Superman is For Everyone

Sadly, this story remains relevant.

With the end of Superman & Lois, my personal favorite live-action adaptation of Superman, I have been thinking a lot about the character. That isn’t necessarily unusual for me — since 1992, hardly a week has gone by that I didn’t think quite a bit about the Man of Tomorrow. Still, with no major outlet anymore, I’m sharing my thoughts here…and also looking back into my personal archives to see if any of my personal favorite rants can be revived or repurposed.

One of the best things about Superman & Lois is that it focused on Clark’s humanity. The Kents instilled values into him that led him to strive for truth, justice, and a better tomorrow — and much of this show has been about how Clark has strived to pass that along to his own sons.

Right after Trump was elected, the folks making Superman comics jumped into the conversation around Republican anti-immigrant sentiment in a way that spoke directly to Superman as a character, and at the time, my Panel Discussions podcast — a show tied to ECV, but which focused on comics — gave me a forum to speak out about those issues. Sadly, with Trump now heading back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a wave of American racism, that story and others like it are still as relevant as ever. So I decided to upload a piece of writing from back then that I actually really liked.

(It’s hard to explain how rare it is that I like a piece of my own writing, so buckle in.)

I’m also going to tweak it a little to incorporate elements of Superman & Lois’s finale, so don’t say I never gave you anything.

Let’s travel back to 2017, shall we?

…Yeah, sometimes the jokes just write themselves, don’t they?

In September of 2017, a group of right-wing activists objected to a story in Action Comics #987, stirring up social media in one of the more ill-advised freak-outs about a comic book story in recent memory. In the scene, which was widely reported on and reproduced across right wing media like Breitbart and Fox News, an angry white man turns his gun on a group of unarmed and presumably undocumented immigrants after being laid off.

Economic anxiety, amirite?

In the comic, Superman swooped in to save the immigrants, smashing the gunman's weapon and turning him over to the police, in whose care Superman leaves the would-be victims as well. In the context of an American president who made animosity towards immigrants his signature campaign position, this scene was taken by some to be either pro-immigrant or anti-Trump, generating outrage from…well, all the people you would expect that kind of thing to outrage.

There have been a lot of things these people utterly missed the boat on, and some of them tie into one of my favorite moments in superhero films.

And yes, it's from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Deal with it.

For context, I'm a sucker for moments. It’s part of why I’m such a fan of writers like Geoff Johns and Scott Snyder, who know the value of a “holy shit” panel.

While the Boaz Yakin Punisher film was generally an unholy mess, there is a beat near the end that I still love to this day. After Frank's intransigence sends his old partner into a spiral, that partner's new partner — sorry, folks, this isn't the kind of film where characters are developed enough that you remember their names! — but the partner's new partner is trying to badger Frank into giving her a response that she wants.

She asks him, “How long do you think someone can live after you've cut out their heart?”

Frank grabs her, and he says, “A long. Time.”

That moment, even existing in the context of a fairly ridiculous film, redeems so much of Lundgren's approach to The Punisher for me. It explains a lot about where he's coming from, and it makes him a far more fully realized character than the rest of the movie would lead you to believe.

So, a small moment can radically improve a movie for me. Doesn't make a bad movie good, but I don't personally find Batman v Superman to be a bad movie, so that's kind of an aside in this case.

Let's take it back to Superman. The splashy headline on The Hollywood Reporter called these immigrants “undocumented workers” right there in the title.

Since that's what I figured would be the thing to make this a capital-T “thing,” my own report rebutted this a little, suggesting that there was nothing in the text of the story to specifically indicate that they were in the country illegally. Ultimately though, getting into the nuts and bolts of that discussion kind of misses the point.

Why? Because it doesn't matter if they're undocumented. They're people, and Superman saves people.

There's actually a really interesting conversation to be had about writer Dan Jurgens’ deeply humane approach to Superman, so forgive me another minor digression; I promise it all ties together.

Prior to the quote-unquote immigrant issue — which, by the way, is not actually about immigration policy at all, and we will circle back to that soon — Jurgens wrote a story that was nominally about rewriting a bunch of Superman's recent history, but actually gave one of his longest-running villains a kind of heartbreaking twist.

