There is a version of Superman that Hollywood keeps trying to sell us. He is a god among men — stoic, invincible, and just a little bit boring. He punches things. He catches falling planes. He stands in front of explosions looking heroic. And then he flies away, presumably to go do more punching somewhere else. It’s not that those stories are bad, exactly. It’s just that they tend to miss the most interesting thing about Superman, which is not his power but his grief.

Alan Moore understood this. In 1985, he and artist Dave Gibbons — fresh off the early planning stages of what would become Watchmen — turned in a single-issue Superman story for Superman Annual #11 that quietly dismantled everything shallow about the character and rebuilt him as something genuinely moving. The story is called “For the Man Who Has Everything,” and it remains, forty years later, one of the greatest Superman stories ever told. Possibly the greatest.

That’s not a casual claim. But I’m going to make the case for it anyway.

How This Story Even Happened

The behind-the-scenes origin of “For the Man Who Has Everything” is almost as interesting as the story itself. By the early 1980s, Alan Moore had become a force in British comics through his work for Marvel UK, IPC Magazines, and Quality Communications, where he’d collaborated with Gibbons on multiple occasions. DC Comics noticed both of them, hiring Gibbons to draw Green Lantern in 1982. Two years later, Moore joined the publisher to write Swamp Thing, a title that had been struggling, and he promptly turned it into something critics and readers couldn’t stop talking about.

Moore was hungry to work on more DC characters — he reportedly pitched ideas for the Martian Manhunter and the Challengers of the Unknown, among others — but kept running into closed doors. When editor Julius Schwartz approached Gibbons about drawing a Superman story, Gibbons agreed and was told he could choose his own writer. He didn’t hesitate. He picked Moore. That creative trust, one artist in another’s abilities, is what gave us this story.

What makes that origin matter is that “For the Man Who Has Everything” never feels like an assignment. It feels like two people who genuinely loved and understood Superman getting to do something real with him, unconstrained by the usual demands of serialized superhero storytelling.

The Setup: A Birthday Nobody Asked For

The story opens on Superman’s birthday — February 29th, a clever touch that means his birthday only technically exists once every four years — as Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman arrive at the Fortress of Solitude bearing gifts. What they find when they get there is Superman standing catatonic in the middle of the Fortress, an alien plant coiled around his body like a sleeping parasite.

The plant is called the Black Mercy, and the man who put it there is Mongul, one of the more physically imposing villains in the DC universe. Mongul is essentially what you would get if you crossed a tyrant with a tank — massive, brutal, and contemptuous of everyone around him. He’s also, crucially, intelligent enough to know that fighting Superman straight up is a losing proposition. So he didn’t. He waited until Superman was incapacitated first.

The Black Mercy, Mongul explains with obvious satisfaction, is a symbiotic organism that feeds on its host’s bio-aura while simultaneously feeding the host something in return: a perfect, personalized hallucination of whatever that person desires most. It doesn’t give you a fantasy you’d choose consciously. It gives you the fantasy your heart would choose if it were being completely, brutally honest with itself.

For Superman, that fantasy is Krypton. Not destroyed. Alive.

What Clark Kent Really Wants

This is where Moore does something that separates “For the Man Who Has Everything” from virtually every other Superman story written before or since. He doesn’t ask what Superman wants. He asks what Kal-El wants — the man underneath the cape, the child who lost everything before he was old enough to remember losing it.

And the answer is heartbreaking in its simplicity. He wants to go home.

In the Black Mercy’s dream, Krypton never exploded. Jor-El’s warnings about the planet’s instability went unheeded, as they historically did — but this time, unheeded simply meant wrong, and the planet survived, and Jor-El lived with the embarrassment of that rather than the vindication of being right about something terrible. Kal-El grew up on Krypton. He married a woman named Lyla Lerrol. He has two children, a son called Van-El and a daughter named Orna. He has a life. A real, ordinary, planetary life.

What’s brilliant — and a little cruel — about the way Moore constructs this dream is that it is not a perfect fantasy. It’s a plausible one, which makes it worse. Krypton in the dream is messy and politically fractured. Jor-El, stripped of his prophetic legacy, has become bitter and radicalized — chairman of an extremist movement called the Sword of Rao, pushing for theocratic authoritarianism. Superman’s mother Lara has died. His cousin Kara is harassed by protesters. The world is complicated and painful in the way that real worlds always are, and Superman loves it anyway, because it’s his and it’s real and everyone he was supposed to have is still there.

That’s the dream. Not a perfect Krypton. Just a living one.

