SPOILER WARNING: This post contains extensive spoilers for Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. If you haven’t read this twelve-issue masterpiece yet, I genuinely encourage you to experience it firsthand before reading this analysis. It’s available in various collected editions, and trust me—it’s worth your time. This is, in my opinion, the greatest Superman story ever told.

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Superman is impossible.

Think about it. Here’s a character who is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and shoot lasers from his eyes. He’s essentially a god walking among mortals, wrapped in primary colors and a cape. In our modern age of cynical, deconstructed superheroes, Superman should feel like a relic—a Boy Scout from a simpler time when we believed powerful people naturally chose to do good.

And yet, Superman endures. More than that, he remains the archetypal superhero, the standard against which all others are measured. Every superhero story, at some level, is in conversation with Superman. But that cultural significance creates a unique challenge for writers: How do you tell a meaningful story about someone who can do anything? How do you create tension when your protagonist is invulnerable? How do you make us care about a god?

Grant Morrison found the answer in 2005 with All-Star Superman, and it was brilliantly, heartbreakingly simple: You make him mortal. You give him one year to live. And then you watch what he does with that time.

I read All-Star Superman as it was originally released, waiting months between issues, and I’ll be honest—Grant Morrison’s work is hit or miss for me. Sometimes their meta-textual experiments and reality-bending narratives leave me cold. But when Morrison hits, he hits hard. And with All-Star Superman, working alongside artist Frank Quitely, they didn’t just hit the target—they split the arrow.

What makes this story extraordinary isn’t just that it’s a meditation on mortality featuring an essentially immortal character. It’s that Morrison, freed from the constraints of DC Universe continuity by the All-Star imprint, was able to pull in story threads from every era of Superman’s 70-plus year history. The result is a love letter to the character that somehow feels both timeless and urgently contemporary, a story that uses Superman’s impending death to explore what makes life—and this character—worth celebrating.

The Weight of the Sun

The premise is elegantly simple and mythically resonant. Lex Luthor, from his death row cell, orchestrates a scenario that floods Superman’s cells with solar radiation. Yes, it makes him more powerful than ever—he becomes practically immune to Kryptonite, gains new abilities, and can perform feats that boggle even his own impressive standards. But it’s also killing him. His cells are oversaturated, burning out like a star going supernova. The very source of his power, Earth’s yellow sun, has become the instrument of his doom.

There’s something beautifully poetic about this setup. Superman has always drawn his power from the sun—he’s essentially a solar battery in a cape. Morrison takes this fundamental aspect of the character and transforms it into Greek tragedy. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, Superman’s greatest strength becomes his fatal weakness. But unlike Icarus, Superman doesn’t fall immediately. He has time—approximately one year—to set his affairs in order.

What does a superman do when faced with mortality? This question drives the entire narrative, and Morrison’s answer reveals the moral philosophy at the heart of the character. Superman doesn’t rage against the dying of the light. He doesn’t seek revenge on Luthor (who’s already on death row). He doesn’t even immediately tell anyone he’s dying. Instead, he gets to work.

The twelve issues of the series loosely correspond to twelve labors—a deliberate echo of Hercules, another mythical strongman who bridged the divine and mortal worlds. But where Hercules’ labors were often about conquest or penance, Superman’s labors are about connection, creation, and care. He creates life in his Fortress of Solitude. He writes his last will and testament—which turns out to be a guide for humanity to follow in his absence. He gives Lois Lane superpowers for a day, allowing her to experience the world as he does. He visits his father’s grave (the Kansas one, not the Kryptonian one). He stops monsters, saves lives, and even finds time to prevent a teenager from committing suicide in one of the series’ most powerful moments.

The Dignity of Choice

If there’s a central moral theme to All-Star Superman, it’s the power and dignity of choice. Throughout the series, characters are defined not by their abilities but by what they choose to do with them. This is most obvious with Superman himself—faced with unlimited power and limited time, he chooses to serve others rather than himself. But Morrison extends this theme to nearly every character in the story.

Consider Lex Luthor, Superman’s antithesis. Luthor is perhaps the smartest human in the DC Universe, someone whose intellect could revolutionize human civilization. But he chooses to spend that genius on destroying Superman, convinced that the alien’s presence diminishes humanity. It’s only at the story’s climax, when Luthor temporarily gains Superman’s powers, that he finally sees what Superman sees—a world of infinite possibility and profound beauty, where every life matters and everything is connected. For one brief moment, Luthor understands that Superman hasn’t been holding humanity back; Luthor has been holding himself back, wasting his gifts on hatred when he could have been creating wonders.

This revelation—that Luthor could have been humanity’s greatest hero if he’d made different choices—is perhaps the story’s most tragic moment. Morrison doesn’t let him off the hook or give him a redemptive turn. Instead, Luthor weeps for what he’s lost, for the choices he can’t unmake, for the genius he squandered on petty revenge. It’s a powerful statement about how our choices define us, how brilliance without compassion is ultimately self-defeating.

The theme extends to smaller characters too. Jimmy Olsen chooses to be Superman’s friend, not his photographer. Perry White chooses to run Clark Kent’s final article even after his mild-mannered reporter has collapsed at his desk. The scientists of P.R.O.J.E.C.T. choose to continue Superman’s work after his death. Even the sun itself, in Morrison’s mythological framework, chooses to accept Superman’s consciousness and allow him to repair it from within.

Love as Salvation

Running parallel to the theme of choice is Morrison’s meditation on love—not romantic love alone, though that’s certainly present, but love as a fundamental force that drives meaningful action. Superman’s love for humanity motivates his twelve labors. His love for Lois Lane leads him to finally reveal his identity and give her the gift of experiencing his world. His love for his adoptive parents grounds him in human values despite his godlike powers.

The relationship between Superman and Lois is particularly well-handled. Morrison avoids the typical will-they-won’t-they dynamic that has often defined their relationship in other continuities. Instead, we get something more mature and touching—two people who already love each other, navigating the revelation of secrets and the specter of loss. When Superman gives Lois his powers for 24 hours, it’s not just a gift; it’s an act of trust and intimacy, sharing the thing that most defines him with the person who matters most to him.

Their kiss on the moon, as Lois’s temporary powers fade, is one of the most romantic moments in superhero comics—not because it’s dramatic or passionate, but because it’s tender and knowing. They both understand this moment is finite. The powers will fade. Superman will die. But the love remains, transcending both mortality and godhood.

Morrison also explores love’s absence as a destructive force. Luthor’s hatred of Superman is really a twisted form of love—an obsession that consumes everything else in his life. Solaris, the artificial sun that attempts to destroy Earth’s sun, is motivated by loneliness and rejection. The Bizarros create their own backwards world out of a misguided love for Superman, trying to honor him through imperfect replication. In each case, love distorted or denied becomes a source of chaos and pain.

The Mortality of Gods

Perhaps the most profound philosophical element of All-Star Superman is how it handles the death of someone who seems like they should be eternal. Superman has often been portrayed as a Christ figure—the savior from above who sacrifices himself for humanity. Morrison leans into this interpretation but adds layers of complexity.

Superman’s death isn’t sudden or dramatic. It’s slow, inevitable, and known in advance. This gives him—and us—time to contemplate what his existence has meant. In one of the series’ most moving sequences, Superman experiences a vision (or perhaps reality) of standing in a golden field in Smallville, talking with his deceased adoptive father, Jonathan Kent. Pa Kent, ever practical and wise, tells his son that death is part of life, that even Superman can’t save everyone, can’t be everywhere, can’t live forever.

This acceptance of limitation is crucial to the story’s philosophy. Superman’s mortality doesn’t diminish him—it completes him. By accepting death, he becomes more human than he’s ever been, even as his powers reach godlike levels. He experiences fear, urgency, and the bittersweet knowledge that every moment is precious because it won’t last forever.