In Superman Reborn, a story that was collected at the same time as Action Comics #987’s release, Mr. Mxyzptlk kidnapped Superman's son, John, in what appeared at face value to be a much higher-stakes and darker version of the games Mxyzptlk has played with Superman over the years.

Mr. Mxyzptlk, if you don't know, is an imp from the fifth dimension. He has godlike powers, knows that Superman exists inside of a comic book, and can't really be defeated in the conventional sense. He sets up little puzzles and contests for Superman to best him at, and by winning the games, Superman can send Mxyzptlk back home for a short time (but the imp will always return).

And there's the rub. Superman's life was in a state of total upheaval when Mxy failed to return because he'd been kidnapped and was being tortured by a mysterious villain called Mr. Oz (who has a kind of extra-dimensional prison thing? We'll get back to Mr. Oz in a minute). Eventually, the aforementioned Superman Reborn story revealed that Mr. Mxyzptlk, after being kidnapped and while being tortured, always believed in Superman. He genuinely thought that Superman would come find him, and when Superman didn't, it broke Mxy's heart in a surprising way.

Later, when confronting Superman, Mxyzptlk said something along the lines of, “You save everybody. I know, I've seen it. So many terrible people. What does that say about me?”

The first time I read that scene, it was agonizing. Here's a character who's destructive in a lot of ways, but ultimately not evil. And his suffering was very understandable, and it was very real. That suffering, and the way that he was broken by his experience with Mr. Oz, was very much a pilot program for what the villain is doing in The Oz Effect.

After all, it was not really a story about those immigrants. They are just one of a number of stories that converge, when Superman is sent around the world trying to save people and animals from crimes and negligence that seem motivated by greed, hate, and laziness.

In each of these cases, there's someone on hand — usually multiple someones — who's wearing a tattoo or brand bearing Mr. Oz's sigil. Prior to The Oz Effect, we learned people like this are his minions. They were usually down-on-their-luck people who do what he asks in exchange for food, money, or whatever. In The Oz Effect, their objective seems to be simply to cause trouble. The reason makes some sense when you get to it.

Here's where we'll break away from the comics and go back to the movies for a minute, so that I can provide some context into that moment that I talked about. In Batman v Superman, the hero finds himself facing off against Lex Luthor inside the creepy birthing matrix thing in the belly of the downed Kryptonian scout ship from Man of Steel.

Lex pontificates about having created Doomsday as the perfect weapon to kill Superman, but when Doomsday comes out of the chrysalis, the first thing he does is swing at his “father,” Lex. Superman, without missing a beat, speeds into action faster than anyone else can move — and save Lex's life. It's this act that begins his fatal battle with Doomsday.

Interestingly, last week, we got to see something very similar in the final peisode of Sueprman & Lois. After his final battle with the kryptonite-wielding, armor-suited Lex Luthor, Superman totally shatters Lex’s battle suit, sending the villain crashing to the ground. After everything Lex had done over the course of the season — including literally orchestrating Superman’s death at one point! — not only does Superman swoop down to prevent him becoming a smear on the pavement, but he also shows Lex remarkable forgiveness in the series’ final scene.

I've always thought that the Batman v Superman scene spoke to a misconception about Zack Snyder's Superman. The idea that the Man of Steel Superman doesn't care about saving lives is the kind of thing you hear repeated on the internet a lot, but it's pretty self-evidently nonsense when you have to actually hold it up to scrutiny.

Superman saves people. It's what he does. And whether it's the victim of a hate crime, or someone who's currently trying to kill Superman himself, Superman does not judge who gets to live or not. In 90 percent of action movies, even films that have a sense of likeness to them, that they say Batman v Superman doesn't, Lex Luthor dies in that scene.

Most action heroes do not swoop in to save the villain during the climactic battle. Superman does, because he's Superman. That's who he is. Fast-forwarding to earlier this week, the same thing happened again in the series finale of Superman & Lois, in which Lex was attacking Superman with kryptonite-laced armor. When Superman shattered the armor and Lex went plummeting toward the earth, Clark saved him regardless of the fact that smart money says that’s a bad call.