When Batman finally manages to pry the Mercy loose, the dream begins to fracture. Superman tearfully says goodbye to Van-El, his dreamed son who never existed, near the Kandor crater. It’s one of the most quietly devastating moments in superhero comics — a father saying goodbye to a child who was never real, who he will never stop wishing were real, before waking up to a world that took everything from him before he could remember what he’d lost.

Moore doesn’t linger on it. He doesn’t have to.

The Other Fantasies

One of the subtler strokes of the story is that it doesn’t just reveal Superman’s inner life. It briefly illuminates two others as well.

When the Black Mercy latches onto Batman after being removed from Superman, it gives Bruce Wayne what he wants most: the night his parents were murdered, replayed — except this time Thomas Wayne disarms Joe Chill before the gun goes off. His parents live. The grief that made him Batman never happens. It is the single thing Bruce Wayne would trade everything to have.

Batman doesn’t stay under long, because Robin acts quickly. But the implication hangs in the air. Batman chose to become what he is, in a sense, but the Black Mercy doesn’t care about choices. It goes straight to the wound.

When the dust settles and the heroes are tending their injuries, Batman mentions offhandedly that in his fantasy he was married to Kathy Kane and had a teenage daughter. Wonder Woman, meanwhile, confesses something quietly sad: she never found out what her own heart’s desire would have been, because the Mercy never touched her. She sounds almost envious. It’s a small moment, but it’s exactly the kind of human detail that makes Moore’s writing feel inhabited rather than plotted.

And then there’s Mongul. When Robin ultimately stuffs the Black Mercy onto the villain at the story’s climax, Mongul’s fantasy is revealed to be exactly what you’d expect from a conqueror: absolute victory. He swats aside the Black Mercy in his dream, kills the heroes, and conquers all of existence. The story ends with Mongul deep in that fantasy, utterly content — which is a sly joke, a piece of irony, and also something genuinely unsettling. The man is happy. He got what he wanted, even if it isn’t real. Whether that’s better or worse than Superman’s situation is a question Moore leaves unanswered.

The Legacy: A Story That Keeps Resonating

“For the Man Who Has Everything” was nominated for the 1986 Kirby Award for Best Single Issue, and it has never really fallen out of critical favor in the four decades since. It’s the kind of story that gets cited whenever someone asks what comics can do that other mediums can’t — intimate, economical, emotionally precise in a way that thirty pages of panel art can achieve almost uniquely.

Its influence spread well beyond the page. The most prominent adaptation came in 2004, when Justice League Unlimited adapted it as the show’s second episode. J.M. DeMatteis wrote the script, and the episode is faithful in all the ways that matter, even with some structural changes — Robin’s role is folded into Wonder Woman, some of the Kryptonian political complexity is streamlined. Notably, Alan Moore — who famously refuses credit and disavows most adaptations of his work — reportedly liked this one. Both he and Gibbons received credited acknowledgment at the episode’s opening. That’s practically an endorsement, coming from Moore.

The first season of Supergirl adapted the story in 2016 as “For the Girl Who Has Everything,” centering it on Kara Danvers and her dream of Krypton rather than Kal-El’s. The second season of My Adventures with Superman used it as inspiration in 2024, with Brainiac deploying the Black Mercy as a consciousness-hijacking tool. The concept has proven durable because it’s not really a Superman-specific idea — it’s a universal one. What does your most honest self wish for? What would you dream if you couldn’t wake up?

Those are questions that don’t expire.

Why This Story Still Matters

Superman is, at his core, a character about loss. He lost his entire world. He lost his biological family. He lost the version of himself that might have existed if Krypton had simply kept existing. Everything he is — the optimism, the dedication, the insistence on hope — is built on top of an absence so enormous it’s almost impossible to fully conceptualize.

Most Superman stories acknowledge this background tragedy in the way you acknowledge a piece of furniture — it’s there, it informs the room, but you don’t really look at it. “For the Man Who Has Everything” looks directly at it for thirty pages and doesn’t flinch. It takes the most powerful being on Earth, strips away every physical defense he has, and asks: what does it cost someone to be this good, this consistently, when they carry this much? What does all that hope actually run on?

The Black Mercy’s answer is that it runs on grief. On the specific, persistent ache of a man who knows he should have had a home and doesn’t, who wakes up every day and chooses to be Superman anyway. That’s not a small thing to ask of a person. Even a fictional one.

Alan Moore has written a lot of celebrated comics. Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — the list goes on, and almost all of it is extraordinary. But “For the Man Who Has Everything” might be his most emotionally direct work. There are no deconstructions here, no ironic frameworks, no commentary on the nature of superhero fiction. There is only a man who lost everything, getting to almost have it back for a little while, and then waking up.

It was published in 1985. It still hits like it was written yesterday. That’s the thing about stories that tell the truth about grief — they don’t really age.

They just wait for you to be ready to read them.