“Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound”. Superman, Kal-El from Krypton, Clark Kent from Kansas had to have been created by teenagers. X-Ray vision, extraordinary hearing abilities, a look that can heat things to a red-hot state, a breath than can freeze them – who else but a teenager would have come up with all that (especially the first)?
Sure enough, it was awkward teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who created Superman, initially as a strip that didn’t work, in the 1930s. The first comic book featuring him appeared in 1938, eighty years ago.
Superman wasn’t the first mainstream superhero character. There were several before him, including Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter, an Earthman whose human abilities become superhuman on Mars (much like Kal-El’s Kryptonian abilities made him Superman on Earth). But he soon became the biggest, triggering what became the Golden Age of Comics, and the most popular.
Superman’s success engendered a rash of superheroes. Batman (billionaire Bruce Wayne) made his debut in 1939; Captain Marvel (Billy Batson) in 1940; Black Widow (Claire Voyant), the same year; Wonder Woman (Diana Prince) in 1941; and Captain America (Steve Rogers), also in 1941. But Superman was (and is) different from all other superheroes, and this difference has shaped his treatment at the hands of some fine writers — Mark Waid, John Byrne, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Frank Miller, and, of course, the great Alan Moore (everyone should read his miniseries, Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?).
The difference is simply this: Bruce Wayne dons a costume to become a superhero, Batman; Superman dons a costume to become a man, Clark Kent. Their costumes make other superheroes extraordinary. His, makes Superman, ordinary (which is exactly what he wants to be). As Neil Gaiman and Adam Rogers wrote in an essay on Superman in Wired magazine: “For Superman, it’s mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent that’s the disguise – the thing he aspires to, the thing he can never be”. That thing is to be human.
Kal-El’s alien-ness is the source of his superpowers, which, in turn, help him save his girlfriend Lois Lane; his city, Metropolis; his adopted country, the United States; and the world. These powers help him battle villains although he is usually tackling disasters, manmade and natural; in the first Richard Donner / Christopher Reeve Superman movie, he is powerful enough to move back time by rotating the Earth in the opposite direction (so that he has enough time to save Lane). In a parallel fictional universe, many of Kal-El’s interventions would violate Starfleet General Order 1 (aka the Prime Directive) that prohibits Starfleet officers from interfering with or intervening in the natural order of things in other worlds, although it is usually this very interference that saves the day.
Superman is clean-cut, blue-eyed, and more all-American boy in appearance than most American boys; he respects authority, follows the rules, is the quintessential establishment man (some writers have tried to give the character negative traits, although this has rarely worked).
He is, despite his alien abilities, perhaps not as intelligent as Batman – one reason why Frank Miller makes him a tool of the establishment who tries to take down Batman in The Dark Knight Returns.
Both Superman’s goodness (linear, I-shall-not-stray-from-the-path goodness), and Clark Kent’s desire to be human are driven by two things. The first is the fact that Kal-El was sent to Earth from a dying Krypton as a baby, preventing him from evolving as a Kryptonian and acquiring Kryptonian values. As anyone familiar with the Superman canon will know, Kryptonians were clannish, highly evolved in terms of scientific development, hierarchical (they even kept slaves), and usually cold. Indeed, to draw an analogy from the same parallel fictional universe referred to earlier, if Kal-El had grown up on Krypton, he may have very well become like Mr Spock.
The second is young Kal-El’s upbringing as Clark Kent, the son of Smallville, Kansas, couple Jonathan and Martha Kent (an early Superman TV series referred to them as Eben and Sarah). They should have been named George and Martha – like the Wilsons in Dennis the Menace were, and for the same reason. It is Martha and Jonathan, a racecar-driver-turned farmer, who shape young Clark’s worldview and values – and even Zack Snyder couldn’t endow him with the shades of grey that make for a truly great superhero.
It is the very absence of this, though, that perhaps explains Superman’s appeal. Most people like their heroes white (and their villains, black). They also believe that super-abilities (or excellence) in one field translate into super-abilities or excellence in all fields. All too often, this doesn’t end well for anyone: it proves the undoing of heroes, and leaves people disappointed in them. Yet, this happens all the time, and is probably happening around us this very instant (that’s right, comic books can explain contemporary political history).
Superman’s quest to be a man is ironic because it has always been man’s quest to be superman. And Everyman’s quest for extraordinariness is every bit as difficult as Superman’s for ordinariness.
First Published: Dec 15, 2018 20:29 IST
