Heroes, Super and Otherwise

I've been busy. Here are some interesting articles about Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America.

From Polygon, by Tara Marie: Would Superman Punch a Nazi? 

The simple answer is yeah, Superman would punch a Nazi, and so would almost all of the creators of our favorite comic characters, most especially Jack “the King” Kirby. Despite this being a somewhat common sense answer, it’s caused a lot of contention.

By Eric Weiss: The DCEU Has a Problem--Everybody Likes Wonder Woman

Most of that trickles down from director Zack Snyder, the primary architect of the DCEU. In his two Superman outings, Snyder struggles with the idea of basic human decency. In fact, it seems to be utterly mystifying to him. Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent spent most of his screen time in Man of Steel trying to convince Clark not to be Superman, to the point that he was willing to die so his son wouldn’t have to be a hero. He lets himself get picked up in a tornado instead of letting actual Superman carry him to safety, based only on the assumption that there would be witnesses and that Clark would then become a public figure.

 I've been interested lately in the scope of Superman references out there. Here are a few that caught my attention.

First, Forbes, which decided five years ago to cover Superman's day job. Deborah Burns uses the comic book version of Superman as a springboard to discuss ways to quit your job in the most graceful manner and how to write for a blog:

But this will be a huge transition — even for a superhero. He will need to find health insurance and learn how to make money without a job. Not having a steady paycheck, he may also need to be more frugal.

 Second, a woman who married Superman: 

So obviously, Superman is not really Superman.  {What?  You thought that picture above was the real deal? :) I dug that out of Superman's files from his college graduation like six or seven years ago. I think he used it for his grad announcement.}  But he is my Superman and I absolutely love him with all my heart.  I considered never showing a picture of him to keep it all mysterious {you know, like that neighbor guy whose face you never see in Home Improvement?} but I thought better of it.  Superman is such a huge part of my life, how could I not show him?  He's an awesome husband and father and he's my favorite and best friend. 

Finally, a runner who is called the Autism Superman.

This is all pretty great.

Links

Nicknames

I've been staying away from the topic of nicknames lately. There are far too many, and they largely aren't interesting or worthy of comment. But two of them strike me as worth posting:

The Superman of volunteerism, Justin Brownlee.

And a commentary on Dwight Howard and Shaquille O'Neill, both called Superman, I suppose. Though I hadn't heard Shaq called that (he does have the tattoo). The writer thinks Howard should wait to take on the mantle until Shaq retires.

In Other Links

Here's an article that calls the Siegel house "A Shrine to Superman."

If I ever compete in mixed martial arts, I'll know how to perform the Superman punch.

Stuff and whatnot

A more and more prominent issue in the study of folklore is creator's rights and copyright. This is paralleled by its prominence in the world of comics. It's particularly relevant where Superman is concerned. The creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sold the rights long ago. There has been a great deal of legal conflict over this, as Siegel himself felt cheated. His (and Shuster's heirs) have continued the fight. I don't feel the need to go into the history of this conflict here, nor am I qualified to comment on the technicalities of copyright.

That said, I side with creators.

There has been a new ruling that seems to favor Warner Brothers and DC Comics, who own the copyright at the moment. The only really interesting piece of news here (to me) is the fact that the heirs will gain all rights to the character in 2013. If I were them, I'd have a giant clock counting down the seconds, like the Chinese used to have in Beijing, right by Tiananmen Square, to count down the time until Hong Kong was once more part of China. That thing was huge.

I found this article on Smallville. I don't have much to say about the writer's opinions, other than I'm not a fan of the show. He makes some interesting comments about "canon" and "straying too far", but the one thing I have to get down in writing is that Smallville's creators didn't come up with the notion that Superman and Luthor were friends as kids. That was Jerry Siegel. He wrote a story in 1960 called "How Luthor Met Superboy" where the true reason behind Luthor's hatred of Superman became known. Superboy made Luthor lose all his hair. I'm not even kidding about that. See this article. This phenomenon of thinking the first time YOU encounter something is the first time it happened is pretty common, I think. I've certainly fallen victim to it a number of times. On TV Tropes they call it "Older Than They Think." TV Tropes is one of my favorite websites. I could read that thing all day long.

