on Superman
Dec. 30th, 2007 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thehefnerI firmly believe Superman is the single greatest superhero, comic character, and American icon, but even some of those who agree with me still think he's a shitty character.
Drives me bonkers, but I frequently hear from some fanboy or comic pundit how Superman is a boring, lame, whitebread, goody-goody boy scout with too many powers and too few flaws to seem relatable or interesting. I've heard it said outright, on a dozen occasions at least, that Superman is, put simply, a bad character.
Now, I think Superman is one of the single hardest characters in modern superhero storytelling to write well. Detractors would likely say those aforementioned disparagements are the reasons why that is, whereas I think Superman gets a bad rap because he's been victim to far too many crap writers. Or sometimes, even good writers who just fail to "get" the seemingly-simple character and his world.
But something very odd hit me recently. Some of the very best modern Superman stories were written by the Brittish/Scottish cadre of comic writers. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are obvious and prolific writers, but also the more cynical and bitterly anti-superhero Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis, and even Mark Millar, 95% of whose work is overblown shock-value crap turning great characters into cheap caricatures.
These writers, cynical at best and crushed-idealist-misanthropic at worst, time and again treat the ultimate idealist and symbol of superheroism (and idealistic Americana) with respect, even--on occasion--reverence. It's amazing.
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nymphgalatea offered some insight as to why this may be:
My background is Scottish/Irish so I think I understand a little of why Morrison, Millar and Ennis in paticular write such wonderful Superman stories.
It's hard to put into words, but I think it's precisely because we see America from the outside. It's because when we're very young we're told many of our relatives in the 1920's went to America "for a better life". We get fed images of the perfect America in cartoons and films. (Until more recently than I care to admit, I thought everyone in the US lived in houses like those in Desperate Housewives.)
I don't think people in the US can understand just how *mythical* their country appears to a wee 6 year old kid living in a rainy grey council estate near Glasgow, with a head stuffed full of images of ET and Disneyland, cowboys and Indians, gangsters and Spiderman and a Kansas farmgirl called Dorothy Gale. Terry Pratchett put it very well in a book called Good Omens. In it a young boy thinks America is where good boys and girls go when they die.
Superman is *the* American icon. Ennis, Morrison and Millar are writing Superman as the embodiment of that "better life". They've managed to keep some of that 6-year-old kid awe, despite their cynicism over everything else. They're writing Superman as how they think the leaders and heroes of that most mythical country should behave.
It's fascinating to consider, and it would certainly explain a lot. Every time I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, I am just blown away by how elegantly simple the stories are, and that's far from a bad thing. You see, there I go, using "simple" as well. "Simple" isn't even the right word I'm going for here.
Some of the very best Superman comics are the ones that look effortless, and few modern writers do it as well as Grant Morrison, who shows exactly what it is that makes Superman such an important, compelling, and enduring character.
Comic reviewer "Stones Throw" on aintitcool.com beautifully summed it up in this review, point-by-point debunking and decrying the arguments for why Superman is a "bad character."
Conceptually, Superman is probably the best super-powered character there is, but in practice he’s labored way too much in comic book purgatory. People say stuff like “he’s too powerful”. How is that a bad thing? Having unimaginable power yet still being susceptible to human emotions and desires sounds like a recipe for engaging stories to me.
Or, “he’s too much of a boy scout”. What do you folks like so much about Spider-Man? Great power and great responsibility, right? Superman’s that to the max! He’s a guy with power so great that he feels he can’t let himself be less than morally perfect – the epitome of a hero’s struggle.
And don’t even give me that “he’s too hard to empathize with” crap. Batman is hard to empathize with. Clark Kent is a guy who knows he has great power but can’t allow himself to prove it to others. No matter how many friends he has he’ll always feel slightly alone. Come on. An all-powerful alien who is at once intrinsically human but always destined to be other, come to save us but never fully join us. Someone who could rule over us but chooses to live as one of our meekest. A guy who’s simply trying to do the best he can with what he’s got.
These concepts are gold, but somehow successive writers have gotten distracted by the trappings and have failed to live up to their potential.
Morrison and Quitely know how to do it though. The main thing to remember is that as an established character, Superman is fundamentally an adult who has got it worked out, occasional doubts aside. Internal soul-searching is all but pointless in a Superman story as it’s telling us what we already know. What a writer has to do is to present outside challenges to what Superman is...
