With nearly a century of history, Superman has a lot of stories to his credit. One of the most iconic characters in pop culture, Superman stories have seen the hero do just about everything, saving the world from countless threats both by himself and as part of various heroic teams. Some of these stories have become classics, beloved by readers for generations and adapted into other forms of media as well.
Yet, for every incredible Superman story, there are those that don’t measure up. Naturally, not every story is going to be perfect, but there are some Superman stories that are so bad that they’re considered by many to be the worst stories in the Man of Steel’s history. From stories so bad their writers were fired to weird future-set tales that make no sense, these are the worst Superman stories, ever.
Written by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Roberson, Superman: Grounded sees the hero return to earth after living on New Krypton and, after leaving a congressional hearing, a crying woman slaps him as she’s upset that her husband died from a brain tumor while he was gone, a brain tumor she thought Superman might have been able to fix but she was told he was away “doing something important,.” Upset by this, Superman thinks he’s lost touch with everyday people and begins to walk across the United States to reconnect.
There’s a lot to unpack about this. The idea of Superman walking across America helping people isn’t necessarily a bad idea. It actually feels like a very Superman thing to do. However, Superman is also the one DC hero that is probably most consistently shown as being deeply connected to the everyday American by virtue of his upbringing on a farm in Kansas so the idea that Superman had lost sight of things is a little shaky. But it’s not just the somewhat thin premise of an out of touch Superman feeling guilty about a man dying while he was gone that makes Superman: Grounded not great. There’s also some very out of character choices in the story, namely Superman making Lois cancel an article exposing a factory for badly polluting the environment because it’s the main employer in a small time. Yes, you read that right: Superman sides with the neglectful corporation, not the truth.
You read that right, though this is one of those “so bad and weird it’s kind of good” situations. In Action Comics #593 from 1987, Big Barda and Superman find themselves manipulated into making adult entertainment together when Sleez comes to earth having been cast out of Apokalips for essentially being too much of a weirdo for even Apokalips. Superman and Barda end up being kidnapped and manipulated into the situation.
Superman, however, ends up being just too pure for it all and is able to resist because of his good strong morals. That gives Mister Miracle time to show up and stop things from going too far — or at least too much beyond kissing. It’s very weird, very wild, and it makes for some interesting Superman trivia but it’s also just bad.
Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One was great. More than 30 years later, however, his Superman: Year One absolutely was not. A non-canon take on Superman, we get a refreshed take on Superman’s origin story but everything in it (except maybe the art from John Romita Jr., if you’re a fan of his) is just bad. There’s an attempted sexual assault that Clark stops and everyone acts like was no big deal, Clark joins the Navy, he runs off with a mermaid at some point, and there’s just a lot of nonsensical things that happen across the issues that just are simultaneously boring and very weird.
Even beyond the very strange nonsense storytelling, however, the thing that really is the icing on the “this is bad” cake is that it’s not even really a “Year One” story. It’s mostly just a badly put together and poorly considered recap of Superman’s life before he was really a hero so it kind of feels pretty pointless overall.
Spanning Action Comics #820 through #825, “In The Name of Gog” is a story that was so bad that it contributed to its writer being dropped, Written by Chuck Austen, “In The Name of Gog” saw the anti-hero Gog arriving from the future intent on killing Superman before the hero could cause some major disaster. That on its face isn’t a bad story idea. However, the execution of said idea in this story was just weird and awful.
“In The Name of Gog” had Lois Lane and Lana Lang pitted against one another, a bunch of weird subplots (including one about a racist Superman ripoff), and a lot of strange little gaps and dropped ideas that make it clear that some of Austen’s ideas never got fully fleshed out. It’s just bad.
The ‘90s were a wild time in comics and Superman: At Earth’s End is a prime example of that, and not in a good way. Written by Tom Veitch with art by Frank Gomez, the story is set in the future following the events of Kamandi: At Earths’ End. An Elseworld’s story, this is a post-apocalyptic future where a white-haired and white-bearded Superman discovers that Gotham City is the next city of Earth set to be “cleansed” via nuclear bomb by emotionless cyborgs as part of an effort to return things to “greatness”. This prompts Superman to go try to stop the cleansing and, upon discovering Batman’s corpse has been stolen, retrieve that.
The story is super weird. Superman finds the culprit behind the theft of Batman’s body is a pair of Adolf Hitler clones (yes, seriously) and ends up fighting their legions of mutant troopers. There’s a lot of weird stuff in here. Superman at some point blames Hitler for the arms race that led to all of this, he ends up being shot and, because he’s weaker than normal, his wounds are fatal. Superman then takes the remains of Batman and walks into a funeral pyre and a member of a child gang that had been working with Superman — because of course this story has a child gang — laments that if there were no guns, Superman would still be alive thus making the story one about gun violence. It is the weirdest, least sensical Superman story ever.
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