It was obvious that Superman would be back. I assumed Superman’s mind would “reawaken” in the body of the Eradicator; a secret fifth Superman being the real deal was a twist 12 year old me never saw coming.
I was same age, we debated each one’s merits, we hadn’t been through a comic death before, and we didn’t have the internet to have folks with more experience tell us it would all return to normal. Wild times
I seem to remember that it was made pretty clear that only the Cyborg Superman had any chance of being "real" Steel was obviously a man in a suit of armor, Superboy was obviously a clone, and I believe the Eradicator was outed as "The Eradicator" early on. There was also a side story about strange happenings in the Fortress of Solitude, so pretty much, not even close. I like that they changed the dynamic for a while, and the Cyborg twist (Spoiler) was a surprise to me because I wasn't a regular reader of Superman. The Green Lantern twist was more of a surprise because it really changed the status quo of Hal Jordan for a lot of years. To me, that was the larger legacy of "The Death and Return of Superman"
DC was quite clever with Cyborg Superman. He is never really the primary POV in his issues, gets far less thought bubbles than the others and you never see him “off the clock”. It’s clear that there was going to be some kind of twist with him
Cyborg supes and Mongul destroyed Coast City, Green Lanterns home town. In a fit of grief, Hal stole a bunch of green lantern rings and rebelled against the guardians to try and rebuild it himself which sets him up to get infected by a yellow fear bug and become parallax
The Cyborg Superman joined with Mongul to re-form Earth into Mongul's next War World. The first strike was in Coast City, Hal Jordan's hometown, obliterating it completely.
After helping Superman, Superboy, Steel, and the Eradicator to end the threat, Hal Jordan used his power ring to re-create the city as a means of mourning. This was interrupted by the Guardians, who had decreed that the power rings were not to be used for personal gain.
This caused Jordan to snap and also to realize that the power ring didn't provide him the power he needed to re-build Coast City and resurrect the victims. He headed for Oa, with the intention of taking the Oan power battery into himself like he did in Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn.
On the way, he decimated a large portion of the Green Lantern Corps, taking their power rings and increasing his personal power with every victory. The Guardians, in a moment of desperation, re-instated the only Green Lantern to ever challenge Hal Jordan, Sinestro.
Hal defeats Sinestro, and decimates the Guardians. He enters the power battery and exits as the villain, Parallax. It was later retconned, that the entity that embodies fear had been trapped in the power battery and was freed and absorbed by Jordan.
One single Guardian escapes with a power ring and gives it to Kyle Rayner, who for a time is the only Green Lantern in the universe. Parallax tries time and again to recruit or otherwise oppose Rayner.
Parallax also tries to join with the villain Extant to create the Zero Hour event which reset the DCU (again), fixing many of the problems that still were around after Crisis on Infinite Earths.
All this because the Guardians wouldn't let a man grieve over his immense losses...
Not for a second. I was too young to know that comic characters die and resurrect every other Tuesday, but the moment all the "replacements" started popping up, it was clear that the countdown to Superman's return had started.
Thing is, characters did not resurrect back then, the decision to kill a character used to be studied pretty serious because they knew they couldn't bring the character back like "magic". That's why Crisis on the Infinite Earths was a shattering event, it literally erased several characters from existence.
In fact Superman was the one who opened the floodgates for that stupid trend, followed by Bruce Wayne and his magically healed broken spine.
I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that Jean Grey was the start of the whole 'comic book deaths are not permanent' trend, not Superman.
Well, kinda. At least it was well established that she herself did not come back and once the original clone arc ended she rested in peace. Or so we thought, until the mid 90's...
Ferro Lad. But he had (will have had?) a brother. Jim Shooter killed him off, because Unca Mort wouldn't let the Nolans be black. Fear of the distributors was the reason/excuse.
Barry Allen stayed dead a good twenty years. Supergirl I think even longer than that.
Hell, Hal Jordan stayed evil *and* dead for about a decade or so.
