Dawg...Waid. Yu. Birthright. A must read for beginners. Waaaaay better than Secret Origin, which sadly usurped Birthright's place in the canon. Like All-Star, it's 12 issues. And it does what Waid does best, which is get to the core of the character and shine a light on it. This was done at a time when I think people started to forget Superman's importance in the DCU and in all of superhero history. This book has that all on display, with wonderful art from the always incredible Francis Yu. I can say, without a doubt, that this story has the single greatest splash page in Superman history. An incredible metaphor that says everything you need to know about the character. And to throw out one more option, the Earth One series by J Michael Straszyncski and Shane Davis was meant for exactly what this list is for. It was a modern take on the origin of the character. It's not earth shattering, but it is incredibly underrated and I think outshined by more successful entries in the imprint, like Batman by Geoff Johns & Gary Frank or Wonder Woman by Grant Morrison & Yanick Paquette. it's just a nice little trio of books that are of a slightly different format, being original graphic novels. Meaning it wasn't released in issues, just all at once as one big tale. Each book is approximately the length of a 5 issue arc, so really, they're a breeze to get through. I love the whole line actually, as everyone uses the blank slate of this specific "universe" to tell really interesting takes on each hero. Some differing from their Prime Earth counterparts greatly. It's like seeing them arrive wildly different but slowly grow TOWARDS their more familiar selves. Plus it's probably the best place to start if you wish to explore the Multiverse.

Excellent

sucks that it’s gone out of print

I loved it it was just so good fun and wholesome

What do u think is the best start comic for superman to u?

I read it as my first and i thought it was still very good

If you had your pick you would choose sentry stories instead of superman.🤷😂

YES. THIS. I call it "All-Star Superman 1.5". It accomplishes the same goal in half the issues. Easily the best thing King has written. Not divisive like most of his crap. He perfectly "gets" Superman. Just goes to show, for his big attempt at a 100 issue run, he was on the wrong one of the Trinity brothers' titles.

The story is one of the better ones, but I cant stand the art style I think its a total miss

Amazing Fantasy then Amazing Spider-Man #1. Start at the beginning always the best bet.

You can start by reading the Ultimate Spider-Man series, it begins with Power and Responsibility. It's not in the main Marvel continuity (aka Earth-616), but it does introduce the character of Peter Parker, and, later on, Miles Morales. The Ultimate universe was made as a way to introduce new readers to comics without them having to read 80 years of comics. So, yk, give it a shot

Black Widow by Waid and Samnee Complete Collection. 12 issues. All you need.

@@MykeHavoc thanks

Other Kryptonites have been explored a lot over the last 20 years. Mostly on tv shows, but in comics too. The Tower of Babel arc of JLA has the villains steal and use all of Batman's contingency plans for if any JLA member ever went bad. Superman's was red kryptonite, which made his skin translucent. In Smallville (and later Supergirl) on the CW, red Kryptonite means a kryptonian has lowered inhibitions and mostly turns to rage. It's a metaphor for substance abuse. The longer they're exposed, the harder it is to stop. Blue Kryptonite temporarily takes away a Kryptonian's yellow sun related powers. They used this in a cool way, with the Kryptonian military fashioning knives with blue Kryptonite blades on them. So it basically acted immediately like a real knife to a regular human. Gold kryptonite is the worst. One touch, and your powers are gone. FOREVER. But black kryptonite might be my favorite. It splits a person in two, one being the Jekyll, the other being the Hyde. It was used to explore the different sides of Lex Luthor and ends up showing Lex the true darkness he keeps hidden within. He has that megalomaniacal side in him. It's something he fights that he inherited/learned/was manipulated by and such from his father, Lionel, who is basically the Luthor we know from the comics. Smallville is the single greatest deconstruction of the Lex Luthor character, explored over 7 years. It's more his show than it is Clark's at times. It was never the same after Michael Rosenbaum left. Anyway, back to kryptonite: so silver makes a Kryptonian more and more paranoid and delusional, created by the excellently casted James Marsters as Brainiac. There was also a gemstone that had the power of persuasion. It was pretty dumb. And good old Green kryptonite had all sorts of wacky effects on humans. Every week, for the first few seasons, every episode, a new "freak of the week" would emerge with some power after being exposed to kryptonite combined with some other thing that was related to whatever the power would be. So a guy using green rocks in his sauna is able to spontaneously combust things. Another, an elderly man, falls into a lake full of green rocks and the water is electrocuted from his suped up wheelchair. It ends up de-aging him to his 20s again. One girl (future Lois Lane Amy Adams, funnily enough) grows veggies in soil filled with green rock fragments. She makes healthy shakes with them and loses incredible amounts of weight each day. She eventually has to feed on humans'...life force? (They get sucked dry and turn into corpses) to control her hunger. Anyway, it was like that for years. All sorts of strange ideas. It was imaginative and fun. I feel there was always an element of will involved (green is the color of will, afterall), as the powers always reflected their goals setup in the cold openings of each episode. Recently, on Superman & Lois, they've introduced both green and a yellowish kryptonite (called X-Kryptonite) that appears to have a similar effect like the green kind did on Smallville. It was also used to take the spirits of Kryptonians and insert them into human hosts. Kinda strange, but like I said earlier, fun wacky ideas. And one last thing: there's been excellent use of Bizzaro in both the tv shows and the comics. Geoff Johns tried to fuse the alien idea of Bizzaro and the clone idea of the post-Crisis timeline into one, and some great stories have come out since, exploring his world greatly. Htrae is one of the 52 earths in the Multiverse. 2 years into the New 52, Johns gave us the excellent event Forever Evil, where the Earth 3 Crime Syndicate invades the Prime Earth, and it's up to the VILLIANS to stop them. Bizzaro played a big part in it, acting as Luthor's bodyguard during the attack. It was a 5 year cooked clone which was supposed to be a 10 year process, so he comes out as sort of a proto-Bizzaro. He puts on his suit inside out, hence the reversed Crest, and was known as project B - Zero (get it?). Soon followed a fantastic issue in Action Comics, by Greg Pak and Aaron Kuder, featuring a classic Bizzaro, from Htrae. The best part is that everyone was complaining that they gave Superman a beard, so in a stroke of brilliance, while he's on Htrae, the laws of physics and reality in general are kind of nonexistent. So his beard just pops off, like a Mr. Potato play piece, and vanishes. This was soon followed up by a great mini with a great premise: Bizzaro and Jimmy Olsen go on a road trip across America. Antics ensue. This was an excellent book, with lovely cartoon style art and written with a very broad apppeal, being appropriate for all ages. I tell you, it was one of the best books released during the New 52, and it wasn't even canon lol Tom Taylor brilliantly slipped in a little Bizzaro reference while writing Earth 2. It was one of the most clever things I've ever seen pulled off. Bizzaro was also featured on both Smallville and Supergirl. Their take of it on smallville was pretty lousy. It was just like a darker copy of Clark, that only appeared rocky in the daylight. Supergirl actually did a more traditional take on the character. While we're on the topic, the Animated Series in the 90s had a few appearances by Bizzaro. The very first one brought me to tears at the end. If you had to distill Bizzaro down to his essence, that episode is the example I would use. Anyway, I'm shutting up now. I promise lol

Bendis started out good but took a bad turn real quick