Look, Up In The Sky… Superman and Lois Turn 75

I’m looking at the cover of Action Comics #1 and finding it almost impossible to imagine how people saw it back in 1938. A powerfully-built ox of a man holding a car above his head while the other figures in the scene cower or flee in terror? Who is this guy? Is he the hero or the villain? Gaudy circus performer or alien invader? Man or…

Superman has also been a part of my pop culture landscape, from the Christopher Reeve movies to Lois and Clark, from running around with my coat doubling as a cape to reading the comics as I embraced my inner geek. True story: while on holiday in Toronto, I was wearing a Superman t-shirt on a visit to the CN Tower. When the time came for my tour party to stand on the glass floor and stare down at the sidewalk hundreds of feet below, I was asked to hold a middle-aged woman’s arm as she’d be too scared to walk on the glass otherwise. That was nothing to do with me being courageous or strong, but everything to do with the symbol on my shirt.

Those early readers weren’t the only ones figuring Superman out. In that first issue, Superman works for the Daily Star, not the Planet; he can leap one-eighth of a mile but can’t fly; his powers are due to Kryptonians being more evolved, not a reaction to sunlight. Perhaps more importantly he’s more rough and ready than the character’s normally portrayed, less sci-fi and more earthy. Back in 1938, Superman had yet to become the mythic hero of pop culture epics.

April 15th 2013, and social media reels in shock as explosions tear through the Boston Marathon. Among the digital chaos of the first few hours after the bombing, a friend retweets a quote from Fred Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” And I read that and I thought about the horror of that day and the heroism of those who ran to help the injured, and I also thought of Superman.

At least Lois was there. For all this is Superman’s anniversary, it’s also the birthday of Lois Lane. I’ll admit it; I’m a shipper. She’s the voice of humanity in the mythos, a tenacious journalist who fights for justice in her own right; the recent trailer for Man of Steel, amid all the questions about Superman’s role and identity, it’s Lois who sits there confidently getting to the heart of the matter. Heck, she’s one who gives Clark’s alter-ego a name. She’s not just one of the most famous female comic book characters, she’s one of the most iconic characters full stop. Read Action #1 again, it’s Lois who’s being kidnapped in that car. It may be Superman’s 75th, but let’s also sing happy birthday to Lois Lane.

Talking of that trailer, there was another moment of humanity that just floored me. The young Clark has just discovered he’s adopted – that he’s not even from Earth. He turns to the man who raised him and asks “Can’t I just pretend I’m still your son?” “You are my son!” Comes the reply, and that still gets me, even as I’m typing this. Maybe it’s because I’m a new stepdad, maybe it’s because I’m getting old and relating to fathers rather than son, but… There’s just so much there, love and compassion and identity and fear, and so much of the Superman story is tied up with the things parents want for their children, whether you’re from Kansas or Krypton.

In a world of grimdark superheroes, it’s easy to overlook how important Superman was and is. He’s been used as a pop culture defence against Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and when Grant Morrison’s run rebooted Action Comics in 2011, Clark returned to his roots as a social crusader in a time of recession and austerity and the 1%. It’s easy to forget Superman’s relevance – after all, he’s a part of the mass media wallpaper – but while it’s easy to see him as ‘establishment’, there’s also subversion going on – he’s an immigrant, he’s working class, he’s hiding a secret and he’s an outsider.

He’s relevant, in other words. 75 years after he first picked up that car, since he first leapt into action to save Lois Lane, he’s still important, still recognised, still a symbol of heroism and justice; ask him what he wants and he’ll tell you he’s here to help.

I want to help too.

Superman, Orson Scott Card and Diversity in Geek Culture

It’s a strange thing, becoming estranged from your own sub-culture. Things happen within a close-knit community that once you’d be in the middle of, but now it feels like it’s happens to other people.

Problem is, sometimes those other people need support; that the stories and characters you love become tainted by association and bad decisions, that your community gets bruised and battered and threatens to tear itself apart.

So when DC Comics announced that their new Superman title would by written by outspoken anti-gay activist Orson Scott Card. As PR moves go, it’s been less than successful, almost immediately attracting a boycott. Do I think DC is fundamentally homophobic? No – I think they hired successful-writer-of-space-opera Orson rather than person-who-doesn’t-like-gay-people Orson, no malice intended. It’s a screw-up.

That’s the problem. And it’s bigger than Orson Scott Card.

Geek culture is often blind to the implications of the media it produces, which leads to things unravelling when people on the receiving end of those implications dare to point them out. Key flashpoints in recent years have been the treatment of women in comic books (with ‘Women in Refrigerators’ being one of the key tropes) and the grief black cosplayers get when they’re dressed as white characters. DC recruiting Card is just the latest controversy that exposes a prejudiced undercurrent in geek culture.

Part of me thinks it’s because of the small-c conservatism of the key geek texts – Superman was created in the 1930s, Lord of the Rings in the fifties, Doctor Who in the sixties, all products of eras with a less inclusive approach to society, their launch years coinciding with Kristallnacht, McCarthyism and Governor Wallace declaring “Segregation forever” in Alabama respectively. Of course their histories are going to have problematic moments; racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers during war time, a lack of decent roles for women or anyone who isn’t white. For the most part, the worst excesses of this get left behind as society moves on; unfortunately, alongside this, stories calcify around particular images and scenarios – they become iconic, in the positive and negative senses of the word.