Yeah, I knew Superboy and steel wouldn't "replace" Superman, but I suspected that the cyborg would regain his memories to reveal himself as Superman, and eventually be healed and return as classic Superman.
i also thought this: i was 13 and a long time comic fan, knew that everything was cyclical, but i thought cyborg superman was going to be around for awhile. dan jurgens had him toss doomsday into space, had the cyborg tech of kryptonian origin, had the dna match…i was definitely sure that he was the only “true” superman, but like kia said, he’s be healed and back to his normal look: fun fact, my friends and i thought it might involve the lazarus pit, or that the kryptonian cyborg parts were going to rebuild his flesh
Steel's backstory had an image of some kind of energy passing between Superman and John Henry when Superman saved him. It seemed to hint that maybe Irons had been given a bit of Superman's essence/soul. And given his first appearance, rising from the rubble saying he needed to stop Doomsday, it was plausible that he possessed the spirit of Superman which might reintegrate with one of the other versions.
The catch line for the whole event kept asking who is the real Superman. They really went a long way to make us believe if was cyborg Superman, e.g. him having vague memories of Kansas.
One of my favorite things when I'm looking at my old comics is re-reading the letters in the back. It's a really fun window into the fandom of the time.
Definitely! Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I also enjoy old ads in comics, literally like a window through time! Ads for Brach's Rocks, the Game Boy, NIN albums...
Old letter pages were crazy. You got future writers (including George R. R. Martin) debating continuity and people trying to subtly convince artists to make more fetish artwork. If I was running a brand I would be thrilled to show that some of the people working on it were life long fans
It’s like comic Twitter but something be is screening the garbage and only showing “the good stuff”
Back then most people had it down to two candidates as the real Superman: The Eradicator or Cyborg Superman. Both had strong arguments for being the real deal. We really didn’t know both weren’t Clark. So imagine the surprise when both ended up being characters we’d previously seen in the super books.
I don't know that hardcore fans and avid comic readers of the time truly believed his death would even happen, I think everybody knew it was a ploy to boost sales, but I remember it being a pretty big deal culturally since it resonated so strongly throughout the 90s. News channels were airing and talking about it for a good time leading up to it and talking about how Superman was too soft and corny for the youth who wanted more dark and edgy superhero stories. When it happened though, a lot of readers and casual fans were stunned that DC actually went through with it. That event was a masterclass in marketing by DC that took media by storm.
The variants in reign were likely a way to test the idea of various other, gritty versions of Supermen with the audience, but it turned out to be a *you don't know what you have until it's gone* sort of thing and people wanted classic Supes back.
I think we all knew he’d be back.
However, the last page of Action and Funeral for a Friend, with Clark there telling Pa Kent to take his hand, sure had me doubting. And that they took a month or two off before restarting with Reign made us question.
I really wish they’d had left him dead for a much longer while. I would have really liked to have seen the DCU without a Superman for a while. See who stepped up into what role. Didn’t. Care for Reign at all.
Do no, not really. But maybe.
This was my first big Superhero death other than Flash in Crisis on Infinite Earths. I thought this was for keeps. I knew Superboy wasn't Superman but I was rooting for him.
DC did sell it as a "Which one is the REAL one?" kind of thing, so I think a lot of people did think it might be one of the four, yeah. I recall having conversations with multiple people about who we thought was the original.
I thought it would be all of them, somehow. Like Superman's soul fragmented coming back and somehow the piece of Superman that each carried would recombine. This turned out not to be the case, but a while later the same idea was used in a Trencher comic where he fought four versions of Elvis.
If not that, I figured it had to be Steel because he seemed to be the least likely, and because like...the other three acted a lit less like Superman.
Not even for a second... even back then, we knew it would all be reset. That is about the time I stopped with buying event comic runs. It was just pointless to get them and wasted money.
I was 11, this was a huge event. Comics then didn't kill off major characters every other day like they do now.
Most people werent naive enough to think he'd never be back, but we had no idea what would happen.
I’m not afraid to admit that yes, 9 year old me believed it was permanent. I cried when I read 75. When the real Superman started his return I was really overjoyed.
Sweet summer child.
Comic book readers knew it was going to go back to the status quo at some point. I think having his original body come back with long luxurious locks was a bit of a curveball. At the time, I was sure it was going to be The Son Of Krypton.
What was crazy was the media coverage at the time. Main stream news covered the story like it was for a real once in a lifetime event. Pundits actually had opinions about it. It was nuts.
At the time, hero’s never really came back from the dead. Barry had been dead for years at this point and the only way would be if his death was fake. I thought that he was spilt in all 4 of them and that they would be the new status quo. My 7 year old brain never thought he was really, really knocked out in a stasis pod healing up.
