The Problem With Superman (Part II)
It's not that I hate Superman. I don't. I actually rather like him when, for example, he appears in Justice League of America. I like the way he bounces off the other characters. Maybe it's that I prefer Superman with a good contrast. Certainly, I like quite a bit of the Batman/Superman team-ups that have appeared over the years. I don't know. All I know is that I inevitably drift out of Superman solo titles after a while, no matter how well-written. The only one I've kept up on at all in recent years is Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, and I'm fairly sure that's squarely down to how much I like the writing.
It's not even that I don't appreciate Superman as a piece of iconography. Hell, if anything, I'm obsessed with Superman as a metaphor. Just off the top of my head, I know that several of the poems that appear in my book -- Andy Kaufman and Superman's Phone Booth, When Superman Was Resurrected, Warhol Days and There is No Word for 'Fear of Culture' -- reference symbols and metaphors from the comic quite liberally. And then there's the odd kinship I've always felt with Superman's creator, Jerry Siegel, who also lost his father in a violent incident in his youth, a parallel I've been aware of for some time, but wasn't moved to address in poetry until after reading Brad Meltzer's excellent thriller, The Book of Lies. Eventually, inspired in part by Meltzer's novel, I worked my feelings about the dark symmetry into my long poem, Boys' Own Stories, which is, as of yet, unpublished.
No, Superman's bouncing around my psyche, but oddly, I find I have little time for him in the day-to-day of my pop culture consumption. I find I want to love Superman more than I actually do. And I don't think I'm alone in that. Obviously, his comics sell well enough, I suppose, considering he's usually starring in several at any moment. And then there's Smallville, but somehow that always seems to succeed sort of despite being about Superman. Indeed, it seems to find its success in being just shy of being Superman. I hear good things about the cartoon, too, but then there was that tepid movie starring Brandon Routh, which didn't really seem to know where to go with the whole mythos. No, Superman's out there in the culture, and in force, but still ... I spend a lot of time talking to the sorts of people who are kind of fanatic about this stuff (some of them even blog about it!) and I never really get a sense of deep love for the character, and even when I do, I never get a sense of association. I get a sort of historical appreciation, or an affection for particular stories, but I never really find anyone who seems to see themselves in Superman.
Maybe it's the immense power. Certainly, it's always a challenge for the writers, keeping challenges coming. And from the point of view of trying to associate with the character, it's true, they make it a little tough, even as wish fulfillment. Certainly, everyone wishes they could leap tall buildings in a single bound, or change the course of mighty rivers with their hands, but I sometimes have to wonder if there's something odd about fantasizing about having that sort of power these days. Power -- that sort of power -- doesn't seem enough to ward off the dark anymore. America has enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world several times over, remember, but the airplanes at the center of the 9-11 tragedy were taken over by men with box cutters. Perhaps, in our conception of a hero these days, we look for a sort of power and execution of power that's a bit more nuanced. Maybe, deep down, we know power alone isn't enough.
And then there's the character himself, or at least, the popular conception of the hero: the boy scout, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. It seems, in these times which sort of teeter between firmly entrenched cynicism and an earnestness which seems desirable and yet a tad still out of reach, Superman's more of an aspiration that an association. You can see why he's loved, even if you really don't.
That's a lot of ambivalence, but icons sometimes do that. Especially when you get the appeal, but it's something you kind of wish you could feel more than intellectualize. Morrison, at the least, has always managed to sell it to me. His run on JLA, particularly, was one of my favorites, his final story pitting the JLA against a planet-destroying war machine from beyond the stars, with Superman trapped inside. Wracked by despair, he tells Batman and the Martian Manhunter something along the lines of, "All we ever wanted was to save Krypton and Mars. To save our parents. But we never did."
It's one of those things Morrison does well, letting the impossibly epic narrative fade into the background as he displays something hugely revealing about the characters in a matter of beats. And it's true, it's one of very few panels where I've really felt I've gotten the character, where I felt there was something there I could relate to, that sense of loss, that sense of trying to fill the hole inside with something positive.
The Routh movie used Superman as a Christ figure, and while that's a perfectly valid device, it fell a bit flat. Even as a self-avowed, non-churchgoing Christian, I don't particularly need my fictions to beat readers or viewers over the head with messages to which I may be somewhat sympathetic. Handled poorly, it cheapens everyone involved in the process. And the Routh film did handle it poorly, as have many other portrayals. But show me a guy with all the power in the world, who can still only even begin to fill the hole in his heart by doing good works and helping others? Yeah. That's a Superman I can get behind.
