House of Eratosthenes

People are often skeptical that a Superman movie can be good because stories need conflict, and conflict seems pretty hard to come by when your hero is a person who always does the right thing and can’t be hurt. That, however, is a reductive way of looking at the character, and the secret to why Superman stories are so great: They’re never really about him. They’re about us.

This is something Snyder and his team almost get, but they come at it from an angle that totally misses the point of Superman. They treat him as a god among mortals, our greatest fear or our great salvation. The problem with this, though, is that it strips the character of his humanity, and makes him downright unapproachable.
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Superman isn’t good or special because he’s an alien who crashes on Earth and ends up being incredibly powerful. He’s special because after all that he becomes someone who always does the right thing because he was raised by a couple of decent people from Kansas. That’s it.

He is someone with the power to be the most selfish being in all of existence, and decides to be selfless because he was raised by a couple of kindly farmers. And the beautiful idea behind him is that we don’t need to be bulletproof to be that way — we just have to be decent people.

I don’t think the author means to say all Superman stories have been great. Some of them were inarguably terrible. But it is equally inarguable that the trademark has something going for it, no? And it’s certainly something greater than being some precursor to Spider Man, with his bromide about “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.” It’s the difference between “What should I do?” and “What should that guy, over there, the one with all the super-powers I don’t have, do?”

It’s the difference between conservatives and liberals. Quoting Robert Mitchell again,

The real difference between conservatives and liberals, today:

Liberal: Someone should take care of this! Or, We need a program to take care of this!

Conservative: ++sigh++ It looks like it’s up to me to take care of this…

Ok, FINE, I get off my ass and release my dream Superman script…

Superman works when they realize it’s not about the physical challenge (which is easy to write – but obviously you can’t really do) but the spiritual/mental challenge. Say what you will, but I actually like the Death story because it’s him being tested mentally as well as physically and proves that he’s a hero down to his core. And Kingdom Come probably even more so as his great powers are NOT the challenge to the story, but the question, “What should I do?”

But one problem (especially recently in comics, maybe it’s changed) is distancing him from earth, making Supes the equivalent of a fallen angel, “barely” human. Superman should always see himself as an earthman, who just happened to have been born somewhere else.

Actually that’s probably where it’s gone wrong. He represents “the American Way” in that of the immigrant, the foreigner who comes and embraces a new home to become a native in spirit if not by blood. Of course that’s not really in vogue any more, immigrants nowadays are supposed to be [whatever]-American which suddenly makes sense of a lot of recent comic writing styles. Superman is no longer “Clark Kent, American.” He’s “Clark Kent, Kryptonian-American.”
- Nate Winchester | 07/14/2015 @ 17:02
The Paul Dini-Bruce Timm concept of the DC Universe was always compelling because they always got the characters right. Their concept of Supes came relatively early in the Superman Adventures, when a car explosion seemingly kills Clark Kent.

Naturally, he’s sitting in his parents’ farmhouse, quietly stewing, while his mom fields condolence calls from the rest of the Daily Planet’s staff. Pa Kent tries to console him: you know, son, you can always have another secret identity, you don’t have to be Clark Kent… but Clark reacts with anger and frustration. “I am Clark Kent! I’ll go crazy if I can’t be Clark Kent!”

This idea that heroes aren’t allowed to be heroic anymore makes the whole concept disintegrate – and the more powerful the character, the more quickly it crumbles.
- nightfly | 07/15/2015 @ 06:46

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Getting Superman WrongTuesday, July 14th, 2015

Getting Superman Wrong
Tuesday, July 14th, 2015