The story suggests that mortality isn’t a weakness to be overcome but a condition that gives life meaning. Superman’s final acts carry weight precisely because they’re final. His last save, his last article for the Daily Planet, his last words to Lois—these moments matter because there won’t be infinite others to follow. Even gods, Morrison seems to argue, need endings to make their stories complete.

Creation Over Destruction

One of the most striking aspects of All-Star Superman is how little fighting it contains for a superhero comic. Yes, there are conflicts—Superman faces various threats throughout his twelve labors—but the emphasis is consistently on creation rather than destruction. Superman spends more time building than battling, more energy saving than punching.

In his Fortress of Solitude, Superman creates an entire miniature civilization of Kandor, searching for ways to restore the bottled city to full size. He crafts suns to feed the infant Sun-Eater. He builds robots to carry on his work after he’s gone. He even finds a way to cure cancer in children, casually mentioning this miraculous achievement in passing. For Morrison’s Superman, true power isn’t about what you can destroy—it’s about what you can create and preserve.

This philosophy extends to how Superman deals with his enemies. When he encounters the Parasite in prison while visiting Lex Luthor, Clark Kent doesn’t fight—he outsmarts the creature while maintaining his secret identity. When Bizarro creates an imperfect duplicate world, Superman doesn’t destroy it—he helps stabilize it, giving the Bizarros their own space to exist. Even with Luthor, Superman’s goal isn’t revenge but revelation, hoping until the end that his greatest enemy might finally understand what he’s been fighting against.

The creative impulse reaches its apex in the story’s conclusion. Faced with death, Superman doesn’t simply die—he transforms. His consciousness merges with the sun itself, and from within, he builds machinery to keep it functioning, to keep it providing life to Earth. It’s the ultimate act of creation, turning his own death into a source of continued life for everyone else. Superman becomes the salvation he always represented, literally powering the world from within.

The Impossible Made Possible

In the end, what makes All-Star Superman the greatest Superman story ever told isn’t just its philosophical depth or emotional resonance—it’s how Morrison and Quitely make the impossible feel possible. They take a character who shouldn’t work in our cynical age and make him not just relevant but essential. They show us that strength without compassion is meaningless, that power without purpose is empty, that even gods need grace.

The story’s final image—Lois standing before a Superman memorial, telling Jimmy she believes Superman will return, while we see Superman alive within the sun, building and creating—perfectly encapsulates the story’s themes. Death isn’t the end but a transformation. Love transcends physical presence. Creation outlasts the creator. And hope—that most Superman of qualities—endures even in the face of loss.

Morrison understood something fundamental about Superman that many writers miss: He’s not interesting because he’s powerful. He’s interesting because he’s good, and he chooses to remain good despite having every opportunity to be otherwise. In a world where power corrupts absolutely, Superman remains incorruptible not because he’s alien but because he’s made a choice—a daily, conscious choice—to serve rather than rule, to create rather than destroy, to love rather than fear.

All-Star Superman takes the Man of Steel and reveals the man within the steel—vulnerable, mortal, and ultimately human in all the ways that matter. It shows us that being super isn’t about the powers you have but about what you do with whatever time you’re given. And in showing us Superman’s last days, Morrison and Quitely remind us how to live our own days better.

That’s the real magic of this story. It takes an impossible character—an invulnerable alien god—and uses his death to teach us about life. It shows us that everyone, even Superman, is racing against time, fighting entropy, struggling against the dying of the light. But it also shows us that this struggle isn’t futile. Every choice matters. Every act of kindness reverberates. Every moment of love transcends its own brevity.

Superman is impossible. But then again, so is humanity’s continued existence, so is love, so is hope in the face of overwhelming darkness. Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman celebrates all of these impossibilities, showing us that the most unbelievable thing about Superman isn’t that he can fly or shoot lasers from his eyes. It’s that someone with all that power would choose, again and again, to be kind.

And if an impossible alien god can make that choice, then maybe, just maybe, so can we.