Honestly, it’s kinda wild that Alan Moore is basically the patron saint of the "modern" Superman despite only writing about three proper stories for the guy. You ask any die-hard fan for a top-five list, and Moore is going to be on there at least twice. It’s a weird paradox. The man who supposedly "deconstructed" the superhero into a million cynical pieces with Watchmen is the same guy who wrote the most earnest, heart-wrenching love letters to the Man of Steel ever put to paper.
People always act like Moore hates superheroes. They think he’s this grumpy wizard in Northampton just waiting to talk trash about the MCU. But if you actually look at Alan Moore on Superman, you see something else entirely. You see a writer who was deeply, almost painfully, in love with the colorful weirdness of the Silver Age.
He didn't want to break Superman. He wanted to give him the ending he deserved before DC Comics hit the giant reset button in 1986.
The Birthday Party From Hell
Let’s talk about Superman Annual #11. This is the one titled "For the Man Who Has Everything," and it’s arguably the best single-issue story in the character's 80-year history.
The setup is classic Moore: simple, but it cuts deep. Batman, Robin (Jason Todd at the time), and Wonder Woman show up at the Fortress of Solitude for Clark’s birthday. They find him standing like a statue, a disgusting, tentacled alien plant called the Black Mercy latched onto his chest.
It’s a parasite. It feeds you your heart's greatest desire while it slowly sucks the life out of you.
While Wonder Woman is busy getting into a brutal, planet-shaking brawl with the warlord Mongul, we see inside Clark’s head. What does the "Man of Steel" actually want? It’s not world peace or a bigger statue in Metropolis.
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He wants to be Kal-El.
He wants a version of Krypton that never exploded. He’s married. He has a son named Van-El. His dad, Jor-El, isn't a tragic martyr but a grumpy, disgraced scientist who got his predictions wrong. It’s mundane. It’s normal. And the moment Clark realizes it isn't real—the moment he has to tell his "son" that he doesn't exist—it’s devastating.
When Superman finally rips the plant off and wakes up, he isn't the "Big Blue Boy Scout" anymore. He is terrifyingly, white-hot angry. Moore writes a Superman that is a god pushed to his limit, and Dave Gibbons (who would later do Watchmen with Moore) draws him with a ferocity that makes you realize why the villains are usually scared of him.
The "Final" Story (That Wasn't)
Then came the big one: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
In 1986, DC was rebooting everything with Crisis on Infinite Earths. The old, wacky, powerful Superman of the 50s and 60s was being replaced by a more grounded version. DC editor Julius Schwartz asked Moore to write the "final" story of the old version.
Moore didn't just write a goodbye. He wrote a funeral that felt like a celebration.
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The story is told through an interview with Lois Lane ten years after Superman disappeared. It’s grim. Krypto the Superdog dies. Jimmy Olsen and Lana Lang die. The Fortress is under siege by a Brainiac-Luthor hybrid that is genuinely body-horror levels of creepy.
But the real twist? The villain isn't some cosmic god. It’s Mr. Mxyzptlk.
Moore reimagined the "funny little man" from the fifth dimension as something immortal and bored. If you lived forever, wouldn't you eventually get tired of being funny? Mxyzptlk decides to try being "evil" for a few centuries instead.
The ending is famous for a reason. Superman breaks his one rule: he kills. Even though it was to save the world from a reality-warping imp, Clark can't live with it. He voluntarily walks into a room of Gold Kryptonite, loses his powers, and disappears.
It turns out he lived happily ever after as a normal guy named Jordan Elliot, married to Lois, raising a kid who can casually crush coal into diamonds. It’s the ultimate "peace out" to a character Moore clearly respected too much to just let fade away.
Why These Stories Still Hit Different
Most writers try to make Superman "relatable" by making him more human, more flawed, or more "dark." Moore went the opposite way. He leaned into the absurdity.
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He used things like the Scarlet Jungles of Krypton or the Phantom Zone—stuff that modern writers often find too "comic-booky"—and gave them actual emotional weight. In DC Comics Presents #85, he has Superman get infected by a Kryptonian fungus that makes him hallucinate. He meets Swamp Thing in the Louisiana bayou.
It’s a story about the loneliness of being an alien.
Moore understood that Superman’s greatest tragedy isn't that he can be hurt by a green rock. It’s that he is the survivor of a dead world who has to pretend to be a normal guy from Kansas just to fit in.
The Supreme "Apology"
If you want to see what Moore really thought about the character, you have to look at his work on Supreme in the late 90s. Supreme was a violent, edgy Superman rip-off created by Rob Liefeld.
Moore took over the book and basically turned it into a love letter to the 1950s. He introduced "Supremium," a "Supremacy" (where all the old versions of the character live), and a female version of the hero.
He later said this was partly an "apology" for the way the industry had taken his work on Watchmen and used it to make everything miserable and "grimdark." With Supreme, he was trying to put the "sense of wonder" back into the genre. He was trying to show that you can have smart, complex stories without losing the joy of a guy in a cape flying through space.
Key Takeaways from Moore’s Superman Work:
- Embrace the Weirdness: Don't run away from the "silly" history of a character; find the emotional core within it.
- The Power of the Ending: A character only truly lives when they are allowed a meaningful conclusion.
- Desire vs. Duty: Superman’s true "heart's desire" is often just the things we take for granted: a family and a home.
- Anger is Human: Even the most moral hero has a breaking point, and showing that makes them more real, not less.
If you're looking to dive into these stories, don't just hunt for the individual issues. Most of them are collected in a trade paperback titled "Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore" or the more recent "DC Universe by Alan Moore." Start with Superman Annual #11. It’s a self-contained masterpiece. If you’ve only ever seen the Justice League Unlimited animated adaptation (which is also great), you owe it to yourself to see the original Dave Gibbons art. The scale of the fight and the sadness of the "imaginary" Krypton just land differently on the page. After that, read Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? to see how to retire a legend with dignity.