As if unleashing a mighty river, changing a centuries-old course and washing away a dry and deadened era, Siegel & Shuster’s Superman led the giddy onrush of American pop culture’s real-life – and humanity’s imagined – next evolutionary step. These were characters whose costumes were more colorful than the Depression and whose physics-defying strength and flight was intrinsically liberated from the shadow of totalitarianism. Superman got boring when he came to be synonymous with an established order that, in too many ways, was no longer new. As community ties fractured and social safety nets wore out, it was the solitary outcasts – first the noirish everymen of the crime and horror comics and the despairing everywomen of the romance comics, then the freakish antiheroes of the post-Fantastic Four era – who drew the sympathy. There’s much I can’t tell you about All-Star Superman #10 that brings Superman home to the outcasts (on both sides of the drawing board) he was created to serve. It would give away too much of the very surprise and reassurance Morrison & Quitely manage to conjure and reconcile in their story. Suffice it to say that, in what he thinks may be the waning days of his life (that’s a cliffhanger everyone who’s even heard of this comic knows about), Kal-El reaches out, considers possibilities he’s never thought about, and contemplates his own unexistence to comfort anxious friends, rescue ancient relatives and leave a legacy for the world, in a very mature fairytale that takes us from the Fortress of Solitude to the Bottle City of Kandor to the Daily Planet offices, the plains of Mars, a microscopic universe and the lonely ledge of a would-be suicide. This issue is the essence of how Morrison & Quitely have been rebuilding a mythic foundation and a common faith in the mainstream comics medium. The classic Superman became an enforcer of faceless social norms. This comic’s character is super-humane. And in this world that’s solitary – and heroic – enough.