"I got calls from people who hadn’t read Superman since they were 12 and now they were 50. And they were very upset. ‘How could you do this,’ they’d say. Or ‘I hope your house burns down.’ "And then you start to worry about your house burning down," continues the writer. "We got enough threats where I know both [editor] Mike Carlin and I were contacted by a bodyguard service that offered to protect us. But when you get phone calls and offers like that—you start to realize how big Superman is as a character."

Realizing how big a deal a story called "The Death of Superman" would be to fans, even if Superman would eventually be resurrected, was something that escaped Jurgens and the other writers working on the story. But it wasn’t a naivete that stopped the writers from seeing the huge ramifications a story like this would bring—it was their total dedication to telling a story that wouldn’t just set records or get massive media attention but would simply entertain fans.

"The story’s a bigger deal in retrospect than it was when we were putting it together," says Jurgens. "One of the things we were always accused of is trying to cook up a huge marketing stunt to get people to read Superman. But that wasn’t it at all. All the Superman writers and artists got together and said, ‘What are we going to do for the next year in Superman?’ And we decided to do ‘The Death of Superman.’ We came up with this character called Doomsday and put it all together. And for us, it was a matter of telling a good story. We thought it could be dramatic—Superman dies! And then what really interested us was what would happen to the world with Superman gone—that lead to ‘World Without Superman’ and some of the other stories that followed. We just tried to do it the same way we did everything else—we just sat down for a good story. We wanted to make it a good, solid, entertaining story."

And then there was the media hype that followed the story. From Entertainment Weekly to "Entertainment Tonight" to local news updates, everyone was covering the biggest story in the country and that story was how DC Comics just killed their top star—Superman.

"There isn’t a word in the English language to describe the level of surprise we all felt [when we saw the coverage]," explains Jurgens. "I certainly remember the conversations at the time and it was, ‘Can you believe this?’ There was no ripple and no buzz [before the story really broke] though. After the catalogue came out and the media began picking up on it, the whole deal went nova! We were all flat out stunned by it."

Today, Jurgens is revisiting Superman and the hero’s death with Day of Doom, a four-issue, weekly mini-series available now. Following Ty Duffy, a Daily Planet reporter assigned to write a retrospective on Superman’s death, Jurgens says the story is like an extra on a DVD and a companion piece to "Death of Superman" that will answer a lot of fans’ problems and complaints about the original story.

"Ty Duffy is a reporter for the Daily Planet, who I think represents the very obvious cynical attitude that we might find out there right now," says Jurgens. "And frankly, the kind of attitude I think permeates a lot of comic fandom. He’s a total cynic. He kind of brings up the points that a lot of fans have about Superman dying and then coming back, which are not without merit. So, I think that makes the story a little more interesting."

And while Jurgens doesn’t want to give away too much about the series and what Duffy eventually finds while covering Superman’s death, he does say he has some very different thoughts about the story than he did in 1992.