My Collection - THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN [1987 Series]

The Adventures of Superman [1987 series]
34 issues [1987 - 1996]
424, 427 - 430, 432 - 433, 445 - 451, 453 - 457, 471 - 472, 479 - 481, 491, 495, 500 - 501, 504, 506, 508, 520 - 521, 533

The series that took over the numbering from the original SUPERMAN book so they could get a shiny new #1. It's just been renamed back to SUPERMAN with #650. When I was reading the Superman books in the early 1990s this was usually my favourite, thanks to a long run of Jerry Ordway drawing and/or writing, and then Karl Kesel writing. I used to have a few dozen more of these, but the structure of the Superman books for most of the era keeping them would have meant having a lot of single chapters of longer stories, and usually not the beginnings or endings, which I guess defaulted to the "flagship" Superman title that this should have been. I've also occasionally sampled most major creative shifts in the past decade, but none kept me interested in reading another issue or keeping the one I did read.

I did still keep more of this than the other Superman book of the era. Most of the Ordway stuff from the early days, especially when he was drawing the book, reads pretty well without the surrounding books, before they went with the tighter continuity and overlapping storylines. I also kept a handful of the Kesel issues that were good single issue tales. If I had an easy way to find out which other Ordway/Kesel stories that I never read from their runs on the book are good single issue stories, especially with art by Tom Grummett or Stuart Immonen, I'd probably pick them up someday.

Couple of good bits:

#446 - #448 are a good example of the Ordway written/drawn era, with some great art and pretty good scripting and characterization for someone who hadn't written much solo before.

#495 has a good Kirby-redux story, with the Forever People, written by Ordway and with art by Tom Grummett.

#508 is more Kirby-redux, this time Superman meeting the time-traveling Challengers of the Unknown in between the panels of one of their original adventures.

#520 is a good single-issue story from the Kesel/Immonen era, a Christmas story with lots of goofy villains.