Celebrating their “Summer of Superman,” DC Comics recently released a giant, well-reviewed book that was designed to be accessible to potential new readers attracted to comics as a result of James Gunn’s new Superman movie. That title, written by legendary Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens, helps show that the “Triangle Era” — a popular but long-gone time in the Superman comics — remains accessible and important today.
Spoilers ahead for Superman Treasury 2025: A Hero For All.
Superman Treasury 2025: Hero for All #1, featuring art by Bruno Redondo (and a short spread featuring art by Jurgens and ’90s Superman inker Brett Breeding), centers on an alien invasion that takes the world by surprise. Taking out the Justice League with a surprise attack, the populace is left to wonder what happened to Superman.
The answer is a riff on one of the most popular Superman stories ever told, updated for a modern audience and thematically inverted. What’s equally interesting is the reveal, fairly late in the story, of the aliens’ commanders.
Longtime Superman readers will likely cotton onto the big bad’s identity sooner than later, with hints in the dialogue long before it’s revealed that Maxima, leader of Almerac, is heading up the attack on Earth. While Almerac has never mounted an attack so successful in the past, that’s likely because Maxima usually leads with her face, mixing it up with A-list superheroes herself before her military ever makes a move.
In Treasury 2025, she approaches the conquest more strategically, allowing her to quickly get the upper hand. Superman is taken off the board in a manner that calls back to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic story “For the Man Who Has Everything,” and the rest of the DC Universe is in shambles.
Maxima is an admittedly odd choice for the villain in a story like this… But it works, in part, because her motivation is so basic. She wants to mate with Superman to create offspring that would be even more powerful than they are, and since he won’t do it, she wants to take him off the board. It may seem like a silly motivation until you consider that Superman and his heirs would certainly present themselves as a threat to a galactic empire.
In this story, she teams up with Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman, and it’s a partnership that makes so much sense, it’s almost surprising nobody has explored it before. Like Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote, both Maxima and Henshaw have a visceral, deeply personal hatred for Superman. And Henshaw has a long history of partnering with other powerful villains, ranging from Mongul to Darkseid, in hopes of finally beating the Man of Steel.
For new readers, these villains are unicorns: totally unfamiliar, giving a sense of the new and exciting, but also easy to understand and compelling. There’s a section in the middle of the comic, drawn by Jurgens and Brett Breeding, that gives a short rundown of Superman’s post-Crisis on Infinite Earths/pre-Flashpoint history, but it is clearly there to enhance the hero’s character arc, not to serve as a primer. If it was necessary information to understand the invasion, it would have been placed earlier in the story.
In that way, Treasury 2025 operates a bit like James Gunn’s Superman movie, to which it serves as a kinda-sorta tie-in. The story opens in medias res, and audiences can pick up more backstory and context as they go. But you don’t really need it to understand what’s happening.
And that’s part of what makes the book fascinating: the character of Maxima in particular calls way back to the early ’90s, and her time with the Justice League is even shouted out in-story. While Henshaw has gone on to be one of the definitive DC villains of the 21st Century, Maxima… Hasn’t. That it’s her story leading the tale speaks to how accessible she is.
In fact, the whole “Triangle Era” of Superman, during which most of Maxima’s biggest stories took place, serves as the backbone of this story, in spite of having ended twenty years before James Gunn ever worked with DC.
The Triangle Era, which ran from 1991 until 2001, was a time of tightly-woven continuity and the central era of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, pre-Flashpoint Superman. During that time, the Man of Steel evolved quite a bit; among other things, he died, came back, and got married. And while common sense would dictate that an era full of big changes would be difficult to follow, the Triangle Era not only featured some of Superman’s most popular and memorable stories, but it also marked one of the last times you could easily jump into any issue of a Superman book with no prior knowledge necessary.
In the 21st Century, the shift to “writing for the trade” — crafting multi-part stories that read best in collected editions — hit Superman hard. 2001 was right around the end of the era when writers tried to approach each new comic as though it might be someone’s first. But even beyond that, the huge popularity of stories like “The Death and Return of Superman” and his later electric powers era makes those stories touchstones for a generation of readers and evergreen hits in the bookstore market.
That means almost anyone with a passing interest in Superman has at least some knowledge of the Triangle Era, whether it comes from “The Death and Return of Superman” or Geoff Johns’s run on Green Lantern or the Jurgens-penned Superman: Lois & Clark, which introduced the pre-Flashpoint Superman into the world of the New 52.
Yeah, Maxima seems like an odd fit for a villain. But she was also part of the Justice League during Superman’s battle with Doomsday. Henshaw’s story is complicated, relying on an understanding of the “Death and Return” storyline. But virtually everyone has a baseline understanding of that story, due to its popularity as well as the fact that it introduced Henshaw, Steel, and the Conner Kent Superboy.
It’s no accident that Dan Jurgens is constantly called in for Superman stories, whether it’s one-shots like this or longer runs like his acclaimed “Rebirth” years on Action Comics. Not only does he understand Superman on a fundamental level, but he was a key part of the Triangle Era — a period of time which, in spite of being decades-old and self-contained, still informs most readers’ impressions of Superman to this day.
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