DALLAS, TX.- For the first time, Jon Bogdanove is auctioning his drawing that told the world Superman would die.

Among the numerous centerpieces in Heritage’s April 4-7 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction, this original artwork — which featured the first appearance of the character aptly called Doomsday — never appeared in a comic book. It never ran in an ad. It was the cover of a magazine meant to get comic-book retailers interested in selling comic books: Advance Comics No. 47, published in November 1992.

In this image, Superman grapples with the green-booted, bone-covered behemoth readers had yet to meet. His name, however, was in the headline above the magazine’s title: “Doomsday for Superman!” There, too, was a second headline referring to the editor of all DC Comics’ Superman titles:

“Mike Carlin on The Death of Superman.”

Like it was no big deal. Except it was. The biggest.

A Newsday writer and editor, William McTernan, saw that copy of Advance Comics and knew he had one hell of a scoop. DC Comics told the paper only that it was “supposed to be the subject of a press release” and had no further comment. So, on Sept. 4, 1992, the Long Island newspaper published the front-page headline “Great Caesar’s Ghost! They’ve Killed Superman,” accompanied by Bogdanove’s artwork credited to Advance Comics. McTernan also quoted liberally from Carlin’s interview with the magazine, in which he suggested an eventual resurrection for The Man of Steel following an appropriate grieving period.

If nothing else, The Death of Superman certainly brought sales for the titles to life: “DC couldn’t keep the presses rolling fast enough,” former DC President Paul Levitz wrote in 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking. “Superman No. 75, in its deluxe edition complete with black mourning band emblazoned with a weeping red ‘S’ shield, became an instant collectible, and when an instant paperback edition of The Death of Superman shipped, it was in quantities no graphic novel would match that century.”

Heritage sold Bogdanove’s original cover of that Death of Superman trade paperback for $204,000 in April 2022. Two years later — in an auction that already includes the most valuable comic book ever sold at auction, Superman’s debut in Action Comics No. 1 — Heritage is proud to offer a work no less historic, the piece that heralded the beginning of the end.

“The idea that Superman could die resonated with the culture at the time, because if Superman can die, does that mean the ideas of truth, justice and the American way could die, too?” says Bogdanove, who has six original Superman works, including covers, in this auction. “Superman always won. People who have never read Superman have always wanted to know he is there. There was Superman, the intellectual property of Warner Bros., but there was Superman, the populist idea that lived in people’s hearts and minds worldwide.

“The idea that could come to an end caught the world’s attention in a way that really shook people. We got death threats! DC got death threats. We had people crying and pleading with us not to kill Superman!”

Over the last three-plus decades, Bogdanove has been asked to share this story countless times, and he happily obliges because how many other people can say they were in the room the day DC Comics decided to kill Superman?

The occasion was 1991’s annual Super Summit, during which every writer, artist and editor assigned to a Superman title — and there were four back then, including Superman and Action Comics – pitched ideas for the following year’s storylines that would connect in each book. Bogdanove was drawing Superman: The Man of Steel, DC’s newest Superman title, which Louise Simonson wrote. Both were Marvel vets, and it made sense for DC to put Bogdanove on a Superman title. After all, his son’s name is Kal-El.

To keep a long — and well-chronicled — story relatively short, the Superman team at DC discovered that then-DC President Jenette Kahn had interested Warner Bros. Television in a TV series featuring Lois Lane and Clark Kent called, you guessed it, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Not only did that catch the Super-team of DC creators off-guard, but it also wholly scuttled their plans to get Superman and Lois married in the comics. DC’s honchos were concerned that having them married in the comics but not on television would be confusing.

So, it was back to the whiteboard as the team scrambled to develop a new storyline that would sustain Superman for a year. At this point, Jerry Ordway, the writer and artist on Adventures of Superman, suggested what he always suggested at these Super Summits.

“Let’s kill him!”

In years past, Bogdanove says, everyone would chuckle and roll their eyes, which they did this time, too. Then Simonson — long an editor of Marvel’s X-Men titles, which saw its fair share of characters killed and resurrected — made a compelling case for killing the seemingly invulnerable Last Son of Krypton.

Bogdanove recounts, “Louise said, ‘Do you know what you get from killing off a character? You get to tell the story of what that character meant to the world through the eyes of his friends, his family, the people who loved him and the people who hated him. You get to tell the story that explains what that character is about.’ And that got our attention. That’s an understatement. It galvanized us.

“Most of the guys in that room — Louise was the only woman — had grown up watching George Reeves on TV. Everyone in that room was a lifelong Superman fan. Even when he was not cool, we were all lifelong Superman fans. We started to think about what Louise said, and we realized this would be an excellent opportunity to make people understand how we felt about the character.”

It fell to Bogdanove to draw that initial image of Superman tussling with Doomsday, and it became an incredibly personal piece for numerous reasons. He wasn’t just heralding the demise of his favorite superhero, but he was paying homage to his grandfather, revered muralist Abraham Jacob Bogdanove — specifically, his painting Wrestlers, which presages Superman’s clash with Doomsday.

“As an artist, it’s your job to feel the work as strongly as your most vulnerable fan,” Bogdanove says. “A lot of thought went into this image. I needed to show that Superman was in trouble but that he still had a chance.” He adds, chuckling at the understatement, “I knew when I was drawing it, a lot was riding on this image.”