Ron Troupe Is In James Gunn's Superman
Why one side character could suggest a lot about the director's approach
Do you know who Ron Troupe is?
Ron Troupe, a supporting character who first appeared in 1991’s The Adventures of Superman #480, is one of a handful of characters who populated the newsroom at the Daily Planet during the “Triangle Era,” my favorite time to be a Superman comics reader.
Probably Troupe’s most famous story was told in Superman #79, in which he witnessed the Cyborg Superman preventing an assassination attempt on then-President Bill Clinton. It’s the only time I can recall when an entire issue was told from Ron’s perspective, and it came during the mega-hit Reign of the Supermen! storyline, so it kind of became the Ron Troupe story almost by default.
Troupe, along with bar owner “Bibbo” Bibbowski, became two of the most important voices of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga by simply being there to represent everyday people, what they were going through, what they were afraid of, and how they felt about a world without Superman.
Ron Troupe is set to appear in Superman (2025), played by actor Christopher MacDonald, and it’s hard not to get at least a little excited by the prospect of a world that includes characters like Ron.
Superhero comics and movies have become so fixated on both the concept of the shared universe, and the practice of big, event stories, that supporting casts and secret identities feel like they have been left largely by the wayside. Why have Ron Troupe and Steve Lombard when instead, Superman could just talk exclusively with other super-powered people? It’s a philosophy that really took off when DC and Marvel had the near-simultaneous Identity Crisis and Civil War events, both of which played heavily on the idea of the superhero community as a separate entity from the rest of society, with distinct and sometimes competing priorities from the everyday people they work to protect.
I don’t think either of those stories set out to make that a reality, and it didn’t flow directly out of them in either case. But the emphasis on the superhero community as its own entity allowed mainstream superhero publishers to squeeze most supporting characters out of the books. The issue with focusing primarily (or exclusively) on a world full of extraordinary characters, is that there are few-to-no ordinary people in your story to serve as a vessel for the reader.
Even Marc Andreyko’s run on Manhunter, a terrific book which boasts one of the best supporting casts in years at DC or Marvel, gave vigilante characters (and Kate Spencer’s tie to the Starman family of characters) more page count than many of the non-supers.
Maybe I’m over-emphasizing this, but it certainly is my impression as a reader. Part of that impression may, to take things back around to the beginning, be due to a jarring change in the Superman books about 25 years ago.
Between 1986 and 1999, Superman appeared in between two and five ongoing titles, with each title having a different creative team and often a different philosophy to the others. The continuity was held together by a strong editorial philosophy as well as periodic retreats colloquially called “Super-Summits.”
The ‘86-’99 era was kicked off following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths by the John Byrne miniseries The Man of Steel. In that series, Superman got a modernized origin story, some of the events of his life were rearranged (such as that Jonathan and Martha Kent, his adoptive parents, were still alive), and his powers were scaled down significantly, allowing him to fly around the planet but not push it out of its orbit.
Something Byrne wanted to do, was to remove the idea of Clark Kent as a clumsy nebbish. It’s here that Clark was given a more competent personality; he was an award-winning journalist, a best-selling novelist, and people generally liked him. He had been popular in high school, and even a successful athlete — before he got powers, and felt the moral obligation to stop competing in physical contests against regular humans.
Clark’s more likable, less pathetic personality led to a number of new dynamics in and around the newsroom. No longer was Jimmy Olsen his only “pal.” Instead, he had fulfilling friendships and relationships with Perry White, Ron Troupe, Cat Grant, and others — many of whom are appearing in Gunn’s upcoming movie.
Out of everyone, Ron Troupe is a particularly interesting choice, because he has a lot less precedent onscreen than any of the others (and less time in the comics than virtually anyone). Ron has made a number of animated appearances -- often in non-speaking cameo roles -- but in live action has only ever appeared briefly in single episodes of Smallville and Superman & Lois. The Arrowverse — DC’s longest-running and most successful shared universe project to date — only ever referenced Ron, with his name appearing on an “in memoriam” plaque on Earth-96 during Crisis on Infinite Earths.
(Fun fact: I purchased that prop at auction, and gave it as a holiday gift to one of the ‘90s Superman creators a couple of years back!)
Ron, then, doesn’t necessarily fit into the mold of being a “classic” Superman supporting character to many. Jimmy, Lois, Lex, and Perry do — and there’s plenty of people who remember Lombard and Cat Grant from their prominent roles in other adaptations — but Ron is kind of an interesting choice, and likely suggests that we’ll be spending more time in the newsroom than almost any other recent adaptation.