And really, with eloquence failing me at this moment, that about sums it up better than anything I could write just now. The fact that Superman can inspire that kind of writing in even a caustic obnoxious authority-hating bastard like Garth Ennis (and I say that lovingly... half the time) really just speaks to me as evidence of the character's enduring strength and influence for all that's good in humanity.
And that's why--as much as I'd love to change the minds of all those who think Superman is stupid, boring, or outdated--I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the character will endure nonetheless.
Drives me bonkers, but I frequently hear from some fanboy or comic pundit how Superman is a boring, lame, whitebread, goody-goody boy scout with too many powers and too few flaws to seem relatable or interesting. I've heard it said outright, on a dozen occasions at least, that Superman is, put simply, a bad character.
Now, I think Superman is one of the single hardest characters in modern superhero storytelling to write well. Detractors would likely say those aforementioned disparagements are the reasons why that is, whereas I think Superman gets a bad rap because he's been victim to far too many crap writers. Or sometimes, even good writers who just fail to "get" the seemingly-simple character and his world.
But something very odd hit me recently. Some of the very best modern Superman stories were written by the Brittish/Scottish cadre of comic writers. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are obvious and prolific writers, but also the more cynical and bitterly anti-superhero Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis, and even Mark Millar, 95% of whose work is overblown shock-value crap turning great characters into cheap caricatures.
These writers, cynical at best and crushed-idealist-misanthropic at worst, time and again treat the ultimate idealist and symbol of superheroism (and idealistic Americana) with respect, even--on occasion--reverence. It's amazing.
nymphgalatea offered some insight as to why this may be:My background is Scottish/Irish so I think I understand a little of why Morrison, Millar and Ennis in paticular write such wonderful Superman stories.
It's hard to put into words, but I think it's precisely because we see America from the outside. It's because when we're very young we're told many of our relatives in the 1920's went to America "for a better life". We get fed images of the perfect America in cartoons and films. (Until more recently than I care to admit, I thought everyone in the US lived in houses like those in Desperate Housewives.)
I don't think people in the US can understand just how *mythical* their country appears to a wee 6 year old kid living in a rainy grey council estate near Glasgow, with a head stuffed full of images of ET and Disneyland, cowboys and Indians, gangsters and Spiderman and a Kansas farmgirl called Dorothy Gale. Terry Pratchett put it very well in a book called Good Omens. In it a young boy thinks America is where good boys and girls go when they die.
Superman is *the* American icon. Ennis, Morrison and Millar are writing Superman as the embodiment of that "better life". They've managed to keep some of that 6-year-old kid awe, despite their cynicism over everything else. They're writing Superman as how they think the leaders and heroes of that most mythical country should behave.
It's fascinating to consider, and it would certainly explain a lot. Every time I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, I am just blown away by how elegantly simple the stories are, and that's far from a bad thing. You see, there I go, using "simple" as well. "Simple" isn't even the right word I'm going for here.
Some of the very best Superman comics are the ones that look effortless, and few modern writers do it as well as Grant Morrison, who shows exactly what it is that makes Superman such an important, compelling, and enduring character.
Comic reviewer "Stones Throw" on aintitcool.com beautifully summed it up in this review, point-by-point debunking and decrying the arguments for why Superman is a "bad character."
Conceptually, Superman is probably the best super-powered character there is, but in practice he’s labored way too much in comic book purgatory. People say stuff like “he’s too powerful”. How is that a bad thing? Having unimaginable power yet still being susceptible to human emotions and desires sounds like a recipe for engaging stories to me.
Or, “he’s too much of a boy scout”. What do you folks like so much about Spider-Man? Great power and great responsibility, right? Superman’s that to the max! He’s a guy with power so great that he feels he can’t let himself be less than morally perfect – the epitome of a hero’s struggle.
And don’t even give me that “he’s too hard to empathize with” crap. Batman is hard to empathize with. Clark Kent is a guy who knows he has great power but can’t allow himself to prove it to others. No matter how many friends he has he’ll always feel slightly alone. Come on. An all-powerful alien who is at once intrinsically human but always destined to be other, come to save us but never fully join us. Someone who could rule over us but chooses to live as one of our meekest. A guy who’s simply trying to do the best he can with what he’s got.
These concepts are gold, but somehow successive writers have gotten distracted by the trappings and have failed to live up to their potential.