This philosophy is kind of covert in Snyder's admittedly dark and somewhat cynical films, but it's there. It's made overt in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, in which the villain tells Diana, They — they in this case being humanity — don't deserve you.

Diana replies with, “It's not about deserve.”

That’s a callback to something that Steve Trevor told her earlier, which is one of the reasons that I've seen some people try to make the argument that the film has a thread of misogyny baked subtly into it (because our heroine gets the moral of the story from her boyfriend).

That's a bit of a crock, though. It may not be a word-for-word callback to the beginning of the movie, but it's pretty clear that Diana has always felt the compulsion to help people and do the right thing. When she's leaving Themyscira to bring Steve back to his home, she's told that once she makes that decision to leave, she can never return.

Her response — “Who would I be if I stayed?” — is note perfect. It asks the same question that a young Clark Kent asks his father in Man of Steel, albeit somewhat more clumsily. His father wants to protect him — because that's what parents do, they protect their child at all cost. And if it comes down to your child or the world, the world can go hang — but the Kents raise Clark in such a way that he's fundamentally unable to accept taking priority over others. Jonathan Kent may want to sacrifice others so that his son might live, but Clark would willingly sacrifice himself to save others.

(Eventually he does, and while Jonathan Kent doesn't live to see it; Clark's mother has to live with the fallout of that decision and put on his funeral at the end of Batman v Superman.)

So what does all of this have to do with the comics, and Mr. Oz, and the immigrants, and Mr. Mxyzptlk? Oh boy, am I glad you asked.

While the immigration issue stole the spotlight because it was picked up by pundits and politicized, Action Comics #987 was originally supposed to be about something totally different. The issue, after about two years of playing with the audience's minds (and Superman’s), Mr. Oz revealed his true nature and his true identity.

Mr. Oz, according to Action Comics #987, is actually Jor-El, Superman's biological father, who somehow survived the destruction of Krypton. He wants his son to see how petty and selfish and vulgar and violent humans are. He wants Superman to see that “They don't deserve you.”

Saving the immigrants, preventing a 1% er's house from being torched, delivering vaccines to a clinic in an impoverished nation, working to mitigate the damage of an oil spill — these are all things that Superman faces in the issue. And as part one of a larger story, this issue forms the base upon which the story is built.

It's about Superman saving people. This is his ethic. This is what he does, and this is who he is. And the story's conflict is about Mr. Oz challenging that ethic. Mr. Oz says, “These people don't deserve you.” Why does Mr. Oz do that? Well, because Mr. Oz is Jor-El, and Jor-El believes that he sent his son to the wrong planet.

He wants to protect his son, because that's what a father does. In an earlier story, Mr. Oz intercepted and trapped Doomsday. And in this issue, he steals a chunk of kryptonite. He secrets that away in the same weird chamber thing where he has the monster incapacitated. These are the only two things that are known to have the capacity to kill his son, and he's removing them from the board.

Fundamentally, then, this is a story that asks the question, “If Jor-El can break Mr. Mxyzptlk’s faith in Superman, can he also break Superman's faith in humanity?” Can he overwrite the messages of Clark's adopted family and force Kal-El to accept primacy over humanity, and allow himself to be “protected” in a way that would take him away from humanity?

Of course, this is a rigged game. We know the answer. Geoff Johns, the chief creative officer at DC, briefly wrote Action Comics. And during one of his most popular stories, he told a tale set in the future with aliens, but which was also a coded story about white supremacy and fear of “the other,” something that is embodied in today's politics by animosity towards immigrants. Of course, the Johns story was written close to 10 years pre-Trump.

In Johns’s story, in the far future, someone has rewritten Superman's history so that, according to the textbooks, he was fully human, he was a champion of Earth and Earth only, and he was essentially a human supremacist.

When Superman, traveling to the future, steps in to save a group of aliens being unfairly targeted by law enforcement, the police challenge him, parroting the official talking points about who they think Superman is and what they think he stood for. It's not difficult to imagine those sentiments coming out of the Trumps and Fox Newses of the world, bitter that Superman doesn't limit his heroism just to “approved” victims and to perpetrators that fit their chosen narratives.

Superman's response is simple, it's beautiful, and it speaks volumes: “I'm for everyone.”