Sunshine Superman

This is a picture of Barack Obama, striking a pose in front of the Superman statue in Metropolis, Illinois. Superman has become visual shorthand for an ideal. Poor Barack. He looks kind of slim compared to the chiseled, buff Superman.

Superman has been around about 70 years, growing from the lithe concept thought up by a couple of Cleveland, Ohio, boys named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, into the gargantuan and grotesquely muscled character of today.Closer to the lithe concept is the movie version. My wife and I saw the Superman movie on its first run in 1978 which introduced then unknown actor Christopher Reeve, who looked good, but had no big, bulging muscles. Ditto the actor in the 2006 Superman Returns.

Superman is so familiar and iconic he can appear in this Sunday funny, "The Flying McCoys," with no need to explain the joke to anyone.I read the Superman comics from about 1957 until 1960 or '61. This past Christmas I got the book, Showcase Presents Superman which reprints many of those same issues I read as a youngster. Occasionally I pick up the book and read a story and I may remember it, but now I'm reading it from an adult viewpoint instead of that of a kid. I'm sure it was deliberate for the publisher to put out the book with those issues from those years, because those were the years the baby boomers were reading them.

Even though I read the stories as a kid who was not as discriminating as I am as an adult, I remember thinking how screwy some of them were. The motivations escaped me. I couldn't figure out why Superman needed a secret identity. Just be Superman all the time, screw the Clark Kent schtick. Superman/Clark were a real pair, like a split personality, creating a two-person lover's triangle. Lois loved Superman, Clark loved Lois.* Boy, talk about turning a guy--even a super guy--into a head case. I know the Clark character created more story possibilities, but c'mon. Superman didn't really need Clark, and that always bothered me.

When I was a kid I became aware that we can recognize people by the sound of their voice, the sight of their teeth or the color of their hair. In other words, we recognize people not only by the obvious, but by the very subtle. It just always struck me that unless the people around Superman were totally blind and/or stupid, there wasn't a way they couldn't know Superman was Clark.

Another thing that bothered me were the endless powers: flight, strength--strong enough to move planets!--x-ray vision, heat vision, telescopic vision, super ventriloquism, super hearing. Every time the writer needed a gimmick out came a new power. One of the rules of fiction is that you've got to have conflict, so you put your character in danger to see how he reacts. Superman couldn't be put in danger. He could bounce bullets off his chest . He could literally do anything. The only thing that bothered him was kryptonite, which was a rock from his home planet. Kryptonite must've fallen to earth by the ton, because a lot of the stories in the reprint book used it as a plot device. They had written themselves into a corner because they made Superman too powerful. The endless supply of kryptonite as a plot device was yet another thing to bug me.

Since this blog is Paranoia Strikes Deep, here's some paranoia: How could any government on the face of the earth react to a real life Superman? If there were such a person the people looking to get rid of him wouldn't be the crooks, it'd be governments (some say we're still talking crooks) who couldn't stand the thought of him able to breech any kind of national security at will. There'd be no way to stop him unless they built kryptonite filing cabinets to hold all of the national security files. I think any government would be extremely nervous having a Superman flying around.

There were just so many things like those examples that I couldn't fathom about the character that at a young age I dropped Superman from my reading list. Re-reading the gimmicky stories in this volume made me remember why the stories always struck me as so untrue. I guess the writers, artists and editors thought if you could accept a guy in a blue and red circus costume flying and lifting buildings, and that even those closest to him didn't know he was living a double life, then you'd accept the implausibility of his secret identity .

They were wrong. The Superman I read about in the comics, and the one I wanted to read were two different characters.

*******

Lois' fantasy.

*Lois was kind of a nightmare figure for a boy. She was always after Superman, conniving, scheming, trying to trick him into marrying her. It was a view of women held by the writers and editors, and then handed down to the young and impressionable readers. There was no sex, quite the opposite. Lois was so non-sexual you have to wonder what attracted Superman to her. I mean, why have hamburger when you can have steak? Superman could have had any babe he wanted. Lois was a pest, a plot device, the damsel in distress to be rescued by Superman over and over. There were probably times when he thought, "If I have to fly to a volcano one more time to save Lois, I swear I'll pretend I don't see her and let her fall in."

Superman's fantasy.

But the ideal is what it is, and Superman would never do that.