Morrison and Quitely know how to do it though. The main thing to remember is that as an established character, Superman is fundamentally an adult who has got it worked out, occasional doubts aside. Internal soul-searching is all but pointless in a Superman story as it’s telling us what we already know. What a writer has to do is to present outside challenges to what Superman is...
And really, with eloquence failing me at this moment, that about sums it up better than anything I could write just now. The fact that Superman can inspire that kind of writing in even a caustic obnoxious authority-hating bastard like Garth Ennis (and I say that lovingly... half the time) really just speaks to me as evidence of the character's enduring strength and influence for all that's good in humanity.
And that's why--as much as I'd love to change the minds of all those who think Superman is stupid, boring, or outdated--I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the character will endure nonetheless.
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He's just so darned American
Date: 2007-12-31 07:03 pm (UTC)http://cc.ysu.edu/~satingle/gary_engle.htm
Re: He's just so darned American
Date: 2007-12-31 07:14 pm (UTC)Haven't finished it yet, but I will. What class?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:24 pm (UTC)Similarly, though the writers can't write dialogue for shit, the failure of Clark and Lana is another interesting line for a story.
It's all very Aristotelean: drama exists when somebody has to make choices. The fact that even an overpowered superhero still has to make hard choices is potentially fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:26 pm (UTC)It could be pretty grim for weeks at a time, without being gritty. (There's nothing wrong with "gritty", only that it's not the only way to be grim.)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:34 pm (UTC)Still, I wouldn't want those to be all the Superman stories. We still need the beautiful fun of the classic Silver Age mentality of the ALL-STAR line. But I'd love to see both kinds out there; a morally gray story of struggle one day, a visit to Bizarro World the next.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:30 pm (UTC)Heh, but you're watching SMALLVILLE? Did we talk about this? It's so odd. It's not a great show by any stretch of the imagination, in my opinion, but the main reasons I watched it for as long as I did were the Luthors.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:39 pm (UTC)Season 4 sucked so hard I nearly quit, but I wanted to see James Marsters in Season 5. Without Jonathan Kent I'm not sure I'll go on to season 6, unless something particularly spiffy happens (which I'm just not anticipating).
You know how I feel about "bad boys", but this time the bad guys really ARE vastly more interesting than the good guys. That's partly the strength of the performances (and the weaknesses of the leads), but it's partly because the writing. Which is odd, because their writers tend to be weak, but the way in which they've been forced to take the Fall of Lex Luthor very, very slowly has been fascinating.
(Unlike the on/off relationship of Clark and Lana, which is just excruciating, and made tolerable only by MST3K-like comments about how deeply closeted Clark is.)
The fact that Lex genuinely wants to be a good person is one of the most interesting ideas in television I've seen in a while.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 07:58 pm (UTC)I do hope they somehow plausibly take Lex's fall all the way to finally becoming the brilliant richly complex and thoroughly hardcore villain he is at best, whose motives are hardly as simple as "I want power" or "I hate Superman." If they can pull it off, ending SMALLVILLE by having Lex finally having become Lex Luthor, I'll be overjoyed. Clancy Brown's vocal performance really was magnificent and is still the best version, in my opinion.
Which reminds me, there's an episode of JUSTICE LEAGUE where the Flash and Lex Luthor accidentally get their brains switched. The thing is, Flash is voiced by Michael Rosenbaum, SMALLVILLE's Lex! What you get is Clancy Brown and Michael Rosenbaum doing impersonations of each other, and the result is hilarity.
By the way, they just did a new animated Superman movie, with James Marsters voicing Lex. It's not that great, and it was very much the one-note boring eeeeevil Lex Luthor, but Marsters wasn't bad (although he's no Clancy Brown).
no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-31 10:17 pm (UTC)Yeah, Miller's DKR Superman occurred to me as I was writing this. It certainly does reflect how many people view the character to this day, and it frustrates me as well. With each passing year, the less I care for DKR as a whole and the more I prefer Year One.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-01 05:04 am (UTC)You should watch these videos. They are in the same vein as the "I'm a Marvel, I'm a DC" videos but it's an ongoing story and becomes a big love letter to Superman for being the symbol of hope and idealism. It's quite lengthy combined but very well written and even has decent voice acting.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-01 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-02 05:50 am (UTC)