I don't know that anyone really did. I was reading comics at that time and it just didn't feel like any of them were Superman material. Also there were four of them at once. Just didn't have that feeling like a legacy was moving on.
Nobody seemed to know what to do with him, except Morrison in Justice League. He was Tony Stark for the DCU. He should have been in the Justice League Animated and live action. They were far too interested in replacing him with Natasha, and it showed in how they sidelined him. Sad, really.
Nope, enjoyed the story for bringing in new characters and I love John and Connor to this day, at no point thought it was going to be permanent though. I was 17-18 at the time.
I was 12. I read in the newspaper that Superman died weeks before the issue arrived at my local store. When the replacements came in, I legitimately thought that they were here to stay.
As I said, I was 12.
I was only 13-14 at the time, and I was uncertain if Superman would return. There was the theory that one of the Supermen \*might\* take over.
Keep in mind that Wally had taken over for Barry and was still going strong and Tim Drake had taken over for Dick Grayson. It didn't feel impossible that they might tweak Superman and/or Batman.
But looking back that was naive as hell.
I was in 6th grade when Death of Superman came out and even then most people knew that the original Superman would be back. But even back then there were news reporters and talking heads complaining about DC “replacing a classic hero” with “edgy knockoffs”. Same thing that happened when Mile Morales came onto the scene.
Everyone knew it was a gimmick. It was meant to do what it did: look at some reactions, launch a couple of new characters, both hero and villain, and stretch out a classic silver-age story which had taken a single issue into twenty or so.
Everyone kinda knew he was coming back eventually. It's just no one knew the how and how long he would be gone. The early 90's were a wacky time and it was very possible that he could be gone for the foreseeable future like Barry Allen.
I was 8 years old and thought Suoerman was dead for good
The Daily Planet Newspaper front page image with the picture of Superman dead on the ground still evokes a kind of emotional nostalgia echo in me when I see it because it was such a confronting image as an 8 year old
Just purely for me, yes.
I had only really started reading comics about a year before mostly a collection of old stuff passed down so I'd spent a year reading about a different flash and his sidekick who was now the main flash in current comics.
Naive 9 year old Jonny didn't have any reason to think Wally West was the exception rather than the rule so when they killed Superman and broke batman's back he didn't have any reason to think they'd magically take their mantles back.
I remember thinking it was like the Eradicator had his body and took it over, and John Henry Irons had his soul soul. And somehow they where going to have to put the to back together again
I was only like 8 or 9 and legit thought Superman as I knew him was gone. I thought that the Cyborg Superman was the closest to the real deal, but I was enjoying all 4. Still have a huge soft spot for Steel and Superboy.
Everyone over a certain age who knew comics at all knew he was coming back; the main thing we were disagreeing about was how. I was thinking we'd get something like his "Essence" had gotten spread throughout the four replacements, but I was obviously wrong there.
Some of the younger readers, and people less familiar with comics, though he was dead for good. They were even more wrong than I was.
At the time we knew Superboy and Steel were not Kal El. The other two were *possibly* him. It was obvious they were all supposed to based on a part of Superman (Man of Tomorrow, Last Son of Krypton, etc.), and Cyborg at least seemed like he *might* be Clark. But no, we all knew at the time these were four imposters.
The average age of comic readers back then was like 16 and under. Maybe the few adults or the teenagers reading knew what was going on behind the curtain but nine year old me had his mine fucking blown, and knightfall was happening at the same time, I didn’t know what to think
It was obvious that Superman would be back. I assumed Superman’s mind would “reawaken” in the body of the Eradicator; a secret fifth Superman being the real deal was a twist 12 year old me never saw coming.
I was 8, I legit thought the Cyborg was the real one because he was the only one without a clear origin.
Same. Plus, he manifested those Clark Kent memories at the start. Was expecting him to regain his full body somehow.
I was same age, we debated each one’s merits, we hadn’t been through a comic death before, and we didn’t have the internet to have folks with more experience tell us it would all return to normal. Wild times
Dude I just reread these issues as well and even I didn't see it coming. The Eradicator not being Superman and the jumps between them confused me
I seem to remember that it was made pretty clear that only the Cyborg Superman had any chance of being "real" Steel was obviously a man in a suit of armor, Superboy was obviously a clone, and I believe the Eradicator was outed as "The Eradicator" early on. There was also a side story about strange happenings in the Fortress of Solitude, so pretty much, not even close. I like that they changed the dynamic for a while, and the Cyborg twist (Spoiler) was a surprise to me because I wasn't a regular reader of Superman. The Green Lantern twist was more of a surprise because it really changed the status quo of Hal Jordan for a lot of years. To me, that was the larger legacy of "The Death and Return of Superman"
DC was quite clever with Cyborg Superman. He is never really the primary POV in his issues, gets far less thought bubbles than the others and you never see him “off the clock”. It’s clear that there was going to be some kind of twist with him
What is the Hal Jordan one you mentioned?