It's not even that I don't appreciate Superman as a piece of iconography. Hell, if anything, I'm obsessed with Superman as a metaphor. Just off the top of my head, I know that several of the poems that appear in my book -- Andy Kaufman and Superman's Phone Booth, When Superman Was Resurrected, Warhol Days and There is No Word for 'Fear of Culture' -- reference symbols and metaphors from the comic quite liberally. And then there's the odd kinship I've always felt with Superman's creator, Jerry Siegel, who also lost his father in a violent incident in his youth, a parallel I've been aware of for some time, but wasn't moved to address in poetry until after reading Brad Meltzer's excellent thriller, The Book of Lies. Eventually, inspired in part by Meltzer's novel, I worked my feelings about the dark symmetry into my long poem, Boys' Own Stories, which is, as of yet, unpublished.
No, Superman's bouncing around my psyche, but oddly, I find I have little time for him in the day-to-day of my pop culture consumption. I find I want to love Superman more than I actually do. And I don't think I'm alone in that. Obviously, his comics sell well enough, I suppose, considering he's usually starring in several at any moment. And then there's Smallville, but somehow that always seems to succeed sort of despite being about Superman. Indeed, it seems to find its success in being just shy of being Superman. I hear good things about the cartoon, too, but then there was that tepid movie starring Brandon Routh, which didn't really seem to know where to go with the whole mythos. No, Superman's out there in the culture, and in force, but still ... I spend a lot of time talking to the sorts of people who are kind of fanatic about this stuff (some of them even blog about it!) and I never really get a sense of deep love for the character, and even when I do, I never get a sense of association. I get a sort of historical appreciation, or an affection for particular stories, but I never really find anyone who seems to see themselves in Superman.
Maybe it's the immense power. Certainly, it's always a challenge for the writers, keeping challenges coming. And from the point of view of trying to associate with the character, it's true, they make it a little tough, even as wish fulfillment. Certainly, everyone wishes they could leap tall buildings in a single bound, or change the course of mighty rivers with their hands, but I sometimes have to wonder if there's something odd about fantasizing about having that sort of power these days. Power -- that sort of power -- doesn't seem enough to ward off the dark anymore. America has enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world several times over, remember, but the airplanes at the center of the 9-11 tragedy were taken over by men with box cutters. Perhaps, in our conception of a hero these days, we look for a sort of power and execution of power that's a bit more nuanced. Maybe, deep down, we know power alone isn't enough.
And then there's the character himself, or at least, the popular conception of the hero: the boy scout, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. It seems, in these times which sort of teeter between firmly entrenched cynicism and an earnestness which seems desirable and yet a tad still out of reach, Superman's more of an aspiration that an association. You can see why he's loved, even if you really don't.
That's a lot of ambivalence, but icons sometimes do that. Especially when you get the appeal, but it's something you kind of wish you could feel more than intellectualize. Morrison, at the least, has always managed to sell it to me. His run on JLA, particularly, was one of my favorites, his final story pitting the JLA against a planet-destroying war machine from beyond the stars, with Superman trapped inside. Wracked by despair, he tells Batman and the Martian Manhunter something along the lines of, "All we ever wanted was to save Krypton and Mars. To save our parents. But we never did."
It's one of those things Morrison does well, letting the impossibly epic narrative fade into the background as he displays something hugely revealing about the characters in a matter of beats. And it's true, it's one of very few panels where I've really felt I've gotten the character, where I felt there was something there I could relate to, that sense of loss, that sense of trying to fill the hole inside with something positive.
The Routh movie used Superman as a Christ figure, and while that's a perfectly valid device, it fell a bit flat. Even as a self-avowed, non-churchgoing Christian, I don't particularly need my fictions to beat readers or viewers over the head with messages to which I may be somewhat sympathetic. Handled poorly, it cheapens everyone involved in the process. And the Routh film did handle it poorly, as have many other portrayals. But show me a guy with all the power in the world, who can still only even begin to fill the hole in his heart by doing good works and helping others? Yeah. That's a Superman I can get behind.
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