Weird one this week! Had some thoughts about SUPERMAN if you aren’t sick of hearing about that movie yet, and then talked a little about being a child of divorce and going to Comic-Con for the first time in a few years tomorrow.
James Gunn doesn’t seem to think an origin story is important in 2025 so I’ll spare you. You know the beats already. Dying planet, last hope, kindly couple, you really gotta get on that Grant Morrison shit if you don’t. You’ve seen the ads, the billboards, the cardboard displays of trade paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. It’s Superman summer. They even branded it on the cover of a new Dan Slott comic. I read the first panel at Golden Apple this morning and in it he writes about the Daily Planet pivoting to multimedia and video, only a decade too late for that bit to land with any relevance which is basically on par for a Dan Slott comic.
Anyways. There’s a movie. You’ve heard, right?
It’s a bit inescapable, albeit not in the worst way. David Corenswet is on one of the most successful charm offenses I’ve ever witnessed, quoting the opening scene of CASINO ROYALE verbatim in a bit seemingly specifically designed to endear him to me and shit man, maybe I’m an easy mark but it worked. It doesn’t help that bro simply IS Clark Kent. Even a deeply imperfect script and film can’t suppress that.
It’s been out for a week now so there’s no point in reviewing it. You’ll probably like it. Objectively the thing Works and I’m in the minority in my issues with it. I think it’s a simultaneous failure on the terms it tries to set for itself but a successful reboot of a universe I love. I bought comics for the first time in a year after seeing it. I liked THUNDERBOLTS more and didn’t even pretend I was interested in whatever the New Avengers are up to after that one.
I play like I’m past this shit, a decade of working tirelessly for a career as a comic book writer flaming out so severely I hardly touched one even for pleasure for two years, but I still feel a thing or two about a thing or two and Clark Kent is one of them. I’ve maintained for ages that the beauty of characters like Clark and Bruce specifically is in their elasticity. You can bend them into whatever shape you want and they don’t break. It’s why Superman can fight Metallo and also the United States Government and why Batman can fight immortal environmental terrorists and also the United States Government via Superman. So I’m not precious and I’m not conservative but I do think there are pieces of the respective myths you don’t fuck with, not for the sake of damaging canon but for the sake of preserving what’s most special about them.
I won’t get into the politics or lack thereof in SUPERMAN (2025) - I’ve already done that ad nauseum on social media and contrary to popular belief complaining about a movie on the internet (or a Substack) doesn’t constitute pro-Palestine activism - but there are some stickier elements to the movie that won’t leave me alone, so much so that I went back for seconds last weekend to chew them over a little more thoroughly.
Spoilers from here.
For a movie that hinges its entire thesis on the fact that Superman is as human and imperfect as the rest of us and that’s what makes him beautiful, I think Gunn misses the mark on elements of Clark Kent in a way that makes the movie a collective failure for me, one humble idiot. Towards the end of the first act Gunn makes a fairly bold decision regarding Superman’s parentage, the short of it being that Lara and Jor-El (his Kryptonian parents) actually sent him to Earth from Krypton with intentions of conquering it, decrying humans as weak and simple and easy to control. There’s also a subtle implication that Clark takes more comfort in the illusion of their decency than he does in the very concrete reality of Jonathan and Martha Kent’s. There are throwaway lines about how he doesn’t call home enough and the Fortress of Solitude’s robot servants know to queue up a video message from Lara and Jor-El for the sake of comfort when he’s dragged in, beaten and bloody, by Krypto the Superdog (good, but there’s too much of him).
It’s a decision made to stoke the central conflict of the movie between Clark and Lex Luthor, one that without a properly depicted origin story takes away from one of the things I’ve always really loved about the character: his relationship to his parents. Prior incarnations, be it the Donner movies or Smallville or frankly even the Snyder movies have properly clocked that Clark feels little to no inner conflict over his parentage. I think it’s one of the reasons he’s always resonated with kids who grew up in adopted families. So often stories that center adoption hone in on the idea of the inherent gap between birth parents and adoptive parents, and for Clark that gap has always been small. He’s the product of the best of his home planet and the best of Earth, plain and simple. Severing his ties to his Kryptonian parents creates this weird dynamic where I think we’re expected to identify with the character as more fully human for not having ties to another planet, and again, that kind of misses the point.
His relationship with the Kents has always really affected me, likely due to being a member of the Smallville generation, and I also personally bristle at the notion that Clark Kent’s mom has to remind him to call home. In many an impassioned conversation at comic conventions or college parties (I was a joy at them, clearly) I’ve yammered about how the whole point of Superman is that he has all this power, totally infinite power, and the only time he ever really uses it for personal gain is so he can fly home for dinner with his mom and dad once a week. There’s this moment in one of the animated series of my childhood, one set around Christmas, where he’s at home with the Kents for Christmas and brings Martian Manhunter with him. His parents are telling J’onn about how growing up they had to wrap Clark’s presents in lead foil so he couldn’t use his X-Ray vision to peek, and Clark kinda pauses for a second, clearly taken aback, and then corrects them: “You mean Santa wrapped them…” and it’s legit maybe my favorite Superman moment in the entirety of pop culture–the most powerful man on the planet still believes in Santa and his parents still have to remind themselves not to ruin it for him.
Believe me when I say I’ve saved plenty of this for therapy over the years but I think the “two families” element of the Superman mythos extends beyond the adoption metaphor and into the “children of divorce” category, one that I found myself in later in life than anticipated. I think any time your family unit is fractured, be it by death or divorce, whathaveyou, it aggressively puts in perspective which pieces of yourself came from which side of the family, for better or worse. Since my parents divorced in 2017 I’ve come to a much better understanding of how I came to be who I am, of what both my mom and dad contributed to what was a singular parental unit as I grew up. That fragmentation is a hard thing to reckon with, one in the years since I’ve seen reflected in Superman comics and movies and TV shows. I like Clark as a guy who isn’t torn between two worlds, two families, but rather serves as a bridge between them. I like the story less when one side of the family is Actually Evil.
There’s this misconstrued notion that Superman as a character and as a story is too perfect, too infallible, too uncomplicated. Uncomplicated doesn’t make for good, relatable story. That’s a notion I kinda flinch at. I think as a storyteller trying to instill an ultimately unnecessary dramatic tension is taking the path of least resistance. It’s far more difficult (but much more rewarding, if you pull it off) to ascribe nuance to a harmonious relationship.
Anyways. I’m reading comics again. People love to tell anyone remotely interested in Superman to read All-Star Superman but I think that’s kind of like handing someone a Thomas Pynchon book right after they’ve learned how to read. I picked up Joshua Williamson’s recent run on the main Superman title and found it super accessible, light, and fun–a pretty great reflection of the energy the film brings to the world and the character. Highly recommend if you’ve been thinking about going to a comic shop sometime soon.
And ultimately all this is moot rambling because the movie got me excited about comics and possibly making them again one of these days and tomorrow I’m going down to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time in a few years. The first summer I visited the west coast back in 2015 I went to my first Comic-Con, back when I was still wide-eyed and scrambling to get a toe in the industry’s door and thinking about moving to Los Angeles to do it. I didn’t move to Los Angeles then, thank god. But I’m here now, I’ve got a half-dozen published comics under my belt, and for the first time in years I’m going to a comic convention with zero stress, only excitement. Extremely wild and weird to think that it’s been ten years almost to the day since that trip. Totally changed my life, mostly for the better albeit with some tough detours here and there. I have no plans, I have no meetings, I have no editors to bother, only friends to hug and longboxes to dive through. Really I’d just like to see what else my guy Big Blue’s been up to since I last checked in.