Action Comics 836: Sigh.
Yeah, okay. I think I finally get it now, thank you. The Pre-Crisis Superman was a stupid character, and he’s never coming back. “An imaginary story… about a perfect man who came from the stars and did only good.” And this was a stupid idea, because nobody is *really * perfect; nobody ever really does only good. So, yes, in hindsight, all those decades of stories where Superman just went ahead and did the right thing every time were laughably naive and idiotic. Sometimes the writers of those stories would even play around with the idea just a bit, by setting up a situation where Superman seemed to be doing wrong, like robbing banks while wearing Napoleon’s hat or something equally goofy, and everybody else in the comic would be like, “Great Caesar’s ghost! Has Superman turned Super-criminal?” But of course, in the end it always turned out to be some sort of elaborate plot to fool some real criminals; Superman wouldn’t ever *really * turn evil. And this was a patently ridiculous premise, because in the real world power corrupts, and people are fallible. A character with no serious flaws makes for boring storytelling, unless you’re writing for an audience of five-year olds.
So the current crossover storyline boils down to a duel between the Post-Crisis Superman–he of the modernized sensibilities-- fallible, conflicted, but who’s still idealistic enough to only kill powerless criminals very rarely-- and a turgid, self-righteous, entirely inauthentic caricature of the Pre-Crisis Earth-2 Superman. I admit that they totally faked me out at first, with the first couple issues of Infinite Crisis; I was genuinely interested to see how the writers would address the Golden Age Superman’s take on the current DC continuity. But it seems fairly obvious now that this “Kal-L” has as much to do with the original Earth-2 Superman as Roland Emmerlich’s 1998 movie had to do with Godzilla, or Verhoeven’s **Starship Troopers ** movie had to do with Heinlein’s novel.
[spoiler]“This is how we DEAL with monsters. We do not debate their rights. We don’t consider their rehabilitation. We STOP their reign of terror, DECISIVELY, without compromise.”
Yeah, that sounds like something Superman would think. That sounds like the moral code of a guy who went out of his way to repeatedly defeat and re-incarcerate a megalomaniacal supervillain with a large, bald, shiny, temptingly heat-vision-transparent head, year after year. Way to capture the essence of the character, there. Yep, given a choice, it’s entirely plausible that Earth-2 Superman would prefer to ally with Guy Gardner and the faux-Authority guys, because he was such a consistently reactionary asshole in his time, wasn’t he? [/spoiler]
I’d been curious about this crossover, interested to see how it would play out. I’d been holding out some hope that the whole “take over the universe” plotline would turn out to be some sort of red herring on Earth-2 Superman’s part, a kind of “Superman fools everyone into thinking he’s crazy by robbing banks while wearing funny hats” gambit writ cosmic. But it seems this is not to be the case, and suddenly I find that I’m not all that interested in following the current storyline anymore. I guess I’d just been hoping to see Superman back in top form again. But, yeah, I reckon I get the message at last. He’s never coming back.
