I'm With Clark Kent

I've read exactly one mainstream Superman Comic Book published after the 1980s. I may make it three tomorrow. Fox News reports:

In the next issue of DC comics’ “Superman,” due out on Wednesday, the superhero’s alter ego will eschew being a mild-mannered reporter, presumably to become a snarky blogger, when he quits his post at the Daily Planet.
“This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren’t really his own,” Superman writer Scott Lobdell said to USA Today.
“Superman is arguably the most powerful person on the planet, but how long can he sit at his desk with someone breathing down his neck and treating him like the least important person in the world?” Lobdell said.

In a panel from the comic, Clark Kent says, "I've been a journalist for barely five years now. Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who believes news should be about---I don't know, news?"

All I can say is, "Amen, Clark."

Now for those of you who remember Clark Kent being around in the 1950s and 1970s, they've rebooted the series a couple of times in the past couple of decades and just did a fresh reboot along with DC's New 52 series in 2011. There's some psuedo-sci fi mumbo jumbo, but what it comes down to is that DC made some demographic decisions and came up with a story line to justify it.

But anyway, back to the main point, I can agree with Clark Kent as I've had many of the same feelings about journalism. That's my emphasis was on back in college and worked on a paper for a few weeks before leaving over a philisophical disagreement with my employer. I tended to believe that people should be paid as promised for their work. The employer didn't.

About the middle of the last decade, I was glad I really hadn't completed my degree and got stuck in that industry. Journalism had become a joke. Unfortunately, blogging wasn't much better, particularly political opinion blogging because so much stuff became topics of conversations that was really irrelevant nonsense.

Of course, Clark Kent may find better luck as a guy who goes for hard news and investigative reporting, particularly in and around Metropolis. I hope it works out for him and I'll be sure to check out his Howard Beale moment?

Do I think it will last? I'd say there's about a 2/3 chance it wouldn't. The 1/3 chance is that American newspaper really are in trouble, so going back to work for one may not be a career possibility in a few years. The 2/3 chance that he will end up back at the Daily Planet is that Superman has a sense of tradition greater than any other comic books. This stuff goes back 70 years: The Daily Planet, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White. That stuff has a gravitational pull. So, just as his TV reporter gig in the 1970s went away, I think that unless newspaper's collapse we'll eventually see Superman back at the Planet.