Decline of Superman, Part Two: Do We Want Heroes to Look Up To?

In the 2007 Marvel/DC After Hours fan-written You Tube series using action figures, Lex Luthor tries to get Superman to help him destroy the Marvel Universe. He explains that in his opinion Marvel has destroyed everything.

"Your job is to be an inspiration for people, someone they can look up to, someone they can aspire to be like in steadfastness, in character, in ideals...

"Now, we have an entire culture who thinks who they are is just fine and how dare anyone suggest they can improve themselves...No one wants to look up to you Superman, they don't want to strain their necks."

Truer words were never spoken at least not by action figures being used as puppets in a fan film although putting the blame on Marvel, but rather on a Wider culture.

Paul Asay ponders a similar point:

…is Superman really too strong for us? Or is he too good?

“Deep down, Clark’s essentially a good person,” Batman says of Superman in DC’s Hush. “And deep down, I’m not.”

That’s one of the things that always attracted me to Batman. Because deep down, I know I’m not, either. None of us are, if it comes right down to it. We all know, at 3 a.m. we’re staring at the ceiling, we’re not as good as we pretend to be or even think we are most of the time. We’re selfish, sinful people. Batman’s not “super.” He’s flawed. In a way he is, in Ryan’s words, a wreck. But he does what he can with the tools he’s been given and becomes a hero through force of will—giving all of us a little hope that we can be a hero, too.

Superman’s not like that. He’s better than us—better, perhaps, than we could even aspire to be. If Batman appeals to jaded adults like me, Superman is a hero for the 7-year-old set—strong and brave and incorruptible and good. He’s a John Wayne relic that you never worry about falling or failing or disappointing you. He’s a hero for people who did, or do, believe in such things.

And then there's Astro who writes;

Characters like Spider Man and Wolverine and the Batman we've all come to know more fully embody the, frankly, childish emotional upheavals we’ve all dealt with, especially the more emotionally and intellectually stunted among us...

Superman, at his core, is a mythological figure much more than he is a character. The stories told about him SHOULD represent the struggles we all deal with -- allegorically...The emotions he feels transcend angst and pettiness, cross into the realm of faith. They are of a higher order, and when you're writing the character you have to play only to those higher order emotions; largely removing jealousy, anger, self hatred, fear, whineyness, arrogance, and all the other negative emotions that make great drama, and are the bulk of a modern writers' repertoire.

Superman is bigger than all that... Superman stories are PARABLES, instructive in their tone, constructive in their direction....

To a populace who would rather not think of all the ways in which we are broken, or failing to live up to our ethical potential, Superman reminds us; a being of pure good, self assuredly doing what he can to save the world without complaint and without hesitation. Couldn't we all be that way? And if so, why aren't we?

Superman makes us UNCOMFORTABLE. Superman makes us ASHAMED of our laziness, of the small compromises we make every day, the transgressions we commit against what we know to be right in the name of expediency, convenience, greed, pettiness, anger.

So, I submit to you, dear reader; perhaps the problem isn’t with Superman. Perhaps the problem with us.

To some extent, these writers have a point. Certainly, they're right on with the comic book reading community.

For a long time, comics haven't been targeted towards kids. That's no big secret. The primary audience for comics has been cynical Gen X and Gen Y males who have little interest in a character whose known for moral goodness.

However, in the wider culture, I think Superman remains much more an enigma. Superman hauls in big time money in merchandising rights from watches to T-shirts to ball caps. People love Superman.

But perhaps we love Superman the way we love Santa Claus. Asay may have hit on it when he referred to Superman as a hero for 7 year olds.

Superman acting with unadulterated goodness while wielding great power seems like something just for kids. It's an adult world and we're cynical about moral excellence. As adults, we've come to believe that everyone has skeletons in the closet and that no one can be trusted. We've been let down time and time again by politicians, musicians, and athletes. When we see a seemingly morally upright person we're waiting to find out the weird stuff just like the recent scandal involving General Petraeus.

Maybe we can't believe a character as good as Superman was created to be. There's certainly part of our society that likes the idea of a tarnished Superman. Yet, I can't help but think that all the Superman memrobilia owned by adults, even adults not into comic books, indicates that on some level, we'd like to believe in the ideal of Superman.