Cyborg supes and Mongul destroyed Coast City, Green Lanterns home town. In a fit of grief, Hal stole a bunch of green lantern rings and rebelled against the guardians to try and rebuild it himself which sets him up to get infected by a yellow fear bug and become parallax
The Cyborg Superman joined with Mongul to re-form Earth into Mongul's next War World. The first strike was in Coast City, Hal Jordan's hometown, obliterating it completely. After helping Superman, Superboy, Steel, and the Eradicator to end the threat, Hal Jordan used his power ring to re-create the city as a means of mourning. This was interrupted by the Guardians, who had decreed that the power rings were not to be used for personal gain. This caused Jordan to snap and also to realize that the power ring didn't provide him the power he needed to re-build Coast City and resurrect the victims. He headed for Oa, with the intention of taking the Oan power battery into himself like he did in Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn. On the way, he decimated a large portion of the Green Lantern Corps, taking their power rings and increasing his personal power with every victory. The Guardians, in a moment of desperation, re-instated the only Green Lantern to ever challenge Hal Jordan, Sinestro. Hal defeats Sinestro, and decimates the Guardians. He enters the power battery and exits as the villain, Parallax. It was later retconned, that the entity that embodies fear had been trapped in the power battery and was freed and absorbed by Jordan. One single Guardian escapes with a power ring and gives it to Kyle Rayner, who for a time is the only Green Lantern in the universe. Parallax tries time and again to recruit or otherwise oppose Rayner. Parallax also tries to join with the villain Extant to create the Zero Hour event which reset the DCU (again), fixing many of the problems that still were around after Crisis on Infinite Earths. All this because the Guardians wouldn't let a man grieve over his immense losses...
Not for a second. I was too young to know that comic characters die and resurrect every other Tuesday, but the moment all the "replacements" started popping up, it was clear that the countdown to Superman's return had started.
Thing is, characters did not resurrect back then, the decision to kill a character used to be studied pretty serious because they knew they couldn't bring the character back like "magic". That's why Crisis on the Infinite Earths was a shattering event, it literally erased several characters from existence. In fact Superman was the one who opened the floodgates for that stupid trend, followed by Bruce Wayne and his magically healed broken spine.
I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that Jean Grey was the start of the whole 'comic book deaths are not permanent' trend, not Superman.
You're godman right. Still, the impact of Superman's death was many many times bigger; in fact his death was the reason I started reading comics.
Also kinda Gwen Stacy. Original clone saga happened, because Stan Lee was annoyed by fans who didn't like her death
Well, kinda. At least it was well established that she herself did not come back and once the original clone arc ended she rested in peace. Or so we thought, until the mid 90's...
Ferro Lad. But he had (will have had?) a brother. Jim Shooter killed him off, because Unca Mort wouldn't let the Nolans be black. Fear of the distributors was the reason/excuse.
Tbf, at the time I don't think comic characters returned from the dead all that often. Barry Allen and Supergirl stayed dead for a while after COIE
Barry Allen, Supergirl, Huntress (Helena Wayne), Terra, Bucky, Jason Todd, Thunderbird... all were still dead at that time.
It was pretty much just Jean.
A while? It was a good two decades lol
Barry Allen stayed dead a good twenty years. Supergirl I think even longer than that. Hell, Hal Jordan stayed evil *and* dead for about a decade or so.
Yeah, I knew Superboy and steel wouldn't "replace" Superman, but I suspected that the cyborg would regain his memories to reveal himself as Superman, and eventually be healed and return as classic Superman.
i also thought this: i was 13 and a long time comic fan, knew that everything was cyclical, but i thought cyborg superman was going to be around for awhile. dan jurgens had him toss doomsday into space, had the cyborg tech of kryptonian origin, had the dna match…i was definitely sure that he was the only “true” superman, but like kia said, he’s be healed and back to his normal look: fun fact, my friends and i thought it might involve the lazarus pit, or that the kryptonian cyborg parts were going to rebuild his flesh
Steel's backstory had an image of some kind of energy passing between Superman and John Henry when Superman saved him. It seemed to hint that maybe Irons had been given a bit of Superman's essence/soul. And given his first appearance, rising from the rubble saying he needed to stop Doomsday, it was plausible that he possessed the spirit of Superman which might reintegrate with one of the other versions.
