into the game to begin with and it started with the Super-office with the Byrne Man of Steel with multiple covers, double shipping and then new #1s to get more people on board (gee does that sound familiar with what's plaguing the direct market still to this day). Death of Superman is them doing what they always did, and just as badly with just as many terrible consequences for the industry and the exploited customer base, who ate it up so got what they deserved in some sense.

-M

We'll have to disagree on the quality of Superman #75, I thought it was schmaltzy, ham-fisted and poorly executed and a bad story that relied on a plot puppet to achieve the writer's goals rather than a compelling conflict built on the character's identity or history. Doomsday is one of the least interesting MacGuffins I have ever had the displeasure of reading in a comic book. As someone who had been reading Superman since the Byrne reboot, this was the book that got me to drop Superman monthly books for a long long time because I thought it was terrible. I skipped most of the Funeral for a Friend stuff and the Reign of the Supermen that followed, and was only starting to sample Supes again when they did Red and Blue Superman killing any interest I had, and that was the last time I bought new Superman Comics until I sampled and passed on the new52 stuff. Not even someone like Busiek, whose work I generally like a lot, could bring me back to the fold after the biter taste of Superman #75 ad the ensuing event-orama storytelling the Superman office peddled after that until their house of cards crashed in on them.

And DC wasn't the first to market comics, but the elements that plague modern comics marketing (variant covers, reboots, renumbering, double-shipping, etc.) and brought the industry crashing down all started with them and were brought to bear in the industry by DC. The quality of the story, good or bad, does little to absolve them or add blame to them for the damage they did to the long-term viability of the market. If you destroy your customer base, you have no one to sell stories to whether they are good or bad. DC started the fires, watched others build it up to more intense levels, then poured gasoline on the fires to try to catch up when they fell behind and didn't understand that all they were doing is destroying that which they were trying to build, again and again, and Didio and company still haven't learned those lessons. Giordano's influence kept a lot of the excesses in check, and Khan backed him usually, but once he was gone, those excesses began to run unchecked and the house of cards they built came crashing down. A few good stories here and there doesn't mean those destructive patterns of behavior were acceptable. Nor does the fact "everyone else" was doing it and they were desperate. They put themselves in the situation by starting the practices they weren't good enough to capitalize on causing themselves to fall further behind and grow more desperate. They dug their own grave, and even if some of the stuff looked/read good while they did it-they were still digging the grave.

-M

If I understand you correctly, your argument can be boiled down to two points:

1. You thought Superman #75 was terrible.
2. You feel that DC is completely and totally responsible for the gimmicks that reigned the early 1990s and continue into today, no matter the fact that Marvel churned such promotions out with greater frequency in the 1990s and financially benefited more from them.

These are opinions that can't be refuted by facts. Therefore, we'll have to agree to disagree.