Part of the reason Ron wasn’t more of a presence in 21st Century adaptations of Superman’s stories is simple: by the time Smallville and Superman & Lois were underway, he had been largely sidelined in the comics.
In 2000, the four monthly Superman books underwent a radical creative shift, replacing writers and artists who had spent the better part of a decade on the titles with hot newcomers like TV executive Jeph Loeb and anime-inspired penciler Ed McGuinness. During their intake interview with Wizard: The Comics Magazine, members of the new creative regime made it clear that they believed the ‘90s Superman comics had spent too much time with his supporting cast, and not enough time on the kind of big, superhero spectacle that made The Death of Superman the era’s defining story. They were promising a smaller cast and more punching.*
This was a divisive, but not unheard-of, take. The incredible success of The Death of Superman took the creative team a bit by surprise, and the titles — which had been seen as a little bit too “smart” and preachy by a lot of “extreme” ‘90s fans — were suddenly the biggest thing in the business. That brought in a huge chunk of new readers who expected the titles to be balls-to-the-wall action all the time. Editors and creators responded by constantly trying to brainstorm big event stories that would satisfy that new audience without alienating the old, but none of them worked the way The Death and Return of Superman did.
There are reasons for that — enough to fill a whole essay, so I’ll leave them largely unsaid. Still, the point was, by 1999, a number of “next” Death of Superman stories had failed to ignite, and both readers and editors were looking for big change in the titles going forward.
The thing is — one of the reasons The Death of Superman was so effective was because of the way it served as a kind of culminating event in the first almost-decade of the post-Crisis Superman era. In Funeral For a Friend, the world was forced to deal with the reality that Superman wouldn’t be there to save them anymore. One of the storyline’s most famous scenes is one in which Bibbo — the owner of the Ace o’ Clubs, a dive bar in Metropolis, breaks down and prays, asking God why He would have taken somebody like Superman from the world, but allowed somebody like Bibbo to keep on living.
The scene was so powerful that they made sure to include it in 2018’s animated adaptation.
“You know, Bibbo — I think of anything that came from the original event, Bibbo was the thing that was kind of the glue for the whole movie, really,” director James Tucker told me at the time. “He really does represent the everyman. He’s not Lois, he’s not Jimmy, he doesn’t really have a deep, personal connection with Superman. He’s us, he’s a fan, and so the way he sees Superman is the way that fandom sees Superman. He’s emotionally hit by what happens almost more than some of the regular cast members. He was very important. They pretty much insisted we use him, and I was all for it.”
The presence of so many Daily Planet reporters, and the prevalence of the Planet in the first trailer and early buzz for the movie, really suggests to me that Gunn wants to make room for Clark Kent’s human side. Exploring his human connections, how he balances the secret, and what it costs him to do so, was a big part of what made the final season of Superman & Lois so great, so here’s hoping that Gunn has a unique take on the idea that lives up to that standard.
Yes, there are a handful of superheroes in James Gunn’s Superman. There’s some concern that he is biting off more than he can chew, although I don’t think that’s the case. Last year, I went to see a live reading of Kevin Smith’s famous, unproduced script for Superman Lives!, and that movie would have had even more characters crammed in. You know what? In the context of the script reading, it worked just fine. Nobody got an arc all to themselves, they were just introduced briefly in the scenes where they were needed, and the story moved on after. Handled well — and I think Gunn has long since proven that he’s capable of handling large casts well — those moments could strengthen not just the worldbuilding, but Clark’s story.
After all, Gunn himself recently said that it’s impossible to know Superman if you don’t know both sides of him — Clark and Kal-El. He also said that knowing both was rare and difficult, and few people really do. It seems like maybe that notion lives at the core of Superman’s relationship to Lois in the movie. So we have the Planet staff, who know Clark but can’t truly know Superman, and we have the Justice League types, who know Superman but rarely, if ever, really know Clark.
For those of us who have a pretty good sense of who Superman is, after decades of comics and a half-dozen movies, somebody like Ron Troupe seems like a pretty promising implication that we’ll get to spend at least a little time with Clark.
*As is often the case when superhero comics go “back to basics,” the Superman titles after this point became a lot more dominated by white, male characters. A number of the modern supporting cast members, who were phased on in favor of a more Silver Age approach, were characters of color or women, including not just Ron but also characters like Keith White, the adoptive son of Perry and Alice, and a number of supporting characters with ties to Lois and her family.