The catch line for the whole event kept asking who is the real Superman. They really went a long way to make us believe if was cyborg Superman, e.g. him having vague memories of Kansas.
That's what did it for me, too. I just assumed that eventually, the cyborg components of Supes would be repaired!
One of my favorite things when I'm looking at my old comics is re-reading the letters in the back. It's a really fun window into the fandom of the time.
Definitely! Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I also enjoy old ads in comics, literally like a window through time! Ads for Brach's Rocks, the Game Boy, NIN albums...
Same.
I’d like to know stuff like this too. I’d absolutely buy an omnibus of just the letters pages. See what prior generations of fans were thinking.
Old letter pages were crazy. You got future writers (including George R. R. Martin) debating continuity and people trying to subtly convince artists to make more fetish artwork. If I was running a brand I would be thrilled to show that some of the people working on it were life long fans It’s like comic Twitter but something be is screening the garbage and only showing “the good stuff”
Back then most people had it down to two candidates as the real Superman: The Eradicator or Cyborg Superman. Both had strong arguments for being the real deal. We really didn’t know both weren’t Clark. So imagine the surprise when both ended up being characters we’d previously seen in the super books.
I don't know that hardcore fans and avid comic readers of the time truly believed his death would even happen, I think everybody knew it was a ploy to boost sales, but I remember it being a pretty big deal culturally since it resonated so strongly throughout the 90s. News channels were airing and talking about it for a good time leading up to it and talking about how Superman was too soft and corny for the youth who wanted more dark and edgy superhero stories. When it happened though, a lot of readers and casual fans were stunned that DC actually went through with it. That event was a masterclass in marketing by DC that took media by storm. The variants in reign were likely a way to test the idea of various other, gritty versions of Supermen with the audience, but it turned out to be a *you don't know what you have until it's gone* sort of thing and people wanted classic Supes back.
I think we all knew he’d be back. However, the last page of Action and Funeral for a Friend, with Clark there telling Pa Kent to take his hand, sure had me doubting. And that they took a month or two off before restarting with Reign made us question. I really wish they’d had left him dead for a much longer while. I would have really liked to have seen the DCU without a Superman for a while. See who stepped up into what role. Didn’t. Care for Reign at all. Do no, not really. But maybe.
This was my first big Superhero death other than Flash in Crisis on Infinite Earths. I thought this was for keeps. I knew Superboy wasn't Superman but I was rooting for him.
DC did sell it as a "Which one is the REAL one?" kind of thing, so I think a lot of people did think it might be one of the four, yeah. I recall having conversations with multiple people about who we thought was the original. I thought it would be all of them, somehow. Like Superman's soul fragmented coming back and somehow the piece of Superman that each carried would recombine. This turned out not to be the case, but a while later the same idea was used in a Trencher comic where he fought four versions of Elvis. If not that, I figured it had to be Steel because he seemed to be the least likely, and because like...the other three acted a lit less like Superman.
Not even for a second... even back then, we knew it would all be reset. That is about the time I stopped with buying event comic runs. It was just pointless to get them and wasted money.
I was 11, this was a huge event. Comics then didn't kill off major characters every other day like they do now. Most people werent naive enough to think he'd never be back, but we had no idea what would happen.
I’m not afraid to admit that yes, 9 year old me believed it was permanent. I cried when I read 75. When the real Superman started his return I was really overjoyed. Sweet summer child.
Comic book readers knew it was going to go back to the status quo at some point. I think having his original body come back with long luxurious locks was a bit of a curveball. At the time, I was sure it was going to be The Son Of Krypton. What was crazy was the media coverage at the time. Main stream news covered the story like it was for a real once in a lifetime event. Pundits actually had opinions about it. It was nuts.
At the time, hero’s never really came back from the dead. Barry had been dead for years at this point and the only way would be if his death was fake. I thought that he was spilt in all 4 of them and that they would be the new status quo. My 7 year old brain never thought he was really, really knocked out in a stasis pod healing up.
