A shame what you have to learn years later.  I thought John Byrne's run on SUPERMAN was generally accepted as typically great... the only scuttlebutt at the time that I recall is some vague grumbling from Harlan Ellison somewhere (and it's been so long, I can't even remember where I first read of it).

Of all the crap that DC (and Marvel) has churned-out in the past 25-odd years, it's John Byrne's Superman that is still polarizing???  Unreal.

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One of the lessons I learned when rebooting Superman was the degree to which the central core of the character had slipped into a place of relative unimportance for many of the most harsh critics. Those barnacles I imagined myself to be chipping away from DC's flagship turned out to be what MATTERED to these people.

It was all summed up for me when, as I have mentioned before, I received a letter from an irate fan who simply could not believe I had gotten rid of Beppo, the Supermonkey. Did I not understand how IMPORTANT that character was?

Eventually, I realized it wasn't really about what was "important". It was about memorizing microscopic details of the character's history. It was about being able to whip out the tiniest trivia, naming issue numbers and other such unimportant window dressings. And somehow, at least in the minds of the people doing it, fitting it into a "cohesive" whole.

As I've mentioned before, DC was reaching the "S" volumes in WHO'S WHO just as I was gearing up on Superman, and they actually wanted to list "my" Superman as a separate entity, "Superman III". I refused to allow it, saying "my" Superman was the same one created by Siegel and Shuster. But looking back, I have long since realized "Superman III" would most likely have silenced about 99% of the protests. Instead of giving the deeply anal retentives something to complain about, it would have given them something else to add to their hoarder brains.

 I was, after all, viewed by many hard core Superman fans as a "Marvel Guy" who was invading the sacred halls of DC.

Yeah, I remember my first brush with that kind of fan-think. While I liked Marvel comics better, I just went to the store and bought comics. I guess it was an unconscious brand loyalty but when I went to get the first issue of Man of Steel at Waldenbooks, I was scoffed at by a Superman fan. He told me there was no sense in buying the comic because it wasn't Superman. I asked why and he told me that John Byrne was going to "Marvelize" him.