davidmann95:

Unsurprisingly, I’ve touched on a lot of the basic aspects of it before, so for a couple parts of this I’ll keep it restrained (speaking entirely relatively), but given I think about Superman more than most people think about their best friends, I feel qualified to state that yes: Superman is great. As I said with Batman, the reasons why on a mass cultural basis are much broader than ‘he’s a really well-written character’ – hell, too often that isn’t even the case, even if plenty *have* stepped up over the years – so I’ll start with the lizard hindbrain stuff and work my way down to the finer details.

Superman has iconic power by default

What it really comes down to, at least in terms of keeping him afloat in the public eye when actual public opinion on him has been shot completely to hell over the last couple decades, is that Superman is a Big Deal. He’s the founder of his own genre: literally every surface-level aspect of his mythology is shorthand for the concept he created as well as for plenty beyond superheroes, from the suit (trunks included) to Lois Lane to Lex Luthor to Clark Kent to flying to Kryptonite to Bizarro and Brainiac to super-pets and x-ray vision. A red cape fluttering in the breeze is itself an evocative image entirely sans context, because people know that means him, by which it really means all superheroes. That means he takes the hits of getting all the complaints other characters duck even as others write thinkpieces on his place in culture and how he represents everything from America to Jesus to conservative values to the immigrant experience, all from people who may well have never picked up a comic or watched a cartoon of his in their lives. Even when most people don’t know much about him as a character, he as a symbolic figure is too massive to not grapple with one way or another, even via shorthand such as ‘he’s dumb’ or ‘he stands for us at our best’; while many of his recent woes can be traced back to people telling stories solely about or defined by that iconography, it still has power. Kids on the other side of the world from wherever you’re sitting right now know he can leap a tall building in a single bound. There’s maybe two or three other fictional characters in the world with that level of exposure and impact, and the unconscious emotional connection that comes baked right into it.

Superman is a protector

When kids talk about loving him because he can do anything, and adults talk about how he brings back those memories of joy and comfort, I think this is what it really comes down to a lot of the time. Superman’s the one who looks out for us, the guy who cares about you. Yeah, there’s gotta be the odd story about how NOT EVEN SUPERMAN CAN SAVE EVERYONE! to keep him honest, but by and large, yes he can. He wears a fun flashy uniform and he can wrap you up in his cape and fly you away from whatever bad’s happening, and even if something can catch up, no bullet or bomb in the world is going to get through him to you, or even hurt him enough to at least be scary. Nothing’s so hard or so big or so scary he can’t help, not really; he naps on clouds and swims in the sun. He’s polite, and never aggressive towards the innocent (not even that often towards the guilty), and he doesn’t talk down to people even though he’s stronger and knows better. He’s as confident as a cool big brother, as supportive and sturdy as a good dad, as vaguely ethereal and perfectly impossible as Santa Claus. It’s not an act, it’s not impersonal – he wants you to be okay, he cares about you and he’ll do whatever he can to make sure you’ll be alright. When that’s done just right? That kind of unreserved, unconditional, powerful demonstration of kindness making a difference, even from a cartoon alien, can knock a lot of typically steely emotional walls down like balsa wood, especially when that can save the day just as much as quick wits or a fist, the way anyone here could too in the right circumstances when they try their best.

Superman is a romantic figure

Something overlooked or deliberately sidelined by many is that a huge, huge part of Superman’s appeal in lots of circles is that he can be a romantic ideal rather than (or as well as) a protective one. He’s a sweet, funny, confident, smart guy who’s built like Adonis and doesn’t think he’s better than everybody else even though he’s literally the best. He holds down a socially valuable job he’s successful and happy at, he’s gentle and considerate, and he’s entirely comfortable being second in his household to a commanding career woman who he’s instinctively protective of, but also willing to back off of when she feels smothered because he acknowledges her independence. He can fly her to the moon, he never lets her forget how happy he is that when he was left lost and alone on the other side of the universe he fell to the one place he could find her, and he wears tights. The comics may forget that, but Lois & Clark knew it. Smallville sure as hell knew it. So have the last couple movies, and Supergirl. Even Christopher Reeve, America’s Dad, got it on with Margot Kidder in that weird shiny Fortress hammock. You wanna talk about the aspects of Superman that go for…ahem…primal instincts, that he’s the member of the Justice League historically most likely to go shirtless* is worth bringing up. 

* Aside from maybe Batman, who’s usually beat to hell and too miserable to leverage any of that playboy charm, and Aquaman, who’s Aquaman.

Superman is an easy power fantasy

Obviously, superheroes are often power fantasies in general; they do stuff we can’t do but wish we could. And Superman’s near the top of that list not just because he’s iconic, and not even because of the scope of his power – Green Lantern and Thor are comparable in terms of raw ability, GL even has an honest-to-goodness wishing ring, but they don’t measure up in that regard. What is is, I think, is that Superman’s powers are rooted in physicality, and therefore easy to imagine yourself doing. Everything most people can do, he does best, from lifting to running to looking to hearing to punching. Even his non-physical powers have a connection to actual physical acts: to see through objects he focuses as if peering through a fog, he doesn’t shoot power blasts from his fists to light things on fire but instead burns them with a furious glare, he doesn’t dispassionately levitate through the air as a standard but takes off and holds his arms forward as if in a mighty never-ending leap. Batman may be ‘real’, but if you imagined suddenly being him, you wouldn’t be Batman, you’d be a rich dude with a weaponized theme park in his basement, because you have no training and no tangible point of reference for thinking of how anything works beyond “punch and throw things”. But it’s easy to imagine being Superman in a visceral, physical sense – just imagine everything you did worked optimally, even the way it only could in a dream.