The problem is, because geek culture holds true to these iconic texts, it creates havoc when, say, a film adaptation wants to beef up the roles of female characters or wants the next Doctor to be black. “That’s not how it’s always been,” comes the inevitable response, and so genres that should be dynamic in exploring possibilities shut down and remain dominated by white men. And while I’ve got nothing against white men (I am one), they don’t exactly give geek culture a multiplicity of voices. And where does that leave you if you’re not one of those voices? Do you get labelled a fake nerd because, say, girls can’t possibly be into comics?

This is where the ‘don’t change the icons’ excuse runs out, because the treatment of people outside the ‘mainstream’ of geek culture can be abhorrent. For a community that has historically been defined by standing on the margins, it’s capable of doing its own share of marginalising.

Superman shouldn’t be about that. More than any other superhero, he’s the one who’s defined most purely by his desire to help and protect others. He’s the guy who gets between you and a killer robot. Or a slumlord. Or corruption or abuse or prejudice. Superman helps people. That’s his job. The key moment of All Star Superman, the best work on the character for years, isn’t a gonzo sci-fi concept, it’s Superman gently and simply talking a girl out of throwing herself off a building. If Superman can’t say “It gets better” then he’s outlived his usefulness. I don’t think he has, but that usefulness has to be more than him picking up asteroids.

I don’t think for one minute DC editorial would let Orson Scott Card use one of its titles to promote a specific political stance. That doesn’t matter. Homophobia has become the elephant in the room, and the fact that Card was even considered for the role, seemingly without anyone considering that it might just be controversial, is problematic. There are already very few black and female creators working in the industry; to pick an outspoken, homophobic author to write DC’s flagship character just adds insult to injury. What does it say to gay creators trying to break into the industry? Heck, what does it say to those who are already established?

Geek culture, in both professional and fan communities, needs to take a good look at itself. Questions of race, gender and sexuality need to be addressed, (and not just by a tiny minority) but more importantly, the community needs to show respect – respect for fellow fans, respect for customers, respect for those who will love Man of Steel this summer but don’t want to buy a comic because it’s written by a homophobe. This isn’t about ideology or politics, this is about humanity.

Superman was once used to fight the Ku Klux Klan for real. We forget the power of our stories; this current controversy acts as a reminder that these characters are important and have meaning for millions of people. Superman is about truth and justice; the moment his books work against that, it’s a problem; it’s even more of a problem that people remain blind to those problems.

Geek culture needs to lose its blinders and live up to its own ideals; needs to be less of a customer base and more of a community. How we go about that will be the real test of whether comic fandom deserves to survive the years to come.

A Tribute to Christopher Reeve and Superman

It’s been eight years since Christopher Reeve passed away; in many ways it feels longer. The news of his passing was one of those moments that elicited a visceral emotional response, not just from me but from across the world, not only because he was loved as Superman, but also because of his response to the showjumping accident that left him paralysed.

I don’t like using the word ‘definitive’ in relation to acting – it shuts down the possibility of an equally great interpretation of a role – but Superman was a part Reeve was born to play. Part of that is sheer physical presence – he looked like Superman – but for me, the real magic in his performance is in his sincerity. Let’s face it, the seventies Superman movies can be a little campy in places, but while Gene Hackman is dancing over the top, Reeve is playing it completely straight.

See, Superman can be a difficult character to portray. I love the guy, but there’s a fine line between leadership and patriarchy, between nobility and humourlessness. Reeve achieves this – yes, his Superman is strong and decent and heroic, but there’s also a touch of innocence there, and naivety. The great thing about Reeve’s Superman is that those things become strengths; when Lois asks why he’s here, Superman just responds “I’m here to help”. And he means it. God bless him, he means it. That willingness to take something that’s potentially corny and instead turn it into the moral heart of the movie is the key to Reeve’s greatness in the role.

Or is it? Because he also pulls a fantastic trick in making Clark and Superman genuinely seem to be two different people. The glasses thing is a much-mocked element of the mythos (although for my money, they work as a symbolic thing rather than anything physical), but Reeve made it work. If you want a successful Superman adaptation, you need to get the ‘Clark’ aspects of the character right, rather than focus on the powerful alien stuff, and this is where Reeve really makes the character his own. It’s not really about the cape and the trunks, it’s about the character. Forget that and you’re doomed. Remember it and you get scenes that people talk about for decades to come. Heck, I’m not actually a huge fan of the Reeve movies as movies, but Reeve himself is amazing in them and I’ll always make time to watch him catch the helicopter. It’s an amazing Superman moment.

Thank you, Mr. Reeve.

Happy Birthday Superman!

Today is Superman’s birthday.

You’ve got to feel sorry for the guy. He spends all that time saving the world and yet when does he get to party? Once every four years. Sometimes life sucks if you’re a superhero.

