What are the essential characteristics of Superman? Which elements, if changed, mean we are no longer talking about Superman? I bring this up because the Ain’t It Cool website has a disturbing if true article about the proposed script for an upcoming Superman feature. And not the cancelled Death of Superman with Nicholas Cage as the Man of Steel either.
While there are several dopers who are comics fans, I’m more curious about what the general public considers essential. For me, as an example, if he doesn’t fly - he’s not Superman. If he’s not Clark Kent in some form, he’s not Superman. No Ma and Pa Kent = No Superman. If he has a beard, or loses the cape, or has blond hair - I’d at least give it a chance.
Your thoughts?
I’d prefer to leave the discussion of the specific plot points on this script to another thread, if that’s possible. But if you must check the article before responding, I’ve placed the link below.
Superman movie script articleKrypton hasn’t exploded; therefore he’s not the Last Son of Krypton. “CIA Special Agent Lex Luthor” Kung-Fu fighting. Effeminate Jimmy Olsen. Krypton invades Earth
No “Truth, Justice and the American Way” no Superman.
He can’t use it as a cynical remark or a joke either, he has to really and I mean REALLY believe it.
The Suit and powers and abilities beyond mortal men are also a prerequisite.
You need The Proper origin Kypton goes boom last Son of Krypton lands in Kansas and is raised as a regular human by Ma and Pa Kent. becomes Superman and works as Clark Kent at the Daily Planet. Has a crush on Lois Lane… etc etc.
Oh yeah and Luthor can’t be a FRICKEN ALIEN FROM KRYPTON!!!
Sent to earth as an infant from the dying planet Krypton.
Raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent as their son Clark.
He learned to control his incredible powers and uses them to help those in need.
He lives among people as Clark Kent, reporter for the Metropolis Daily Planet and loves reporter Lois Lane.
His one great weakness is Kryptonite.
He believes in the equality and nobility of all people and refuses to kill.
His powers are, flight, invulnerability, super speed, super hearing, x-ray vision, heat vision, telescopic vision, microscopic vision, and he can see across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and he can hold immense amounts of air in his lungs and can expel them as “super breath.”
As long as those prerequisites are met, I’m willling to consider other variations, except the ones in that STUPID script.
He’s the last survivor of his lost planet. He has only records and (vague, at best) memories. He has made Earth his new home, permanently. There’s nothing for him to go back to.
Violating that (as is done in the script), in my opinion, contradicts an essential element of the mythology. 'Twould be like the Romans changing their mind about the crucifixion and nailing up Mary instead of Jesus (or Brian, heh heh).
You must be a newcomer to Superman. Otherwise you’d know that in the old Superman stories it seemed like the only people who got killed when Krypton blew up were his parents. You had Kandor and Argo City survive in their entirety, all the Phantom Zone criminals (many, many more than the three seen in the movie), and various experiments from Krypton that got away. The universe wasn’t exactly lacking in Kryptonians…
Of course, Krypton does need to blow up. That’s his starting point, barely escaping from a dying world leaving everything behind to be adopted by a rural couple. After that… Superman is a lot about attitude. He’s powerful enough to do whatever he wants to but he doesn’t because he’s had a strong sense of morality engrained into him.
[list=1]
[li]“Strange visitor from another planet with powers far beyond those of mortal men.”[/li][li]The Clark Kent secret identity. As a corollary, if someone discovers the truth, they prove it by trying to cut his hair and have the scissors breadk. ;)[/li][li]Refuses to kill.[/li][li]Lois Lane, any any of her guises.[/li][li]The red cape and the big red “S.”[/li][li]Flying, invulnerability (at least up to a certain point – “nothing less than an exploding shell can pierce his skin”), x-ray vision, heat vision, telescopic vision, microscopic vision, super hearing, super speed. Don’t include his shape changing and telepathic powers (which actually were written into the character at one point).[/li][/list=1]
Optional:
[list=1]
[li]Ma and Pa Kent. Superman did well without them for years.[/li][li]Luthor. While he’s certainly Supes greatest opponent, there are others that might be better, especially since Luthor has been on onscreen. I’d especially love to see him go against the Parasite*, or at least Braniac.[/li][li]Daily Planet. Good, but Clark did OK as TV reporter in the 70s, too.[/li][li]Jimmy Olsen. Unless he has some role to play in the plot. He’s usually just an extraneous character and was only created so Supes had someone to talk to.[/li][/list=1]
Avoid:
[list=1]
[li]Mr. Myxptlyk[/li][li]Toyman[/li][li]Prankster[/li][li]Lex Luthor in purple tights[/li][/list=1]
*My vote for the ideal villain for the movie. The Parasite absorbed energy from people around him, including Superman, so the more they fought, the weaker Supes became. That would allow for all the fights you want without dragging someone from Krypton. Second choice would be the sand Superman from Denny O’Neal’s 70’s reworking for similar reasons.
That’s Mr. Mxyzptlk to you, buddy. I mean, pre-Byrne at least, he was Superman’s Greatest Foe. However, I’ll admit that he fits a lot better with the 1950’s concept of Superman than with anything later - and good uses of Mr. Mxyzptlk tend to acknowledge this.
