05/23/21 - If Evil Superman is Lame, Then Good Superman Is Cool, Just Admit It
Grant Morrison got the assignment.
Mags says I’m forcing dichotomies where there are none but I’m ready to fucking die on this hill. If the Evil Superman trope is lame, it stands to reason that Good Superman is cool. Superman is a good character! THINK, MARK!
Some ongoing punishment of the gods for our hubris, it must be, that we tried to make all our stories gritty and now live in a post-Snyder world because of it. I wish I could be the kind of person who swats away any mention of the superhero genre, and my body is following my distaste suit, trying to develop the allergy. Netflix announced the voice actor roster for Trese’s English and Filipino dubs, and my adult acne broke the fuck out just thinking about the mythology discourse I’ll no doubt see regurgitated online, the pandering and equally desperate praise, the boba-neoliberal call for more! Representation! In! Hollywood! Alas, Marvel continues to churn out its phases like our government does quarantine acronyms, and I can’t let the hell go. WandaVision was a lot of fun, Harley Quinn’s first two seasons gave us the best iteration of the character thus far, and I’m still keeping pace with the My Hero Academia manga, so why stop now. If media is garbage then I’m a cockroach, torrenting Disney Plus content.
The Evil Superman trope is a thought experiment we’ve run well into the ground, but once upon a time it was compelling. Before The Boys’ Homelander and the Invincible adaptation’s Omni-Man, we had DC Elseworlds, the Injustice video games, and local komikeros taking a stab at the archetype. Let’s be generous, and admit that Evil Superman’s various forms were meant to give us the conceptual means to more deeply imagine power and the human impulses that guide it. What does evil look like when we buff the stats to max levels? Homelander is the narcissistic embodiment of American exceptionalism, and Omni-Man was born in a civilization founded on conquest and eugenics (again, easy metaphor for America). Russian poet Joseph Brodsky says: “You Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots.” As long as we keep writing villains with skull-heads and vampire cloaks, there will always be room for stories where evil disguises itself as heroic, which it usually does. Not everybody’s gonna get it, but some do.
(For the record, Invincible’s first issue was released in 2003, predating Zack Synder’s Man of Steel by ten years. Getting sick of an archetype is fine, but I think it’s facetious to criticize Invincible for piggybacking on a trope when it was novel at the time of its publication. Setting the reticle on Amazon for timing the adaptation to come out in today’s entertainment landscape is easier, and makes more sense.)
Such stories are conceptual sandboxes where we can play with the maxim “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and test how legit it is. Crooked politicians and CEOs make an obvious case. But the maxim turns sanctimonious when the conclusion storytellers come to is, oh, give anybody enough power and they’ll definitely kill the better angels of their nature. That’s where the trope falls apart and gets boring, and like, we already have enough despots in the real world, tell us something we don’t already know. I think it’s one of those cases where a supposed subversion gets so overdone we circle all the way back to classic conventions, and realize Superman’s boy scout morality was an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kinda situation.
In his book “Supergods,” Grant Morrison gives historicity to Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1, published 1938. This was, as Morrison notes,
“[…] nine years after the Wall Street crash triggered a catastrophic worldwide depression. In America, banks were toppled, people lost jobs and homes, and, in extreme cases, relocated to hastily convened shanty towns. There were rumblings too from Europe, where the ambitious Chancellor Adolf Hitler had declared himself dictator of Germany following a triumphant election to power five years earlier. With the arrival of the first real-life global supervillain, the stage was set for the Free World’s imaginative response.”
It is no accident that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two American Jews, wrote their caped crusader to be the last of his race, who must live with the memory of his people’s near eradication.
Action Comics #1 hits the stands and Morrison asks us to note the comic book cover’s anti-establishment semiotics. They write:
“In any other hands but Superman’s, the green roadster on that inaugural cover would boast proudly of America’s technological superiority and the wonders of mass manufacturing. […] But this was August 1938. Production lines were making laborers redundant across the entire developed world while Charlie Chaplin’s poignant film masterpiece Modern Times articulated in pantomime the silent cry of the little fellow, the authentic man, not to be forgotten above the relentless din of the factory floor. Superman made his position plain: He was a hero of the people. The original Superman was a bold humanist response to Depression-era fears of runaway scientific advance and soulless industrialism.”
In other words, fuck Ford! And fuck Musk, too! Siegel and Shuster would eventually lose Superman’s soul to a rights battle with DC, as writers with different philosophies rushed to build their own edifices upon the groundwork laid. But traces of Superman’s car-smashing first impression can still be seen in his greatest stories, and we see him for what he really is—an unstoppable force that embodies the dreams of the downtrodden. Morrison continues: “If the dystopian nightmare visions of the age foresaw a dehumanized, mechanised world, Superman offered another possibility: an image of a fiercely human tomorrow that delivered the spectacle of triumphant individualism exercising its sovereignty over the implacable forces of industrial oppression.”