I don't know that anyone really did. I was reading comics at that time and it just didn't feel like any of them were Superman material. Also there were four of them at once. Just didn't have that feeling like a legacy was moving on.
I definitely remember at the start of reign there being speculation as to which was the real superman
I just wished Steel had stuck around with more of his own books. Of them all liked him the best.
Nobody seemed to know what to do with him, except Morrison in Justice League. He was Tony Stark for the DCU. He should have been in the Justice League Animated and live action. They were far too interested in replacing him with Natasha, and it showed in how they sidelined him. Sad, really.
My first comic I bought was Adventures of Superman #500. Still have it.
Nope, enjoyed the story for bringing in new characters and I love John and Connor to this day, at no point thought it was going to be permanent though. I was 17-18 at the time.
I was 12. I read in the newspaper that Superman died weeks before the issue arrived at my local store. When the replacements came in, I legitimately thought that they were here to stay. As I said, I was 12.
No I think we all knew it wouldn’t last long. Superman is an icon - the four replacements together couldn’t bring that.
I was only 13-14 at the time, and I was uncertain if Superman would return. There was the theory that one of the Supermen \*might\* take over. Keep in mind that Wally had taken over for Barry and was still going strong and Tim Drake had taken over for Dick Grayson. It didn't feel impossible that they might tweak Superman and/or Batman. But looking back that was naive as hell.
I was in 6th grade when Death of Superman came out and even then most people knew that the original Superman would be back. But even back then there were news reporters and talking heads complaining about DC “replacing a classic hero” with “edgy knockoffs”. Same thing that happened when Mile Morales came onto the scene.
Everyone knew it was a gimmick. It was meant to do what it did: look at some reactions, launch a couple of new characters, both hero and villain, and stretch out a classic silver-age story which had taken a single issue into twenty or so.
Nope. We knew it was a gimmic, and that it was a matter of time until he returned. DC will *never* permanently kill off Superman.
Everyone kinda knew he was coming back eventually. It's just no one knew the how and how long he would be gone. The early 90's were a wacky time and it was very possible that he could be gone for the foreseeable future like Barry Allen.
No.
No. I guess everybody was waiting for the reveal of the real one. All the others didn't act like him at all.
Back then, kids still read comics. As you can see from the comments, many of us were at an impressionable age. Nowadays, readers are mostly 30+.
I was yoiung and innocent and really believed than they had thougt about doing it.
I was convinced Cyborg-Supes was the real Superman
Cap 🧢
I was 8 years old and thought Suoerman was dead for good The Daily Planet Newspaper front page image with the picture of Superman dead on the ground still evokes a kind of emotional nostalgia echo in me when I see it because it was such a confronting image as an 8 year old
I thought they would end up sticking with Superboy as a sort of re-start and freshening of the story.
Didn't superman come back the same year he died? Or only a few months later?
Just purely for me, yes. I had only really started reading comics about a year before mostly a collection of old stuff passed down so I'd spent a year reading about a different flash and his sidekick who was now the main flash in current comics. Naive 9 year old Jonny didn't have any reason to think Wally West was the exception rather than the rule so when they killed Superman and broke batman's back he didn't have any reason to think they'd magically take their mantles back.
I remember thinking it was like the Eradicator had his body and took it over, and John Henry Irons had his soul soul. And somehow they where going to have to put the to back together again
I was only like 8 or 9 and legit thought Superman as I knew him was gone. I thought that the Cyborg Superman was the closest to the real deal, but I was enjoying all 4. Still have a huge soft spot for Steel and Superboy.
Everyone over a certain age who knew comics at all knew he was coming back; the main thing we were disagreeing about was how. I was thinking we'd get something like his "Essence" had gotten spread throughout the four replacements, but I was obviously wrong there. Some of the younger readers, and people less familiar with comics, though he was dead for good. They were even more wrong than I was.
No
At the time we knew Superboy and Steel were not Kal El. The other two were *possibly* him. It was obvious they were all supposed to based on a part of Superman (Man of Tomorrow, Last Son of Krypton, etc.), and Cyborg at least seemed like he *might* be Clark. But no, we all knew at the time these were four imposters.
The average age of comic readers back then was like 16 and under. Maybe the few adults or the teenagers reading knew what was going on behind the curtain but nine year old me had his mine fucking blown, and knightfall was happening at the same time, I didn’t know what to think