In other international news...

The new Prime Minister of Bulgaria is referred to as Superman.

So is Michael Jackson.

A bit of this, a bit of that.

I suppose that the recent passing of David Carradine makes his speech in Kill Bill a sensible link at the moment. It is a good speech, so good that it was more or less written in 1968 by Jules Pfeiffer in The Great Comic Book Heroes, reissued by Fantagraphics Press not too long ago. Tarrantino often borrows liberally from other movies (so much that it's even commented on in other movies--Swingers, for example [Swingers...haven't thought about that movie in a while]), which makes me wonder if he's read Pfeiffer's book.

I'm not sure what to make of the St. Cloud Superman. Evidently he's all about free speech.

Again with Flickr. The makeup artist says it's inspired by Superman. Red, yellow, blue. Are there flickr people out there who come up with new make up designs (is that the right word) and post them regularly? Interesting. (sorry, the picture won't post.)

This review of Irredeemable is as good a reason as any to bring up the Superman pastiche. It's pretty common in comics to have a character who's not Superman, but is really Superman in all the important ways. This way creators can tell Superman stories that couldn't otherwise be told. It's akin to the Imaginary Stories, which I think have given way to Elseworlds (if those are still around, my comics information isn't the most current), which is similar to the Earth 2 stuff from a while back. In this version, the Plutonian is more or less an evil Superman. I think. Haven't read it yet, but I intend to. It's written by Mark Waid, who claims to be the only person on the planet to have read, watched, or listened to every Superman story ever told (in Superheroes and Philosophy).

Speaking of which, here's a blog entry Waid wrote earlier this year, which cover one of the reasons why he loves the character so much. Here's a passage:

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t real. What mattered was that he cared about everyone in the world, without exception, without judgment.
Everyone.

Waid has become one of the superstar writers in comics, and he's moved from a regular gig writing for DC comics, where he got to retell Superman's origin in a series called Birthright, to Boom! Studios, where he's now the editor in chief.

I’d walked into that theater with a very short future ahead of me, and I’d walked out feeling safe and inspired in Superman’s orbit. Without that, I can promise you I would not be here today.

That's a good note on which to end. Well, not as good as this:

Imagination

I'm trying to figure out exactly what to do with the fact that kids pretend to be Superman. A big part of me is already dealing with the concept of ostension, which is enacting a behavior that you read about or hear about (such as a kid playing russian roulette because he read about it in a comic book--see The Ten Cent Plague). There was, after all, a rumor that George Reeves killed himself because he felt guilty when all sorts of kids hurt themselves pretending they could fly.

So kids pretend to be superheroes. Scholars study this. Advice sites tell you how to deal with it. Frederic Wertham condemns it and the art form that prompted it. But what does it all mean? I'll get back to you on that.

More Nicknames...

Finally a baseball superman. Shannon Wilkerson of Augusta State.

Soccer. Derby's Superman, Oscar Machapa. The article doesn't refer to him as that except in the headline.

Boxing. Edwin Valero. He's from venezuela.

Mixed Martial Arts. Anthony Manacio. He's got superman tattoos, too.

Lacrosse. Ryan Fioretti. he's a goal keeper.

This one's not in reference to a specific person's nickname, but refers to the fact that superman is a character type. It's in reference to some Dodgers players realizing that they're not going to be "superman." Someone who plays even when they're not feeling up to it. So, you know, it's still sports.

Enough of that. Tattoos

This is funny:

Then there's Turk--Donald Faison of Scrubs. According to some, he's going to remove his superman tattoo.

From an interview in American Way:

I was 18. I wanted to get a tattoo. Superman was the coolest. He could solve every problem. He was the man of steel. I wanted to do it. My right arm is my strong arm, so I thought if I put the tattoo on that arm, it’d make me stronger. Didn’t really do anything for me. I’m just permanently marked with another man’s insignia. You live and learn.

And then there's this one:

More Nicknames

Stephen Ireland, who plays soccer for Manchester City FC, is known as Superman.



Glenn Beck calls himself Superman. I don't think it's a nickname is you apply it to yourself. Probably won't stick.



