Batman was always dark. He was snapping motherfucker’s necks in 1939 in addition to packing a .45.
Apparently, that’s Tony Stark’s opinion, too.
Well, he did take on the Ku Klux Klan.
And evil landlords, and wife beaters!
True, but for a long time the dominant public image of him was Adam West.
This wasn’t a problem in the '70s. One of the writers (Elliot S Maggin*) delved into all that. In great detail. Clark doesn’t (all per Maggin) drink beer, he drinks a fruit drink his mom used to make. His hobby was recording commercials that amused him on his newfangled video tape recorder machine. Superman’s favorite dinner was Bouef Borginione (which, for the life of me, I can’t spell), etc. (I’m not quite nerdy enough to remember that much detail on my own. I just reread Maggin’s two novels and a bunch of his stories)
The problem is that since…oh…about 1990 (about the time that for some inexplicable reason, the Toyman became a child murderer–I’m using that to pinpoint the time, not as a cause) DC gave up on supporting cast members, especially for Superman. Ron Troupe, Cat Grant, Jimmy and Perry, Lucy Lane, etc. all vanished as major characters and weren’t replaced. Superman needs a supporting cast, since without a supporting cast to interact with, yeah–Superman is boring. (Hell, Byrne’s Luthor was boring too until reinvented by Morrison)
Maggin also wrote a (sadly now forgotten) classic called “Must There Be A Superman?” which, at the time, and especially at DC was a really radical story. The Guardians (from Green Lantern) went to Superman and asked him to think about what he was doing to the human race. Every time Superman got a kitten out of a tree or rebuilt a slum, he’s taking another peg out of human initiative. In an incredibly nuanced discussion (for a DC comic in the mid '70s especially) the Guardians weren’t saying to quit being Superman, just…maybe think about bigger consequences and slow down just a little. Maggin wrote a ton of stories for Superman like that from maybe 1972-1979 or so. And then pretty much vanished.
Also, Alan Moore’s Supreme showed how a really talented writer could take Mort Wesinger’s Tougher-Than-God Superman and still make him interesting.
Superman can be great. But it takes a great writer and generally his books don’t attract it.
*Who wrote two Superman novels that are the best…literally the best…treatment of Superman and cast ever, IMHO.
ETA: Added link to story–it’s been online forever and the page is filled with interviews from people at DC…I assume they don’t object.
This was touched on in The Dark Knight Returns, where Superman’s a pawn of the US government. He’s sent to sort out trouble on the fictional South American island of Corto Maltese, where he routs a Soviet invasion force; there’s no indication that this is hard for him. Having said that, he turns out to be vulnerable to a Soviet nuclear missile sent in retaliation, not from the explosion but from the dust cloud, which blocks out the sun. In The Dark Knight Returns he’s literally solar-powered.
Later in the book Batman takes him on in a fist fight, and gets in a few good punches; he’s using a kind of robot suit hooked up to the mains, and Superman is weakened from the missile.
I’ve always thought that Superman’s problem isn’t so much his invulnerability, it’s the fact that we can’t really see his limits. We can tell that James Bond isn’t bulletproof, and the other superheroes tend to have intuitive limitations - I instinctively assume that Spiderman couldn’t survive a machinegun blast to the chest, even though it’s not explicitly stated - but Superman’s vulnerability is arbitrary. Can he lift that rock? Can he lift a slightly larger rock? There’s no way to tell. Will he die if he flies into a building, or just punch straight though? I have no idea. If we can accept Superman lifting an entire mountain, it seems absurd that bullets could hurt him;
Much as it pains me to admit it, Michael Bay’s Transformers got this right. Perhaps the makers of the new Superman film could break with convention and ditch the whole super-heroic aspect entirely, and make it a 70s-style youth film where Superman goes on a cross-country car race, for example, but half-way through the race is forgotten and he has a spiritual awakening. Or he goes off to Peru in order to shoot a film about himself, and the local tribesmen start dressing up as Superman and pretending to fly. Or Superman has to deliver a 1970 Dodge Challenger across the US in less than fifteen hours without cheating, and there’s a nude woman on a motorbike.
Glad to see at least some people agree with me.
“X doesn’t appeal to me! It must be broken!”
Oy, I can’t stand that. Go read Supreme, or Invincible, or Thor, or any of the half-dozen others if you don’t enjoy Superman. It’s okay.
Superman is to DC what Mickey Mouse is to Disney - he’s the original, the icon, and the big symbol, but does anyone today prefer his shorts over Donald Duck’s? (Donald Duck being Batman).
I like this.
They touched on the Superman problem briefly in Megamind. For those of you haven’t seen it, a fairly serious spoiler:
About halfway through the story it is revealed that Metroman, their Superman equivalant, has faked his death and gone into retirement. Now it wasn’t his story so they couldn’t spend much time on him, but they did make a few comments on how he was just tired of saving everyone, all the time, how everyone just expected him to do it.
Basically demonstrate how tired Supes is of saving everyone, and how much he just wants to go into retirement. I’m sure it’s been done, but I don’t know how often or how well.
We’re just discussing. Plus, I mean, with the zillions of comics out there, I don’t think it would ruin Superman to have a couple of more serious stories with him, but still fitting who he is.
Part of the problem, with the films at least, is that his antagonists haven’t really challenged him at all. I don’t care how clever Lex Luthor is supposed to be, he’s really never going to defeat someone who can fly back in time. Superman 3 had a business man with a computer going up against a god. Did Superman even have to break a sweat?
The only film to give him a decent workout was Superman II. Surely Superman has a more interesting rogues gallery than that.
Make him gay. Or at least put him in a threesome with Lois and Batman.
That was my problem with the Bryan Singer flick. I mean, the man can throw a *continent *into space. How did Lex even stand a chance?
The problem is it is hard to write Superman well. But when it is done right, it can be compelling. Take a look at the Bruce Timm animated series of the '90s and the Justice League sequel. In those he is a well realized and interesting individual. He is personally regularly threatened. His primary opponent is Lex Luther, who Supes can’t seem to really get to legally. And who is significantly brighter than Supes. Which means a lot of his problems are coming at him sideways. Add in real opponents who actually are in his league and can threaten him (Parasite, Lobo, Darkseid, Jax-Ur, Braniac, Bizzaro, etc.) and there is always a feeling that he can fail. Heck when Parasite first meets him, he beats him badly and keeps him around only to feed on him. So Superman spends weeks beaten, imprisoned, and useless.
And of course many of the best episodes are focused around the things that Superman simply can’t do… because of who he is. “The Late Mister Kent” and the JL episode “Man Who Has Everything” are both fantastic and are great at showing the personality and tensions of the character. Neither is resolved through the use of “powers.” And “Knight Time” is fantastic, where Supes has to fill in for Batman… and is pretty bad at it, only succeeding because he has Robin to help. Then there is the alternate reality episode “Brave New Metropolis” where he takes over and runs the city in a totalitarian dictatorship, highlighting how significant his choices are, and how close he really is to becoming a villain.
Of course these and other favorites are great not because they are the standard story, bad guy shows up Superman pummels him, but because they do what a lot of people here are complaining you can’t do with Superman. They focus on the character. They highlight the difficult choices he has to make on a regular basis. They show the consequences of keeping his personal code. They show how difficult it is to keep to that code. They show his humanity. And none of them veer into angst or “darkness” despite some easy hooks you could use for that.
It isn’t impossible to write good Superman stories, just hard. But with a good writer, you can tell stories you can’t with any other character in modern literature. So I wouldn’t change him.
Is he even sexual? I mean, I know he must be, but it always seemed weird to me that he was even interested in human women. We must be as ants to him. Well, maybe more like sheep - isn’t he supposed to be an allegorical Jesus anyway, ergo a Shephard?
Amazingly, you’re underselling it. Throwing an ordinary continent into space would’ve been easier; Superman threw a continent made of kryptonite into space.
Look for the first Astro City collection (“Life in the Big City”); the first story involves an all-but-Superman (“Samaritan”) and his daily schedule. I think people have done essentially the same story with Superman, but I haven’t seen it done better than in that issue.
He does. But they generally have an element of the “fantastic” they seem to be leery of putting on the big screen. Super powered aliens, killer robots and cyborgs, magic, extra-dimensional entities, and of course a lot of mutated humans. Heck even Luther in the comics is a lot more powerful. He has built time machines, created superman clones, and made many of the aforementioned robots, cyborgs and and mutated humans. Maybe now that the Avengers has shown how you can be successful having aliens, magic, monsters, super-tech and the like all mixed together, we may get a superman that embraces the same.
I always think that comic book movies miss a trick when they do this. The best thing about comics is that you might see what happens when a cyborg fights a vampire, or a mutant vs a god etc.
In the movies, they assume that the audience can only cope with one ‘extra-reality’ thing at a time, so Iron Man has to fight an evil suit of armour, Thor has to fight an evil god etc. The Avengers was the first movie to realise that people are quite happy to watch a WWII supersoldier vs Aliens.
But you are ignoring a very real problem-declining sales. Comic characters need to develop and change to increase(or even hod) an audience. Put in some new to spark interest(new outfit, new characters, new interests), and take out the old that never really worked(super intelligence-talk about an inconsistent ability!). Unless y’all get together and vow to buy hundreds of copies of each issue of Superman and/or Action it will eventually disappear.