I’d like to add a vote for the Sand Superman, though, if only for obscure continuity reasons
Powers: Strength and x-ray vision, and vulnerability to kryptonite. Flight and heat vision are very strongly recommended. Freezing breath, telescopic vision and other enhanced senses, enhanced intelligence, and (near) invulnerability are optional (if he’s not invulnerable, then his suit, or at least the S on his suit, is). Leave out all else.
Costume: Red and blue, with red cape. The S emblem on his chest.
Origin: Barely escaped from dying Krypton. Crashed on Earth, adopted by the Kents.
Ethics: Believes in truth and justice (I can imagine a non-American Superman, so we’ll leave that out). Doesn’t kill. Works with authorities, rather than against or despite them.
Character: Maintains secret identity of “Clark Kent”. Works as a reporter (probably for the Daily Planet, but not necessarily). In love with Lois Lane.
I disagree. Krypton has to blow up, true. But for the bulk of his career (roughly '55-85) he wasn’t alone. Supergirl, Krypto, The Bottled City of Kandor, The Phantom Zone prisoners…
And the smaller powers don’t really matter. I think the absolute core of Superman can be summed up in one famous paragraph:
With one exception*, the rest is window dressing. Neat, wonderful window dressing, but ultimately window dressing.
To use Chronos’s format
Powers: Strength, Flight, at least somewhat invulnerable (“Tank shells burst harmlessly upon his chest!”/“It tickles!”). Other stuff is great: Heat/X-Ray vision (they used to be the same power: he’d crank his X-ray vision up enough to burn things.), Super-Breath, Super-Ventriloquism, microscopic vision, telescopic hearing, etc are all cool, but not crucial.
Costume: Blue/Red/Yellow in that order of frequency. “S” shield of some sort. Cape.
Origin: Rocketed from a dying planet…key point: the planet must be a place who’s loss is regretted. Making it a dystopia means that Superman was lucky that he left which doesn’t work at all, IMO.
Personal life; Reporter, mild-mannered secret identity (see Chris Reeve’s portrayal in the first Superman movie. Not a wimp, not a coward, just mellow.
Love Life: Superman/Lois/Clark triangle.
Ethics: just like Res said, “Superman NEVER kills”. The whole “Truth, justice and the American way” thing. I can’t picture a Commie Superman herding dissidents into a gulag. Even if he’s not an American, he should stand for the ideal version of the “American dream”.
Main enemy: Pre-Byrne, his greatest foe was Lex Luthor, mad scientist. I prefer the Elliot S! Maggin take on Luthor: he sees Superman A) irresponsible ("I was in a lab that was on fire and filled iwth volitle chemicals in fragile glass containers and you decided the safest way to blow out the fire was to blow it out???) and B)as interfering with human free will (“He lost his mommy and daddy when Krypton blew up so now he’s nannying us so he doesn’t lose us too”-paraphrased quote from one of Maggin’s novels), but the key is that Luthor is a scientist. Byrne’s “I wanna write Kingpin, but he’s Marvel’s character” version was atrocious…you’ll notice that in the last few years, they’ve given him something similar to Maggin’s motivation.
Fenris
*The one thing the old TV show’s opening monologue missed was the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle. Yeah, I know he’s married. Yes they’ve done some good stuff with it, but when it comes down to it, by losing the famous triangle they’ve lost a huge chunk of the magic.
The old Luthor was good, but so’s the new Luthor. Mad scientist characters in general had fallen out of style at the point of the revamp (I think the only one to still be taken seriously is Dr. Doom and that’s mainly because that man has a sense of style).
When Byrne revamped Superman just about every change made was to increase dramatic tension. Superman was the only survivor (and later someone else came up with a reason why there could be no others), Superman was still powerful but not overwelmingly so (just like the Sand Superman storyline; shame that got ignored), and he got a villain that increased tension. Instead of a Luthor who was constantly breaking out of jail, coming up with a plot to kill Superman, and then getting thrown back in we have a villain that Superman can’t do anything about. It turned Luthor from a villain for a short plot line into another supporting character for the book.
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…but none of it succeeded at all, IMO. Big surprise, right?
**
But he left Ma and Pa Kent alive, and he had that moronic scene in Man of Steel #6 where Superman says “Krypton’s art and culture were stupid and useless, I’m an Earthman.” so he’s really not orphaned and alone. He is abysmally stupid in that incarnation though.
**
But again, there were thousands of great stories between 1955-1985 where Superboy/man had his highest level of power and there was still dramatic tension and Alan Moore’s Supreme showed that you can write a character that powerful, have dramatic storylines and appeal to a modern sensibilty.
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I see your point on that, but IMO that’s not Byrne’s Luthor, who was simply Kingpin on Slim-fast. There was a revamp of Luthor in the early '90s where he got the “Earth is for normal people, not super-powered types” attitude and has since become an interesting supporting character. And the Earth-1 Luthor when written right (and he often wasn’t) was ten times the character that even the more interesting modern Luthor is.