Superman is fun

All of the above makes him grand and likable, but that’s not the same as being able to support decades of monthly adventure stories. The basis of that is that he lives in a universe-sized, Earth-shaped toybox. He doesn’t just have superpowers and a nifty suit, he’s got a cave at the North Pole right near Santa with a time machine, statues of all his friends, a space zoo, a gun that turns people into ghosts, and a bottle city full of real people, plus robots to keep it all tidy, and only he can get in because the key was forged in the heart of a star. His cousin, kid, dog, and a few of his best friends wear capes too, and his ‘brother’ with reverse-superpowers lives on a cube planet where it’s perpetually opposite day. His friends and wife often go on their own adventures and get temporary superpowers just by being in his vicinity, he dated a mermaid in college, his after-school club was in the future and he commutes to the moon for work, and his deadliest enemies include a crazed mad scientist, an evil robot with a death-heart, a mischievous imp in a derby hat, and brilliant alien computer literally named Brainiac. Superman lives in a sci-fi fantasy dreamland of childish archetypes that can exist on any scale from the microscopic to the galactic to the other-dimensional, and as a result of that he can go on any adventure imaginable, to any time and place, and as a super-man who doesn’t often have to worry for his own safety, he can survive and appreciate and care it all.

Superman mythologizes the mundane

And it’s where the fun and the big, mythic aura Superman carries meet that the magic happens that makes him as versatile and effective a character as there is in fiction: everything he does is rooted in something incredibly normal and human. His wild super-suit of circus royalty is made to reconnect with his heritage the only way he has, and to try and make himself colorful and unthreatening to a world he needs to accept him. When he travels through time, it’s never just to save reality, it’s to go see family and friends. He walks his dog around the rings of Saturn, he looks at his city in a bottle and wonders if he’ll ever be able to get around to taking care of that, he walks on the bottom of the ocean to think things through privately, and spends an entire day saving the world to get away from a conversation he wants to have. Every mad, cosmic aspect of his world is something totally normal blown up to be as big as it feels, and even when he does interact with the ‘mundane’, his presence alone elevates it to myth in a way no other superhero can. That’s the true source of his ability to adapt, rarely tapped but always potent: he can do anything, because he’s us.

Superman’s an actual good, interesting character

I place this at the bottom because it’s the aspect that’s most rarely captured, especially in the public eye (though the handful of times it has been are why he’s my favorite). But when he’s handled properly, then even divorced from everything else, Superman is fascinating as a *person*. Raised knowing there’s something different about him even as his weird alienness lets him understand people and the world around them in ways no others can, he learned one day he was born of the most mind-shattering act of cosmic horror imaginable, with a place greater than Earth in every way destroyed by coincidence, a signpost by any measure that the universe is a chaotic, meaningless, cruel place that destroys the innocent with indifference…and he became a good man who treasures life over anything. He has power that lets him do literally anything he pleases, and he spends half his life among us at a desk job because he thinks we’re just swell and he wants to keep being part of it all. Even though he can never entirely, not really, divvying his life up into discrete, manageable chunks that let him interact with the world on his own terms and try to see through what he sees as his responsibility, until a woman sees through the deception and self-deception and gets the real him to tentatively come out. 

He has fun little hobbies, and unusual friendships, and a complex rivalry with the one man in the world who could’ve been his equal. He’s seen the best and worst of the world, and he accepts it all, but he still radiates a decency and innocence that can be mistaken for naivete by those who don’t know him. He’s clever but easy to catch off-guard in the right circumstances, always struggling between trying to be the god people expect him to be and the inadequate fake his humility can make him look at himself as, he likes football and pretzels and pulp novels and Metallica, he gets a kick out of writing because it’s one of the few things he can do on an even playing field, he’s not sure how best to raise his kid, he worries that that one alien dictator is going to pop by again soon and he might not be ready to deal with it, he has to coordinate dates with his wife precisely because they both have such busy schedules, he counts dust particles in the air when he gets bored, and he believes in everybody. There’s so much going on with this guy, this identity-case, this brute, this pacifist, this establishment-man, this rebel and idealist and weirdo and a dozen other conflicting things. He’s been and done just about everything with charm and style over the decades, and it works, because it all adds up into one nice guy’s unusual, well-rounded life. And because it’s always anchored by an understanding: for all that he’s a unique freak of creation, he knows that in all the madness and uncertainty and horror, the one thing we have to rely on is each other. So he’ll put on his suit and throw himself out there against the only things in the universe that could kill him when he could be doing anything else, because he’s found a home with us little people when he lost his, and he knows we’re worth the fight; everyone is, aliens just like him in their own ways, waiting to be saved the way they saved him when he landed in a field. That’s why Superman’s great.