The Big Red S

As a geek of note, people are always asking me my opinion on matters of geek lore. Of course when I say ask, I mean that I force my geeky knowledge upon them when they least expect it, like when they read my blog.

You're stuck now. Now you have to listen to me rant about Superman.

With a fresh new Superman movie on the reels, everyone is talking about The Big Red S himself, the man of steel, and generally talking up the superhero of all superheroes. That's what Superman is, right? He's not just a superman, he is the superman from whenst all other supermen are derived. Too bad he sucks. That's right, Superman sucks.

S for Suck.

Here's my beef. Superman's powers all come down to the fact that he is essentially an indestructible, unstoppable, god among men. Nobody can even come close to harming him, and he is without personal fault; he is an unflinching goody good that has never had an impure thought in his life. Justice is his passion and his porn. Superman is just plain perfect. Where's the fun in that?

What can harm Superman? Nothing.
What can Superman do? Anything.
When will Superman right every wrong in the world? Before lunch.

This is a great character when we need a Superman to fight the ills of the world, but after he single-handedly won World War II and defeated the KKK there was just nothing more for Superman to do. He successfully made the world peaceful, so what now?

Well, it turns out comic book writers are pretty lazy. The answer that they came up with was kryptonite. As the name subtly suggests, it cripples Superman and makes him virtualy catatonic. God one minute, slug the next. This gives us hundreds of story options, so long as they all end with Superman gritting his teeth and fighting off the kryptonite's effects or having someone come along to move the glowing green rock that's causing him so much difficulty. This carried the Superman franchise for another 20 years or so, but eventually they needed to fabricate some nemesis or nemises for Superman.

Here's what we got:
Doomsday - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Darkseid - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Imperitex - Super evil and hellbent on destroying everything.
Gog - Super evil but hellbent on destroying only Superman.
Lex Luthor - Evil and hellbent on destroying Superman, and even though Superman could kill him on any day of the week, knows where he lives, is on a first-name basis with him, and knows for a fact that Lex Luthor is trying to kill him, he has let Mr. Luthor try to kill him for almost eighty years.
Brainiac - Likes to shrink cities.

As you can see, we have been given a stunning variety of character depth in Superman's opponents. No, just kidding, they're all pure malevolent evil without a redeeming quality. They also have some extremely poor back-stories. Example: Gog. A bunch of gods get together and say "hey, lets give this psychopath unlimited powers!" This is not the level of foresight that I would hope omnipotent beings posess. The further downside is that since you can only do so many takes on the "I want to kill everything" character before it becomes played out (example: Imperitex), they keep killing and reviving these guys at an alarming rate. Example: Doomsday. Just read his bio. The number of times he has been killed is both confusing and sad.

So, while some of my geeky brethren may delight in the return and re-coolification of Superman, I'm going to give it a miss. The Spiderman and X-Men franchises are already doing more with the superhero genre than Superman could ever do. While Superman is a virtual God, Spiderman is stuck with only the amount of power that can be reasonably derived from a radioactive spider; there's all sorts of situations that are challenging for Spiderman beyond glowing green rocks. While Clark Kent is one chiseled hunk of man that could be living the American Dream if he wasn't so uptight, Peter Parker is, frankly, a loser. Peter Parker's life sucks and will likely continue to suck. The general public adores Superman and he adopts a secret identity to avoid fan-mail. Spiderman is hated by half the city, so his superhero life is only marginally less crappy than his real one. Superman gets up in the morning, admires his award-winning abs in the mirror, has breakfast donated to him by a grateful philanthropist, puts in a hard day's work just so that he doesn't forget what it's like to be a commoner, saves the world for an afternoon, has martinis in the evening with hot hot Lois Lane, and finally goes to bed thinking about how awesome tomorrow will be providing Doomsday doesn't come back and kill him again. Spiderman gets up, looks around his crappy appartment and remembers he's still a skinny dork, barely has enough cash to buy breakfast, works all day just to make rent, then spends the evening saving people that may or may not hate him because having 50% of the population spit on you is an improvment in the life of Peter Parker. You tell me which of these scenarios has the greater opportunity for dramatic conflict.

I should also mention the X-Men. They don't have the luxury of secret identities, when they do assist the general population they're assisting a population that hates and fears them, and most of the time they're just trying to avoid being rounded up into concentration camps. They can also only do one thing each, and have a whole host of mortal weaknesses. There is a ton of room for story development there. Watch X-Men 3 sometime. They actually manage to put meaningful philosophica questions into a movie that actually contains the line, "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch."