Michael L. Fleisher put it well in his Original Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes: “Superman’s powers are, by and large, extraordinary magnifications of ordinary human abilities.” The encyclopedia, in tracing through all the Superman stories, shows how his powers developed in straight lines: strong, stronger, superstrong. His heat vision and x-ray vision aren’t oddballs thrown into the mix. They grow out of his being able to see very well; he can see so well that walls get out of the way. I would quibble with one word in the Flesher quote. He says the powers are “extraordinary.” I would go for “limitless.” If you can do anything, which is my view of being super, it makes perfect sense for your powers to keep opening out and out and out, a never-ending demonstration of a principle. The sight of Superman throwing planets isn’t reductio ad absurdum, a corner lazy writers paint themselves into. It’s the point. That’s the sight we want.
Now, to get very fine, throwing planets is not in itself a classic indulgence. It’s not something you lie back and fantasize about on summer days. Superman isn’t there to live out our fantasies. Having Superman eat a store’s worth of ice cream isn’t any more fun than having him sort a warehouse of mail. In fact it’s less fun, because we don’t want him to be self-indulgent; we want Superman keeping the world on track. Half the time he’s doing something you yourself would not want to do. But when he performs one of his feats, he’s making a point on our behalf: that the universe is still our size. Existence is so built to our scale. With the ice cream or the letters or the forest turned into boards or the billion tons of coal mined in one day, what counts is the blur of hands and the sight of the masses of material being processed, and Superman’s face stationed there with its hard-jawed grin, floating above the activity. The Superman titles spent a lot of years entertaining kids with industrial processes rendered in the dumbest way possible, as one guy working very hard.
That’s a strange form of entertainment, when you think about it. It’s so specialized it’s freakish. All other superheroes tend to fight, but for Superman fighting is beside the point. By definition, by being super, he is the best of whatever comparison he finds himself in. If he is one of two large men, he is the best—that is, strongest—of the two of them. Starting in the 1970s, when the Marvel way became dominant, the writers have marched up a series of angry bald entities to fight Superman. They’re big fellows, and their anatomies look like jungle gyms made from bowling balls that were welded to other bowling balls. The characters are meant to be scary, but they’re dull. If they could really fight Superman, he wouldn’t be Superman. He would have slipped his job description and become a blob. Instead it’s the opponents who become pointless, a lot of heavy-breathing noise (Galactic Golem, Doomsday) made over a promise we don’t believe in and don’t want fulfilled.
Superman did start out as a fighter, but after a half decade he was branching out into high-speed assembly of dinosaur bones. Pretty soon the fights had reduced themselves to rounds of “light taps” received by men wearing hats. Superman had found his vocation. He did things like read all the Metropolis municipal archives at once, or transport industrial sites. In 1951 he started with the making of coal into diamonds. (My source for these activities is Fleisher’s Original Encyclopedia. If you ever want a Superman overview, volume 3 is great.) Superman’s role in life is to engage in fussy interventions with immediate physical reality. He’s always imitating a factory or contriving workaround physical setups that depend on him as lynchpin: plug that volcano with that iceberg! He’s like someone stuck fishing rings out of sewer grates, one after the other, endlessly. The saving grace is that he’s super, so the work is never a sweat. Lois Lane watches Superman at work in Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” What she remarks on is his finesse. For a superhero, Superman is a lot like a golf pro. He has to do things just so, and his triumph is that he can. But we’re all in the same boat. Modern life is mainly a series of contrived situations that we have to fit ourselves to and learn to manipulate: the alphabet, tax law, pill caps. Superman can fit himself to any and master them within seconds. He’s endlessly versatile, and it turns out that’s the key aspect of being super. Even as kids, we begin to suspect that lifting things doesn’t give you as much power as figuring out how to load a stapler or drive a car. If you live in modern society, Superman is your ideal self, or the ideal of that part of yourself suited to modern society.
Those blurry, superfast hands sorting machine parts could be called a kid’s version of industrial activity. But really, they’re my version of industrial activity. I don’t understand how machines work or how soda gets put into millions of bottles. I guess I could, if I thought about it, but in very rough outline and without any direct reference to my own experience. It’s all very abstract. To tell the truth, I couldn’t survive in a world that was simple enough for my immediate experience to anchor me, one where I could walk to the blacksmith’s and get some idea of how he banged horseshoes into shape. I need modern comforts. But, psychologically, modern life is uncomfortable. Enough people have remarked on the problems. Humanity has become so powerful over the past few centuries, but take us one by one and our choices are not really that broad, our knowledge isn’t that great. We don’t feel free, but we don’t feel like we have a place; we’re just hemmed in. We’re kings of creation, but we tend to be sitting around in offices and trying to figure out what happened to us—how did life become this? Huge swathes of existence feel like they’re not there or they’re not as described, like they’re ghosts of themselves. Being a peasant never allowed for great range of activity, but at least nobody was telling you that it did. A peasant could understand his situation, and he knew what his body was for. Whereas, for most of us, the relation between our spine and our hip is a very abstract matter.
Superman is so powerful, but his existence keeps being turned sideways, equivocated upon, redefined away from what it’s supposed to be. Being a person turns out to be such a provisional, unreal state, at least if Superman really is our stand-in. I’m talking about his great years, the Weisinger period of the late 1950s and the 1960s. When Superman was selling his most copies, he was getting switched around and bounced through versions of himself, worked like variations on a theme. He was a baby or an old man or there were two of him. Batman had done a lot of the same stunts during the 1950s, but they worked better and longer for Superman. Add the Superman robots and it’s like personal identity becomes a devalued concept, starts wearing thin. Having the cape and the chest, or the glasses and the tie, turns out to guarantee nothing.
There’s my Superman. He’s modernity. It’s what he stands for, and he grows directly out of it. He’s the odd doodle our collective mind drew when the second-by-second experience of modern existence, the way modernity feels, became impossible to ignore. “Super,” the category he embodies, represents the new dimension added to existence by technological development. The most extreme transformations in our physical environment are now produced by means we find unreal and abstract, that feel like they have nothing to do with us; he’s there to bridge the gap.
Like modern existence, he’s best in theory and becomes tenuous and overcomplicated in practice. We think of him as a pair of vast shoulders and a proud set of boots straddling the universe. But when stories have to be told about Superman he becomes an exercise in crosscutting rules or in the spinning off of versions of himself. Or simply in helplessness: Krypton is going to explode all over again and there’s nothing he can do.
Finally, I’d like to note that reading Superman stories, taking in all that Silver Age lore about the rules of his existence, was my kiddie version of modernity—my starter kit, really. He helped get me ready to function as a member of a modern society. During my Superman years I learned to read, and I got a taste of what modern existence is all about. He explained the world to me. Superman dealt with people wearing suits and ties or engineer’s caps or baker’s aprons. I was five or six or seven and reading about adults out in their world, interacting with each other, and adults are the ones who know. (I remember that, even though Curt Swan was better, I found the old Wayne Boring stories in the annuals more official. They were old-fashioned, which was good: it meant they came from before I was alive.) What I learned about, aside from the absolute safety of everyone from everything because of Superman’s activities, was the central place of technical knowledge. Superman was the most important being ever, and his powers were governed by rules that we had to learn and understand; in fact you couldn’t imagine the powers without the rules. When I was reading Superman, I was getting ready for a lifetime of user manuals and tax forms.
All right, I’m bitter. And I suppose by now I’ve gone beyond a reader’s decent tolerance for fancy views about pop culture. Superman is such a huge fact in our media environment that looking straight at him is unsafe. It throws you into metaconsciousness.
But at least I have deposed my psyche. Nothing above can be proved, but take it all together and you have some sense being made out of one life spent in the same universe as Superman.
