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Monday Morning Music: Superman (It’s Not Easy)

October 26, 2009

I’ve been a comic book reader all my life.  I’ve watched Superman, Batman, Swamp Thing, Green Lantern, The Hulk, Spiderman, and many more change over the years as comic companies try to revitalize them as brands, or just get them into interesting stories.  And of all the characters, I think Superman poses the hardest problem for the writer.

I mean, Batman’s an interesting guy; he’s as messed up as they come and still have any hope of being called a “hero”.  And he could be killed by a single bullet in the wrong place, but he stays alive by his skill and wits.  But Superman?  He was raised by loving parents in wholesome Smallville, and he’s so powerful it’s difficult to invent any threat to him personally. (You can only whip out the kryptonite just so many times.) 

About the only way to make him interesting is his sense of isolation.  We humans are very much defined by the boundaries of our vulnerability – and he needs to act human to keep his identity secret.  So he has to be a very keen observer of human behavior.  But it’s not easy, because very few people get close enough to him to know his secret. Worse, the better he succeeds at keeping the secret, the more isolated he is.  Add to that, everyone expects him to save them, but he can’t be everywhere at once. 

Gotta be a lonely thing. What he wouldn’t give to just go hang out with someone like himself.

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  1. October 26, 2009 at 08:07 | #1

    Hmmm.

    Superman was postured as an alien, a non-human. I find it problematical to try to analyze his emotional needs, because his may not be mine.

    I never was much for comic books myself, only because my mom instilled such a love for reading in me that my nose was always stuck in a book. As a kid, I seldom had money to buy a comic book, but there was always that little Carnegie library just down the street .  .  .

  2. October 26, 2009 at 08:43 | #2

    The song was pleasing and your observation was thought provoking.  I never thought about that aspect of of the character.

  3. October 28, 2009 at 01:54 | #3

    One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read is Superman For All Seasons.  I’ve always been bored to death by that character, but that story brought him so much alive, made him so emotionally real, that you got over the Boy Scout ways and the super-everything and realized that he does have vulnerabilities.  They just don’t come out in an action comic.  In the right hands, he’s fantastic.

    Also a beautiful moment in Hitman where he’s moaning to Tommy about not being able to save everybody, and Tommy, who’s totally star-struck, makes him feel better about not being everywhere saving everyone at once.  And then, the moment Supes is busy elsewhere, Tommy completed the assassination the whole visit interrupted.  It was priceless.

    I surely don’t envy the writers who have to come up with interesting and credible threats for him to face.  Invulnerable characters are a right roaring pain the arse.  I have enough troubles with folks who can heal everything outside of catastrophic beheading… I can’t imagine having to write someone who’s truly invulnerable except for one teensy little flaw.  And he didn’t even have that until the original writers got desperate and seized on Kryptonite.

    If they hadn’t been writing action comics, they could’ve really gotten cruel. How do you destroy a physically invulnerable guy, after all?  Go after everyone and everything he cares about, and wreak havoc.

    I guarantee you there’d be no need for Kryptonite if they’d gone that route instead.  At least, not until “threats to friends and family” became old hat…

  4. KWF
    December 6, 2009 at 00:11 | #4

    I agree with Dana

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