Why We're Superman (and Why That's a Bad Thing for the World)

By Karon Flage
August 1, 2006

Stephen Rauch looks at how the themes of unrestrained power in today's DC and Marvel superhero comics echo world politics.

Judging by where DC and Marvel have been heading lately, people are starting to turn on superheroes. DC's latest crisis came about largely because of how dark the world's heroes had become, and how much they blurred the line between hero and villain (and can I please never see the phrase "mind-wipe" again as long as I live?). Marvel is heading into its Civil War storyline, which is the result of when people realize that superheroes are nothing more or less beings of immense power, operating under their own supervision without any oversight of any kind, doing pretty much whatever they want. People who could probably rip the planet in half if they felt like it, and who spend most of their time getting in fistfights with each other. And that, maybe, there's something wrong with this.

Of course, none of this is new. I got seriously into comics about 5 years ago, when "grim & gritty" and "deconstruction" were the twin 800-lb millstones around the industry's neck, that it had been trying to climb out from under for a good 15 years. You know the story: Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen begat second-rate clones, and those begat third-rate clones, and so on, until everyone was carrying a gun and had "Blood" or "Death" or "Kill" in their names. So what's truly funny about this modern push into grimness is the way DC and Marvel are treating this as a new and exciting direction — "Look! The heroes are really a bunch of sexually frustrated neurotics! And people hate and fear those who are different and powerful! What a startlingly novel idea!" One can only wonder if they're going to bring back big hair and legwarmers.

But as silly as this can be (my choice for the peak of silliness came in Identity Crisis when Brad Meltzer explained that Sue and Ralph Dibny — the Elongated Man! — were the real heart of the Justice League), there is something to be said for looking at unrestrained power run amok.

Right now, America has more or less secured its place as the most powerful country in the history of the world. The leaders of every other country in the world know, on some level, that if we get it in our heads to reduce their country to radioactive grit for the next several thousand years, there's fuck all they can do about it. And while the discussion stateside seems to focus on everything we need to do to keep ourselves safe from attack which could come at any time and kill your children, the rest of the world must be looking at us in the same way you would look at a small, irrational child who has somehow obtained an automatic weapon.

In comics, we have a character who is just as scary as we must seem to the rest of the world: Superman. Except we're not used to thinking of him in this way. Because he's Superman. Brian Azzarello's recent Lex Luthor: Man of Steel miniseries perfectly captures the Big S's role as metaphor for America's position in world affairs. At one point, Lex Luthor (who lest we forget, is the bad guy par excellence in Superman's rogues' gallery) poses the question: "What if he changes his mind? What if ... tonight — he looks down at us and decides we're not capable to manifest our own destiny? What if tomorrow he wakes up believing he knows what's best for us? That it's not enough to protect the world ... when he can rule it? ”The only safeguard we have against that happening ... is his word" (italics mine).

There is certainly no shortage of people criticizing America's movements toward empire. And the response is always that we don't want to rule the world, we only want to make it (and ourselves) safe. But even if you believe that without question, the more disturbing implication is that we're only not ruling the world now because we don't feel like it. The second we change our minds, there's nothing anyone else can do. And why can the rest of the world feel assured that we'll keep our hands off? Because we say so.

And this, at least according to Fox News, is enough. Likewise, no one really spends much time considering the possibility that Superman would really go bad. It's happened before with Superman-analogues (for example, in Brian Bendis' and Michael Oeming's Powers), but never with Big Blue himself. In Powers' Sellouts storyline (in which a Superman-analogue character goes insane and starts killing thousands of people), a government agent tells Christian Walker that at that level of power, "we as a society are just praying to dear God they're good folks."

But that's the thing: no one worries about this with Superman. And the reason why no one does is the reason we need to be paying attention to this: we know he's one of the good guys because he's so damn American. All that pseudo-mythopoeic blather about Superman's upbringing, being raised as a human by good, hard-working, God-fearing people, Heartland values, and so on, makes us believe that he would never do the things we would rightly fear from anyone else capable of doing them. Because somehow we believe that American values can trump everything.

It's the same situation in world politics. We know what's happened before. What every nation in the history of civilization has done when it attained the level of power we now hold. The horrible abuses of power and sheer inhumanity they waged against anyone who had the misfortune to have something they wanted, or who maybe just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We know all this, but we feel secure in our belief that we'll never do anything like that, because, gosh darn it, we're the good guys. And it's the same reason we don't fear Superman, this overwhelming faith in American values in the face of all evidence to the contrary that makes us just as dangerous as an unkillable alien with heat vision.

Of course, Superman's never going to go bad (except maybe in the pages of www.superdickery.com), but we're in the process of watching our government turn us into something worse than monstrous. We've spent the last three years trapped in a war in which the President made up his mind that he was going to attack someone, and that once that happened, no one — not the UN or Congress or Iraq or anyone else — had a chance of altering that decision one iota.

Because there's another side of Superman. Since we're heading back to the '80s, it might do us some good to remember The Dark Knight Returns, when Supes acted as Ronald Reagan's errand-boy to take out Batman when he became too much of a political threat. It might do us some good to remember all that power and potential being reduced to a bare-knuckled enforcer, laying a smackdown on anything that threatens the status quo. And while I must confess that most of the time, the tights and capes crowd really isn't my cup of tea, it's nice to see that even the most mainstream comics can remain relevant once in a while.

Most of the time, the only person in Metropolis who's even the least bit concerned about this is Lex Luthor, who is, of course, a super-villain. At best, he's the no-good worry-wart raining on everyone's parade of love for the big guy. And of course, if you question what we're doing in the world, some people are bound to respond, "Why do you hate America so much?" And the stereotypes of the spooky boogeyman "Liberal" — immoral, decadent, atheistic, egg-headedly intellectual — match up pretty well with the classic tropes that identify supervillains. Essentially, the Left has collectively become a super-villain, out to prevent America from pursuing its Never-Ending Battle to protect itself from any threat, real or imagined.

And why does the side that believes that we shouldn't push other countries around just because we can, that the government should try to help poor and homeless people, and that you should be concerned with privacy even if you don't have anything to hide — how do they end up getting identified with the Big Bads of the comics page? Maybe some of it is because we still think that "American values" mean we'll always be good, and that we can trust anyone with a flag or an "S" on his chest. Maybe we all believe in Superman just a little too much.

Some days it's good to be the bad guy.