Core Genre: Science Fiction. Because rockets, exploding planets, mad scientists. Eye laser beams. Et cetera.
The Bad: Because he’s so over-powered that no problem could be a challenzzzzzzzzzzzzz*huh?* oh sorry, I sent myself to sleep from reciting one of the same old criticisms that get pulled out of the cupboard time and again.
You don’t need me to tell you the problems with the character. We’ve heard them all before, over and over. There’s not enough Kryptonians, there’s too many Kryptonians, he’s a big wet boy scout, he’s a crypto-fascist. I could go on, all day. But I don’t have to, because:
The Good: All the character’s problems are utterly irrelevant. He’s the first superhero, the template. Want to talk about “superheroes” as an archetype? He is the archetype. If Superman is too idealistic, then superheroes as a genre are too idealistic. If he’s too far to the political left or the political right, then so is the genre. If he has too much power, then we’re criticising the very idea that our own imagination is too powerful. A need to put limits on limitlessness strikes me as nonsensical. Who on earth would want to encumber their own capacity to conceive?
To claim that Superman has neither resonance or relevance is to do the same for the concept of the ’superhero’. And this year’s box office receipts alone make a mockery of that.
None of this means that he hasn’t been handled badly in the past, mind. Give anyone a blank piece of paper and the opportunity to create whatever they want and most oftne people kind of freeze up. A lack of limits lends itself to a lack of focus. That’s why Grant Morrison suits the character; he’s the writer most likely to continue utilising wilder and more imaginative concepts. But it’s his weakness, too. How often has a Morrison story collapsed under its own weight? Let’s take a look at the breakdown:
A) Superpowers. The very minimum being super-strength and, of course, flight.
B) A cloak.
And honestly, that’s it. That’s all you need for a Superman story. Because a kid who’s sole prop is a coat with the top button done up is going to create a tale just as relevant, meaningful and important as anything written by Morrison, Schwartz, Weisinger, even Siegel and Shuster themselves.
And I think there may be an interesting consequence to this: while not every other superhero character can replace Superman in a typical Superman story, I suspect Superman can replace pretty much every other hero to a certain extent in theirs. For example, the Martian Manhunter can fit into any Superman story that’s based strictly around the cosmic end of his powers, but he couldn’t fit into Red Son. But Superman could fit into a J’onn J’onzz story easily, even one based on J’onn’s multiple secret identities. It would just involve modified Superman robots, and would probably be pretty cool. Even stories centred on a female protagonist that are predicated on gender can have their hero switched out by using Supergirl, because in terms of the mechanics of the thing, Kal-El and Kara are the same character. Even Arkham Asylum would work with Superman, although it would probably be about a page long and consist of “…and then he flew in and rounded them all up in about a minute, give or take.”
Joking aside, I’m serious about Arkham Asylum. Imagine a psychoanalytical take on Batman’s rogues, where the main character isn’t a clinically depressed rich boy but instead a brightly coloured spandex crusader with a messiah complex. More dissonance, more insight, more lunacy.
If anything, Superman as he’s commonly thought of, with the uniform and the S-shield and the mild-mannered alter-ego, isn’t so much the ‘original’ as a derivation of the original. Superman as defined by comic-book fans compared to the general public is different again. For the purpose of the exercise, let’s take current continuity Superman as a separate entity and take a look at how he works.
A) Superpowers (a combination of heat vision, vision powers, super-speed and strength, invulnerability, flight: perhaps even a certain resourcefulness)
B) Clark Kent, reporter, as an alter-ego
C) The uniform.
Factor B is specific to current-continuity Superman because the question of his identity- whether “Superman” or “Clark Kent” is the mask- has become fundamental to the character, regardless of what side of the fence the writer may come down on. I think some element of this needs to be present in the story, really. While archetype-Superman could easily have a series of stories that make no mention of Kent (seriously, remove any mention of the secret ID from almost any Golden Age Superman tale, and it probably won’t effect the Superman-ness of the story at all), I’m not even sure current-Superman could work without it, either through a humanising effect or as a reaction against it.
Where Superman is something of a one-note character is in the application of the above factors to the bad guys. He locates and interacts with his antagonists via his superpowers, almost exclusively. Clark Kent as a mechanism is important for the way he interacts with Superman, not with the villains. Sure, there’s the odd time where an investigation leads to a story, or Kent faces Luthor for whatever reason, but the presence of these elements isn’t essential for it to be a Superman tale.
And this is the heart of the character as we know him, and what makes him unique. A few days ago, as a preface to these posts, I posited that superhero stories are ultimately interactions between heroes and their villains. I still think this holds for every superhero- but only partially for Superman. Factor A controls his interaction with the villains. Factor B controls his interaction with himself. And Factor C primarily controls his interaction with us. Sure, the act of reading any superhero tale sets up an interaction with the audience, but with Superman that interaction is vital. The symbolism of the uniform is as important to the audience, if not more so, as it is to characters within the work. Here’s a couple of illustrations.
Firstly, I’m not going to do a post on Spider-man. Of all superheroes, his mechanics are the most obvious. In fact, Marvel have gone to great lengths recently to restore Quesada’s take on what’s vital to a Spider-man story to continuity (incidentally, while I don’t like the disappearing marriage at all, these posts should illustrate why I understand where he’s coming from). One element I do want to bring up, though, is Peter Parker’s own internal life; in essence, how he interacts with himself. What makes this different from Superman’s apparently identical interaction is that Peter Parker is in fact one of Spider-man’s villains. Not so Clark Kent.
Secondly, we can illustrate the three factors through Superman stories that don’t work. Let’s take the infamous Superman Returns (and once again, I stress that I do really like the film. I just don’t necessarily think that it’s a wholly compelling Superman story). Factor B: Clark Kent’s barely in the film, and when he is he tells us almost nothing about Superman. Factor C: The Superman uniform is a representative shorthand for the character himself. You see the S-shield and the cloak, and you’re reminded instantly of what the character represents (truth, justice- all that stuff). If the film played to that, there’d be no dissonance. Instead, we get Big Blue as an absent father who’s abandoned all his various responsibilities for selfish reasons, and there’s not a single audience member who won’t feel the wrongness of that, even at a subliminal level.
Finally, there’s a failure in Factor A: the major interaction with the primary villain being a shard of kryptonite in the back while weakened. Even poisoned and powerless, Superman would have pulped Luthor. Just think about it; the most effective scenes of the movie (the plane crash, the incidents in Metropolis, lifting LuthorLand) had Superman using his powers to interact with villains (because accidents and natural disasters are villains in this context).
Other factors: I’ve gone on long enough already, but obviously Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are, with Robin, perhaps the most historically important supporting cast members of any superhero. And if we’re talking about nemeses, Luthor is the Big One. So much so, that I suspect he’s maybe the only supervillain who merits a delineation of his own, because the central argument can be reversed for him. Luthor’s story is very much about how he places Superman into context, and how he deals with him. Without Superman, Luthor doesn’t have a story. Villains like the Joker, or Doctor Octopus, could function perfectly well with any other hero as a nemesis. Heck, a villain doesn’t need to interact with a hero. An unobstructive story arc relating to Norman Osborne doesn’t ever need a superpowered antagonist to turn up. But without Superman, Luthor’s nothing.
In conclusion: Superman as a character has a multitude of interpretations, and a limitless potential. The engine that drives this is the unique way he interacts with his villains, with himself, and with his audience.
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