February 29th isn’t the anniversary of the character’s creation or his first publication or anything. It became the traditional birthday for Superman during the Silver Age and it fits – why shouldn’t Superman’s birthday be on the leap day? It’s an unusual birthday for an unusual person.

It’s no secret that Superman is my favourite superhero. Batman may be cooler (and, in a weird way, funnier), and Starman may be better written, but there’s something about Superman. Maybe it’s because he’s the first superhero, the one who defines the genre – he’s pure of heart and never gives up and if you were somehow mysteriously transported into the world of comic books, he’d be the one you’d call for help.

Being the first carries with it a specific set of problems though – he’s sometimes seen as boring because he lacks an ‘edge’ (that’s because he’s the baseline and so it’s easy to forget the uniqueness of his first appearance), and because he’s the first – and therefore ‘establishment’ and ‘patriarchal’, he becomes the one to knock down in order to prove another character’s credentials (this is key to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which was so influential that everyone ended up doing it).

All this has been used to call into question Superman’s relevance; I say it enhances it. Certainly in the UK we’ve had a couple of years that have served to highlight the corruption of many of our institutions – MP expenses scandals, newspapers hacking phones, bribes paid to police. We suffer from a lack of heroes, real and fictional. In that context, the concept of Superman, who’d fight to the death to save one person, and who’d never take a bribe or fiddle his expenses, is a powerful one. That’s why Grant Morrison has taken him back to his 1930s roots as a crusader against social injustice – the character’s relevance has been confirmed by echoing his birth.

I don’t know what Superman’s future holds – how it will be shaped by the move to digital publishing, how the forthcoming Man of Steel will compare to movie juggernauts like The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, how truth, justice and the American way survives in a world that’s lacking all three.

But I do know that, as a character, Superman is still loved, still has something to say, still leads the pack when it comes to fictional heroes. And so today I’ll read a comic, wear my Superman t-shirt, and be grateful that, once upon a time, someone dreamed of a man that could fly.

 

Run That Hammer Down: A Sort-Of Review of Action Comics 4

Warning – Contains spoilers!

The tale, so it goes, is that John Henry was the greatest steel-driver ever to work the railroads that would go on to open up the American frontier. A former slave of enormous strength, he was working the railroad in Virginia, or West Virginia, or maybe Alabama, or Kentucky, or Jamaica when the Boss bought himself a steam drill to do the work of 20 men. Well, someone had to stand up for the jobs of the work crew, and so John Henry challenged that steam drill to a race. It was an epic conflict, but John ran that hammer down, only to collapse and die of exhaustion on the finishing line. And his wife, who was called Julie, or Lucy, or Polly Ann, wept for her man, as generations of musicians sang songs about John Henry.

I’ve written before about how the revamp of Action Comics has been informed by themes that are current to both today’s world and the early 20^th century of the Great Depression, when the original run of Action and the character of Superman were first introduced. Well, issue 4 (script by Grant Morrison, art by Rags Morales) is where one of those themes emerges with full force.

Metropolis has been struck by an alien computer virus that takes over automated production lines and uses them to churn out rampaging robots, all of which intend to kill Superman no matter who gets in their way. It’s a combination of fears – the fear of how technology will eventually take over and supplant humanity (linking with everything from the Luddites to Henry Ford’s assembly line techniques) is one that goes back centuries – heck, I bet people were twitchy about the wheel – but Morrison links this with the stereotyped Hollywood-version of hacking, where dark forces can get into your computer and unleash robopocalypse.

In a way it’s symbolic of the revamped Action Comics as a whole – the 1930’s talking to 2011 about what they have in common, soundtracked by Springsteen singing protest songs and live-streams from citizen journalists covering the Occupy movement; the design of the robots is deliberately retro, possibly because of this conversation. And at the end of the issue, dehumanised technology wins (although this is just a cliffhanger, so come back for issue 7).

However, although the evil head of science wins in the main story, it’s a different tale in the back-up story. This introduces hero Steel to the new DC Comics continuity, a character based on the folklore of John Henry. Steel, an engineering genius in a high-tech suit of armour (and armed with a bigass hammer, which is awesome) represents the positive side of science – we’re told how one of his heroes was Richard Feynman, not just because of his genius but because he played the bongos. It’s a depiction of science that supports humanity rather than oppresses it (as Steel points out, Lex Luthor, personification of warped technology and corrupt capitalism, has never played the bongos).

Unlike the John Henry of legend, Steel isn’t killed by his victory over the villain of the piece – ironically, he beats Metallo using a computer virus, which mirrors the virus that caused all the chaos in the first place. It’s not technology that’s bad – battlesuits and hacking are used for both good and evil throughout the issue – it’s how we relate to it.

And that’s the story of Morrison’s Action Comics as a whole. It’s about people and how they’re affected by the use of abuse of money, technology, the media, whatever. Superman returns to his roots as an activist crusader because, although he’s expressed some cynicism about the world, he’s still a hero of the people, not because of his powers but because of his heart – Metallo had his heart broken and became a monster, while Superman may be an alien but in many ways he’s more human than some of the humans. It’s not external factors that necessarily make us, it’s how we respond to them. You can quit, give up, get trampled by that steam drill.

Or you can run that hammer down.