For their first DC publication – Superman Official 1986 Annual – Grant Morrison wrote Osgood Peabody’s Big Green Dream Machine, a prose story with illustrations by Barry Kitson and Jeff Anderson, where a gang of criminals attempt to discern Superman’s vulnerabilities by peering into his dreams. Seeing fields of bones and assuming they represent a fear of death on the part of the invincible man, the crooks attempt to intimidate him, only to learn they had been tricked and were instead picking up the super-brainwaves of Krypto the Superdog. “And as Superman led Osgood and the others away, the air rang with the sound of his laughter.” The notion of Superman exposed to decay, to time, to failure? A punchline.
35 years later, the extended admission to the contrary that is Superman and The Authority
series and finally bringing Superman into the 21st century. This new take on the character would arrive in the 2003 miniseries 
, created by writer Mark Waid along with artists Lenil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, and Dave McCaig. While the 12-issue miniseries celebrates and modernizes a number of points from the Man of Steel’s history, Waid and his team also used Birthright to redefine the character of Superman; examining his identity in a new, more cynical era, and how it shapes him, his chosen family, and eventually the world at large.
for the character’s 75th anniversary? Remember how it was unceremoniously demoted to a nine issue miniseries (over the course of eighteen months) because by the end no one much cared, and now it’s almost entirely forgotten? Have you ever really let that set of facts sit in your head in all its plain absurdity?