I recognise though that painting Superman as some sort of underdog insurgent with a grudge against The Man is a stretch, and you don’t have to believe it. I don’t. While Morrison’s analysis of Action Comic #1’s cover’s political gestures is interesting, it loses out to the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s essay “Super Position,” which interrogates the ideological premises of the superhero genre. Superheroes, for all their power, seem totally incapable of solving systemic and political issues. Their worlds have time machines but no cancer cures. The Justice League routinely battles cosmic level threats but never work to take earth from a Type 0 to Type 1 civilization. Graeber writes:
“These ‘heroes’ are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their role as heroes: as Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants, but as Superman, he is purely reactive. In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination: like Bruce Wayne, who with all the money in the world can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to indulge in the occasional act of charity; it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily carve free magic cities out of mountains.
Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.”
It’s an ideological project that neatly lines up with the whole “Marvel is US military propaganda” talking point, as exasperating as that is to hear. This could be why various comic book writers—succumbing to the genre’s fascist tendencies, whether intentional or otherwise—would write Superman as a Lawful Evil dictator or an obedient dog of the state. Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a good example of this.
So how do you write Superman? Let me assert first that one reason people think that Superman isn’t an interesting character is because he’s hard to write. So many have tried and failed, and we see mostly the failures. There are myriad comic book characters that can get away with a mediocre writer and not be boring—Deadpool doesn’t need good jokes, he just needs to be makulit; Wolverine is one-note gritty (2017’s Logan is an exception); Green Lantern is lame as hell but no one ever calls the corp dull. Writing Superman is like writing a rhyming sonnet in iambic pentameter—either it’s amazing or it completely beefs. And I know, I know a comic book character’s mythology is the gestalt sum of all their stories, but I think that in the same way there are examples of Superman written poorly, there are tricks to writing Superman well.
Fittingly, it was Morrison who gave us one of the greatest Superman stories of our time in the form of Superman All-Star, an analog of Heracles’ twelve labors that kind of sidesteps the hero’s political and ideological baggage by taking the route of cosmology. When Superman discovers that he’s dying, he accomplishes a series of feats that test his moral compass in a way only possible for someone who’s abilities border on god-like. The stroke of genius to All-Star is that it unpacks Superman’s humanity through apotheosis. Come on, bitch!!! He beats Samson and Atlas in an arm-wrestling match, solves the riddle of an Ultra-Sphinx, writes a Lex Luthor profile (people forget the man is a CAPABLE JOURNALIST), and defeats a poison sun with an adopted sun-eater.
This is why I love comics.
(These aren’t even the highlights of the run, which is only twelve issues long, so I’m going to spoil the best parts, because whenever I tell my friends “You should totally read so-and so,” they won’t, which is fine, so I’ll just give you the skinny here.)
In All-Star, we see Superman at perhaps his most powerful. Morrison has a way of embracing the absurdity of Superman’s power set. Here we see him lift quintillions of tons, decode and transcribe his DNA hex by hex with x-ray and microscope vision, and even create a miniature universe that mirrors our own, where human history plays out in the span of a breath and all mentions of the superman ideal culminate in one meta-panel of Siegel and Shuster sketching their first draft of the Man of Steel. He’s nigh omnipotent, but not unapproachable, and Morrison really brings it home in issue 12.
In a last ditch plot to escape execution and take over the world (yadda yadda), Lex Luthor downs a formula that imbues him with Superman’s powers. What Luthor didn’t count on, however, was how even sheer mathematics yields to the idealism of Superman’s morality and the heart of his heroics.
The discursive tendencies that rush to the defense of a Snyderian, gritty Superman usually go like, oh, we gotta give this guy more angst to make him relatable, blah blah. These attempts to make Superman more human fail not because he’s a bad character, but because the ideas are redundant. Superman is already very human.
Morrison gets the assignment. Superman isn’t human despite all his power—he’s human because of it. Superman is good because he represents the ultimate power fantasy: the ability to help others in need. THINK, MARK!!!
Just needed to get that off my chest. Here’s ten pieces of media I ate up the past couple of weeks. None of them are superhero-related.
This cover of “Party in the USA” as performed by Bilmuri is gentle and sad.
A D&D campaign called The Unsleeping City! Home-brewed to be set in modern New York and run by CollegeHumor cast members, The Unsleeping City is probably the best thing I’ve been watching, and set me off on my latest pandemic hyperfixation of studying to be a Dungeon Master. Episodes are movie-length but I swear you’ll get sucked in.
Revisited a poem called Ode to the Corpse Flower by Benjamin Garcia.
Welcome to Your Bland New World, a thinkpiece about like… MUJI-ass branding.
Ancient Akkadian poems and medical texts reveal grief’s universals. Read this with the knowledge that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were definitely gay.
The Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values. Shout-out to Deo Mostrales for this link and the last two. Y’know how everybody has that one friend on social media who shares the gnarliest articles? That’s him. One time I asked him to help me confirm the existence of a study that systemically disembowelled over 60,000 Nearctic birds, and he found it, the fucking madman.
Probably my favorite episode of the Kwentong Creatives podcast. A very off the cuff interview with Jake and Toni from Kodawari, and Gio’s really good at riding that energy. Lots of giggling.
A self-plug: the last episode for the first season of The Gig Is Up. Helena and I started this podcast not really knowing where it’d go, just learning as we went and trying shit out, and now we have a whole season! If you’re a listener of the podcast reading this, thank you for making us a part of your day whenever you could. In this episode we speak to writer Ren Aguila and ethnomusicologist Monika Schoop about Route 196, the bar’s farewell gig, and the paper they’re writing about it. It’s the most academic episode we’ve done yet.