I just want to throw in mad props to the costume and the flying. I know that these days, big shot execs all think the costume and the flying are old-fashioned and stupid. Apparently they don’t play well to the new generation. Well if that’s the case, it’s the new generation that needs to go. They are essential parts of the character. He wears a costume and he flies. Those two things are important. Maybe not the most important, and certainly not the only important, but they are important, dammit.
And here’s a good Superman line from the mediocre, “Kingdom Come” graphic novel:
“In this world there is right and there is wrong…and it is not difficult to distinguish between the two.”
I agree, and as an aside, the line is a tribute from Kingdom Come writer Mark Waid to earlier Superman writer Elliot S! Maggin who first used it in the Superman novel Superman: Last Son of Krypton (it and the sequel Miracle Monday are the best portrayal of Luthor, Lois and Superman I’ve ever read. And given how many Superman comics I’ve read, that’s saying a lot! )
I wanted to add something to the things not needed:
Fights.
Superman rarely had extended fight scenes, and they were never blow-by-blow punches. That was partly because most villains couldn’t go toe-to-toe with him, but it allowed writers to be more creative.
Compare Superman stories that are contemporaneous to those of the early Spider-Man. There was much more variation in story; Spider-Man, issue after issue, recycled the same plot: villain shows up, defeats Spider-Man; Peter Parker mopes around for a while, then fights the villain again and wins. Superman’s opponents tended to be smart and avoided direct attack, and it would be refreshing to see a superhero film that didn’t deteriorate into a fistfight.
Hey! You’ve been through this discussion a few times too!
Well if you were fond of the classic Krypton I can’t argue with that. What Byrne did was, I think, make all the Krypton elements neglegible and depending on what you like in Superman that’s either a good or bad thing.
Ma and Pa Kent were hardly non-existant in the old stories, though. They were around Superboy constantly though their characters weren’t exactly interesting.
Hey, feel free to keep it to Superman and just use What Ever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (or even better, that annual he wrote with Mongol in it).
It’s not impossible to write a story with an enormously powerful character but it calls for a different direction of story development than the typical super hero. That’s why Superman’s popularity declined to the point that a revamp was all but necessary; guys who couldn’t write that kind of character had him flying around catching thugs. Every so often you got a good story from someone like Moore or Maggin but the vast, vast majority of the Superman stories from about the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties were absolute crap.
FWIW, at the point when he did the revamp I think that Byrne would have been capable of writing the planet-moving Superman well but he was hired to rework him. These days, OTOH…
That is true, it was right after Byrne left that Luthor was effectively in every single issue. I still don’t know if I’d call the industrialist Luthor Kingpin-Lite but it was a solid advantage of the revamp.
Mad Scientist Luthor could be a lot of fun, but by the time they gave him that battle suit so he could fight Superman hand to hand it was just stupid…
Shouldn’t we be shrieking at one another by now and calling each other names? Are we breaking a law? Will the Usenet police come and get us?
Regarding the battle-suit. I liked the mid-'70s jumpsuit with the flying harness. The '80s Iron-Man style armor was just stoopid, I’ll agree.
And much of Cary Bate’s work on Superman was really good. Not Alan Moore level good, but certainly Marv Wolfman level good. A couple of story-arcs that come to mind would be one around Superman #320 or so where the Parasite reverses his normal gimmick and boosts Superman’s powers a thousandfold and Superman can’t control them. Another excellent story-arc (lasting like 5 issues, which for DC was LONG) by Bates was around Action #470 or so: most of the Phantom Zone criminals escaped and Superman had to deal with them. That arc also introduced Faora Ul-hul(?).
In other words, I disagree with your assessment that most of the mid '60s to the mid '80s were crap. Late '60s-mid '70s? Crap. Agreed. Luthor and Braniac’s new look forward through Byrne? Again, crap. (IIRC, DC had the idiotic idea that Superman/Action would be one of their tryout books for new artists/writers. :rolleyes: Normally, tryout books are the low sellers: I recall one success story with a British writer who’d gained a little notoriety for his revamp of a Captain Marvel ripoff in Britian who got to try his hand at the failing book Swamp Thing. And within about 12 issues made it DC’s um…third? best seller, behind Teen Titans and Legion. )
But mid-to-late '60s (the Virus X story, bunches of good Legion crossovers, introduction of many new villians (Parasite and Terra-Man to name two) and say…'75 through '81 or so were damned good, if not spectacular, runs.
One other point of disagreement: Ma and Pa Kent’s deaths were as crucial to Superman mythology as the whole “and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter” thing. There was reader identification in the mild, slightly nerdy exterior, Superman underneath dichotomy that’s completely lacking in Byrne’s “Clark Kent, yuppie jerk” verison. Ma and Pa Kent’s deaths showed that there are things even Superman can’t do. It showed his limits. I like Ma and Pa Kent, but at the same time, I think their presense undermines an essential part of Superman’s character.
You like Terra-Man? That’s it, there’s no hope for you.
I do think that post-Byrne there is less of a need to show Superman’s failings which is what you like about knocking off the Kents. When every so often a sufficiently powerful jerk can come along and make Superman work for his money then the need to emphasize his downside is lessoned.
