Superman is my favorite superhero. With the new movie coming out tomorrow (as I type this), I’ve been thinking about that lately. What follows is a ramble through those thoughts— I’m not writing from an outline to produce a well-constructed essay. Just thinking aloud.
My impression from having known lots of comic book fans over the years is that Marvel beats out DC in the popularity contest for favorite comic book universe. But when you narrow the focus to particular characters, DC’s top two— Superman and Batman— beat the field. Not unanimously, of course, and if your favorite superhero is Spider-man or Iron Man then that’s fine. But if you tally up the votes, it seems like DC’s Night and Day rise to the top, and of the two Batman comes out ahead.
But I pick Superman. Why? That is hard to say, and I have to admit that he has seldom been well-served by the writers who’ve taken him on. During the decades I followed comics (I gave them up a while back but that’s another story) I was disappointed by the Superman books far more of the time than I was by Batman’s books. Batman is easier to write, and to write well, than Superman. When I say Superman’s my favorite, I’m talking about a Superman that somehow exists despite the way most of his creators have handled him. There’s a real Superman out there somewhere— or I should say in there somewhere because he’s not flying around in the real world, he’s an archetype that lives in the human imagination, somewhere in the same place that the Hero’s Journey comes from.
I was in a theater for another movie when the first teaser trailer for Man of Steel was shown. The teaser didn’t make it clear at first that it was an upcoming Superman movie it was presenting. Only at the end of the trailer was there a sudden reveal, a wide shot showing Superman fly up out of a layer of cloud into the light of the sun. At that moment, in the dark theater, a little kid’s voice rang out with sudden, absolute delight, “It’s SUPERMAN!”
That’s the Superman that is my favorite superhero: the one that lives in that child’s imagination, and mine. But he’s rarely been captured as he should be, in the comic pages or in the movies. The problem is this:
The key to Superman is that he is wholly admirable. He is the human being without flaw. The best one-line summary of Superman I ever saw came from former DC editor-in-chief Dennis O’Neil: “It isn’t about strength or flight or X-ray vision. Superman’s defining power is that he will always do the right thing.”
That’s hard to write well— nearly impossible, in fact, since the job involves not just presenting such a character but also making him sympathetic. It really should never work, by any of the normal rules of writing good protagonists. When trying, Superman’s writers have fallen into two traps:
One, they try to give him some kind of dark side or edge, but that ruins him. It seems like it should work: the character who has his own demons to overcome as well as whatever antagonist threatens him from outside— that’s a good protagonist. If he succeeds, he’s a good hero. Almost all good fiction fits that pattern: the hero has to triumph in conflicts both internal and external in order to triumph. That’s a journey we can all sympathize with, it’s the one we all go through, it is the very essence of good storytelling.
The problem is, it isn’t Superman’s story.
Two, they make him as good as he should be but can’t figure out how to make that interesting. Villains— and sometimes his more cynical allies— often mock Superman as the “Big Blue Boy Scout.” He’s seen as simplistic or naive. The writer may agree— or may know better but just not have a way to show it. Readers end up with a character who is bland, untroubled and boring. But this trap can be avoided.
The way to write a good Superman story and avoid these two traps is to recognize this: this flawed and broken world, filled with villains and victims, with the greedy and powerful and sadistic, with people trying to do their best but failing and people who aren’t trying at all, offers plenty of dramatic conflict, plenty of struggle and suffering and heartbreak, to anyone who stands out as a representative of something better. He doesn’t need to bring his own baggage in order to face a harsh test both internal and external: the world itself will hit him with everything it’s got.
Superman’s power is that he always does the right thing. It isn’t that doing the right thing is easy for him.
Let me add a note on a more superficial feature of good Superman stories: his purely physical powers have to be kept within reason. A mentioned the best summary of Superman up above. Dennis O’Neil’s successor as DC editor-in-chief, Dan Didio, gave what I think is the worst possible summary of the character: “I’ve always seen Superman as just this completely over-the-top guy with no limits whatsoever.” (As a side note, Didio’s reign as chief of DC Comics coincidences with a decline in quality, right across the universe, so severe that I finally gave up reading comic books altogether.)
You can write good Superman stories with an over-the-top powered Superman. You can avoid the two traps above. It was done, now and again, in the “Silver Age” comics. But comic books are ultimately about action-adventure, and if the writers have pumped up Superman so that nothing can physically challenge him, it becomes almost impossible to work any action in– all the writers can do is have him stumble over a lump of kryptonite every other page.
Notice that the Christopher Reeve movie (still the best Superman movie, unless the one that premieres tomorrow tops it) gave him far less power than the comic books of the time. In the comic books, Superman of the seventies once blew out a star with his super-breath, like a normal human would blow out a candle. Meanwhile in the movie he had to work to chase down Lex Luthor’s missiles, and it took a visible teeth-clenched effort to change the course of the one he caught. And he still couldn’t manage to save the one person he most wanted to (yes, there was the turn-back-the-world ending, but that, too, was presented as a supreme effort born of rage and grief— meanwhile in the comic books Superman was going back in time by flying faster than light quite routinely).
In the mid-eighties, with the revamp of the character following DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman’s powers were scaled way down, so that he was comparable to several other DC characters, both heroes and villains, so that he realistically faced real challenges from his adversaries. A few fans did complain (I recall one fan letter on the letters page saying that if he wasn’t stronger than the whole rest of the universe, then there wasn’t any point to him) but the result was a vast improvement in the stories and he was still Superman.
Superman has to have limits so that his real power, doing the right thing, becomes difficult— and thus the subject for good storytelling. In a comic book universe filled with superpowered beings, he can still be superpowered without losing that.
How do you write Superman well?
In the first Christopher Reeve movie, after Clark’s father dies: “All those things I can do… all those powers… and I couldn’t even save him.”
At the climax of the “Death of Superman” storyline, Superman has come back from a near-death experience (or maybe he was actually dead, it’s not entirely clear) with all his powers gone. He’s entirely vulnerable. When he learns that an alien invasion from Warworld is under way, he picks up a raygun lately used by Lex Luthor’s henchmen and prepares to join the fight. Lois Lane tries to talk him out of it, reminding him how weakened he is. “It doesn’t matter,” he answers. “I’ve seen Warworld. Before I let that hell come to Earth, I’d gladly die again.”
And in the very best Superman story ever (to my taste, anyway), Superman goes with Lois Lane to look over the fan mail that the Metropolis post office accumulates for him. A lot of it is what you’d expect: marriage proposals, get-rich-quick schemes using his powers, and so on. He finds some genuine pleas for help that he can address. And then he finds a letter from a little boy whose father is dying of cancer and wants Superman to come cure him.
Superman looks at the letter for a long moment. Lois, seeing his face, says, “You’re going, aren’t you?”
He flies across country to the hospital named in the letter, but he’s too late: the boy’s father died only minutes before he arrived. The little boy is furious and runs out crying. Superman turns to leave but the dead man’s wife asks him to speak to the boy.
“I only wanted to come to give you my best wishes,” he tells the boy. “You know that even if I had come earlier, there was nothing I could have done. I’m not a doctor.”
“But you’re Superman!” protests the boy.
“No, son,” Superman answers. “I’m Superman.”
And that’s how you write a great Superman story.