New Zealand Chief's rugby player Dwayne Sweeney became Superman quite recently, if I'm reading the article correctly.



Li Ka-Shing's son, Richard Li, is apparently being called Little Superman, mostly because his father is called Superman. It's all about business acumen.



Here, a high school soccer team is like Superman because they play well when the sun shines.



Then there's Nolan Belcher. I'm beginning to wonder if all of these Supermans are speculative, like this one, or if there's more to it.



Maya Moore plays basketball for UConn, and is called Superman in this article. Evidently, she juggles, too.



This one's all about golf, not specific to any golfer:



The fashion experts can say what they like about the Green Jacket but it has transformative powers, like Superman's cape or a bite from a radioactive spider. Slip one over the shoulders of a golfer and it turns a man into a boy, a jaded professional into a joyful ingénue. The eyes widen, the arm hairs bristle and the spirit soars.



So the cape turns Clark Kent into a boy, a joyful ingenue. Interesting.



I can only describe this as an article confirming that technological progress will either transform us all into Superpeople, or will render Superman unnecessary. Here's a relevant passage:



This is the first of the lessons I have for new smartphone owners: You will drop your phone. You cannot reverse time by flying around the globe. Your phone will be OK. So don't baby it. You bought it to be used, not put in a display case in your living room.



The article itself opens with two paragraphs about the author imagining flying around the globe in reverse--as Superman did in the 1978 movie--so as to reverse time and prevent the accidental fall of a cellphone.



I suppose that the DC Comictitian is going to come up sooner or later. Might as well be now.



Everybody else is linking to this video on YouTube, so I will, too.



And I know that you can see my underwear

And you can joke about it all you want, I really don't care.



Finally. I suppose I should post a picture of Action Comics #1. In the beginning...

A central focus of my book is the morality at the heart of Superman. The jokes about him lead me there, as do the conversations I've had about the character. So I'm glad to see essays like this one, at FaceTheReckoning.com. It's a response the idea that Superman's morality would be shaped by his powers, that he would inevitably give in to the temptation to use them for his own selfish ends and because he doesn't, he's not an interesting character. The response is well articulated.


The list of people given the nickname Superman grows every day. Here's Shane McConkey, extreme skiier. Then there's Dr. Gahl, about whom I know nothing other than that he's associated with the fight against Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome.


The title for the Dr. Gahl post refers to him as "our Superman." I recently read that superheroes are not so much gods in the sense of a lot of gods whose nature gives them provenance over some force of nature or human institution (i.e., Zeus was god of justice and lightning; Athena was god of wisdom in battle and weaving), but rather superheroes are tutelary deities who protect specific cities. It's not entirely true, but super heroes are first and foremost associated with cities, especiallly Superman. Superman is also associated, with varying degrees of agreement, with "the American way," which makes him a patriotic figure more so than pretty much any other super hero. The iconography supports the argument.


What I'm getting at here is the "god's on our side" attitude. It crops up in sports, in war, and probably in lots of other places. Several religious people have written books on Superman, mostly to point out the parallels with Christ and show us the way, so to speak. John T. Galloway, Jr. wrote perhaps the earliest one of these, The Gospel According to Superman. More recent books attempt to demonstrate that Superman is Christ-like, and that this is a good thing. Galloway goes in the opposite direction, labeling Superman a false god and saying that the best response to his story is to compare it unfavorably to the gospels. In particular, he notes that Superman is "on our side," which he criticizes because of his belief that god is on everyone's side. I've simplified his argument perhaps too much, but I hope the point is clear.

If there's "our Superman" there can be one for other people, too. All of which is sort of beside the point. I think the post I've been discussing labels Dr. Gahl as Superman because of his tireless efforts attempting to find a cure for the disease in question. So "our" here isn't a form of patriotism, and in fact includes everyone. I don't even necessarily agree with Galloway. Just writing and writing and writing. Here's a patriotic picture:







Interestingly, the image came up on a website devoted to stem cell research, something Christopher Reeve advocated, if I recall correctly, because it could lead to advancements in treatment for the injuries he sustained. There was an episode of South Park about this, which pitted Reeve against Gene HackMan. Funny stuff.





Then there's this: