SUPERMAN: Comic Book Writer Mark Waid Explains Why Divided World Needs The Man Of Steel In 2025

@Thing94 - Beat it, ya crum-bum—we got no room for cheapskates like you.

@PartyKiller - Superman's days as a corporate symbol are numbered. He'll be everyone's soon.

@PartyKiller - You really are living up to your username right now, aren’t you? Take a hike.

@FlixMentallo21 - Did I ruin the hate-party? HAHAHA!

@PartyKiller -
Are you trying to imply that MAGA is not entirely for the benefit of the Corporate Overlords? The lefties are now corporate shills?

You need to be send to a reeducation camp.

@ObserverIO - exactly.

And the dumbest bit is when they have Superman wearing the costume and then acting oblivious to the fact that he is wearing a GIANT S IN A SHIELD on his chest... as tho it never occured to him.

@ObserverIO - lol yep! It is so contrived and dumb .... Pete Holmes nailed it:

@McMurdo - slight tangent, but this whole thing reminds me of how out of touch people have become with Superman's roots in the beginning, where their idea of the character is such a 180 to where even basic stuff like the very first cover to Action Comics doesn't make sense to them.

I came across this on reddit earlier, a guy asking for clarification on the Action Comics 1 cover:




Superman is smashing the car.

Context: gangsters kidnap Lois Lane after forcing her car into a ditch causing an accident. So Superman rescues Lois Lane and destroys their car in true justice fashion.

People in the modern era claim this is out of character behavior for Superman, and always have him catching a car and setting it down in modern homages of the cover.



However, this cover is the litmus test for whether you understand Superman as a character or not: if you feel like what he is doing is out of character, you do not understand Superman and have no business writing him.

The other litmus test is the S symbol: modern writers refuse to allow the S symbol to be an S that Clark created along with the rest of the suit to stand for "Superman," the public costumed persona Clark invented to help people. They insist that that is not modest and is too egotistical for the "perfect" image they have created of the character, so always make the S into a coincidental alien glyph that just happens to resemble an S in a shield, and make Clark completely oblivious to the fact he is even wearing it until someone else points it out. This retcon is ultra contrived and coincidental and undermines the credibility of the character all because modern writers don't understand his personality.

The truth is that his creators got it right the first time and did not need to be "corrected" on what the S is. The S is an S that stands for SUPERMAN, the public performing persona (a la a wrestler) Clark created for himself to help others (along with the mild mannered reporter disguise Clark also created). Superman is a vigilante and is smashing the bad guys' car because they smashed an innocent person's car and kidnapped them.

Lois Lane's first instinct when she sees Superman is to fear him, like any normal person would after seeing his abilities. But that is precisely why Clark designed a mask-less, primary colored outfit with a big S inside of a SHIELD on his chest: to symbolize that he is a PROTECTOR, a defender, and is not trying to hide from anyone.







So much of the psychology of what makes the character tick is lost when they don't have him create his suit and just have it given to him by someone from space where he isn't even sure what it is he is wearing or even why in some cases.

But it was all laid out that CLARK created it in even Action Comics 1's brief origin:



"Early, CLARK decided he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind. And so was CREATED... Superman!"

Also, he is SUPERman, not SOLARman; he gets his powers because he is from a race of super people (even if he has no idea of their existence or that he was born on another planet as a baby like in the original comics where he had no idea about Krypton for over a decade into his costumed career), not merely because he is like a plant and absorbs sun differently from us. I think the sunlight stuff has gotten a little out of hand these days.

Being an alien is just the explanation for the powers, nothing else, the costume, the S, the morality, the worldview and will to help others all come from being Clark Kent.

It's all there in the early issues in the Golden Age Superman stories, especially the first two years. The more people have gotten away from what Superman's creators did, the less sense the character has made, to the point of where you get people rejecting stuff like the Action Comics cover and the S symbol standing for Superman.

Hopefully as Superman (and Batman) become Public Domain in the next decade we see a return to his roots in characterization again.

I feel like we don't have this issue with Batman because, even tho he waned in popularity after the 60s, Superman as a character never really hit rock bottom the way Batman did, which allowed for writers to really come in and do a thorough examination of what he was and what worked with him in the beginning and do a proper reboot of him with his roots rediscovered the way writers did with Batman.

The closest thing would be what John Byrne did in the 1980s, which was excellent, but people like Mark Waid and Geoff Johns have tried so hard to bury it in favor of rehashing some of the worst parts of the Silver Age (the Superboy in the origin retcon, multiple kryptonian survivors,
over emphasizing Krypton to the point of where he sees it as his true home via enhanced memories and looking at earth with snobbery under certain writers, etc.).

Superman, being the first and most famous superhero, was sort of a victim of his own success in a way, in that no matter what, he will always be in the public conscious somehow. And, as DC's first major character, when Batman's popularity hit rock bottom, he was allowed to rediscover himself in Superman's shadow, to the point where eventually writers understood him so well that this understanding is now ubiquitous to people everywhere... meanwhile, Superman has just sort of limped along, and you get people asking questions about really basic stuff like this guy on reddit did.

@Pictilli - I was re-reading All Star Superman again recently and I was so glad when Grant Morrison had someone mention less heavy gravitational pull of Earth being why Superman can fly rather than just solar powered superpowers. It's little things like this that get lost over time. This comes from the Princess of Mars and the Barsoom books when John Carter could leap great distances because of Mars' lesser gravity.

Also in the panel you posted, everyone on Krypton becomes super strong when they reach maturity because they have evolved into a super race, again not because of stored up yellow solar radiation. This comes from philosophers such as Nietzsche, theorists such as Darwin and spiritualists such as Madame Blavatsky.
It also really fits in with the whole idea of the metagene which has become a staple of both DC and Marvel mythology. So humans are in the process of their evolution into a super race but some aliens like Superman's race have already evolved.

Makes so much more sense the way the original creators wrote it in the golden age than when the silver age guys came in and started presumably taking copious amounts of lsd or something because their shit got kinda weird and wild.

@McMurdo - Thank you, and I agree 100%. Gunn's is going the most accurate live action Superman we have probably had in film to date.

I think what Superman has developed into in many ways is as foreign to what he was conceptually in the Golden Age as the sci fi Batman of the 1950s who traveled to alien worlds is to our conception of Batman today. Only difference is Batman got back in touch with his roots, while Superman hasn't had that done quite so well (yet).

@MakeAmericaGrea - Sounds more like you’re thinking of his alternate-universe counterpart Overman, from a world where the Nazis won.

Get a freaking shrink, a clue, and a life.