Today is the 75th anniversary of the issuing of Action Comics #1, the first appearance ever of Superman.
Superman remains one of my favorite comic book characters of all time. There are many people nowadays who look on the character as quaint, or outdated. People prefer the darker, grittier characters, or the characters who are more morally flawed, like Batman. Some complain that Superman is too impossible, and requires too much of a suspension of disbelief, but in reality, at least in the comics, Batman is as unlikely a character as Superman. Batman is like Albert Einstein, Chuck Norris, Bill Gates, and General George S Patton all rolled into one. He is literally unstoppable, given enough prep time. I remain to this day a bigger Superman fan than Batman fan.
Let's put aside the fact that he started it all, that all comic book heroes exist in part because of the success of Superman. What really attracts me to Superman is the deeply theological themes that animate the character. Siegel and Shuster were Jewish boys who grew up very poor in Cleveland. Their parents were immigrants. Their personal experience growing up Jewish in a Christian nation, and the immigrant experience of the time, deeply influenced the creation of the character.
Superman is an attempt to create a secularized or rather science-fictionalized version of Christ. Superman is a cosmic messiah. He is sent by his father to this world, where he has great power. He hides among human beings, and uses his great power to not only protect them and fight the forces of evil that threaten them, but also to inspire them to be their best. Superman is also the ultimate immigrant, coming from another planet but being adopted by human, American parents and winding up completely enculturated while also having a keen sense that, ultimately, he comes from somewhere else. This messianic figure is also Americanized, embodying the ideals of the American Dream, and the values of the common midwestern family (of the time).
The interesting thing is how all of these elements mix together. You have a rather Jewish conception of Messiah in all of this. Superman is in many ways the messiah Jews expected: super powerful, having all the qualities we naturally incline to: good looks, strength, invulnerability, the ability to live above everyone else (originally by great leaping ability and later by flying), aloofness, fame, so on. As Superman became more and more powerful, he became more and more like what we naturally associate with God. Think about this in relation to all I write about God-in-Christ. Christ is about vulnerability, giving up power, love, living among everyone else, etc. So while Shuster and Siegal were appealing to Christian sensibilities about messiah, the messianic vision they portrayed was essentially Jewish.
But Superman lives among normal human beings. He 'hides' within the life of Clark Kent, who in many ways is everything Superman is not: common, weak, disrespected, and unsuccessful with women. In this way the character Superman captured the basic Christian idea of God walking among us. In many ways, it is the conception of Christ that dominates Christianity. God CONDESCENDS to become one of us. Behind the commonality of Jesus is the true nature of Divinity, which roughly corresponds to everything Superman is: invulnerable and beyond the concerns of mortal men. Most Christians, whether they realize it or not, have not moved far beyond the simple messianic hopes of ancient Judaism. This is roughly the Judaistic Christian Superman of Shuster and Siegel.
Over time, more mature Christian conceptions came to bear on the character. Superman's power level grew to super-cosmic proportions. Yet Superman self-limits, not only because he fears he cannot control the full breadth of his power, but because he doesn't want to over-interfere in the human right of self-determination. He respects our freedom, and so he refuses to use the full breadth of his physical might nor to impose himself on us politically. This decision to self-limit out of love and respect for humanity roughly corresponds to later Christian theological reflections on the real nature of God-in-Christ, whether done consciously or not. A great examination of the whole breadth of this evolution can be understood by watching the animated films: ALL-STAR SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN VS THE ELITE, both fantastic movies in their own rights, and both based on very popular and critically acclaimed comic books. I highly suggest watching them together (and what better day to do this, than on Superman's 75th Anniversary?)
Yet throughout this Supermessiah is unabashedly American. He believes in the underlying ideals of this nation and what it can stand for. He sees the country not for what it is, but for what it could be, and he tries to live as a symbol for what it could be. He is the American Dream worked into one's conception of God. While there is something idolatrous about this, it is not purely idolatrous. (To get a wonderful examination of this tension between the idolatrous and non-idolatrous American Dreams, read Reinhold Niebuhr's BEYOND TRAGEDY, Chapter entitled "The Ark and The Temple".) To the degree we are capable of disentangling the good from the bad, there is something of great value in all of this. If nothing else, Superman confronts us with our usually subconscious tendency to idolize the American Dream. Watching that play out in some very sophisticated stories like SUPERMAN VS THE ELITE is entertaining and instructive.
Superman is more than just another comic book character. He is a whole set of very ancient ideas come to life in a modern context. The enemies he battles are of a cosmic scope, and threaten the whole of the planet, and beyond the planet. In that sense Superman represents the apocalyptic vision that I find has such great value, and I have argued for here many times. This is the idea that we are all involved in the cosmic clash of various forces of enormous scale. But whereas the good people of the DC Earth can do nought but sit back and hope that Superman will once again save the day, we in the real world are all our own Supermen, empowered by a loving God to take part in the not-never-ending-but-currently-ongoing battle against evil. We are the children of the cosmic God, we are the sojourners and immigrants from Somewhere Else, here on Earth to help make it more like the world from which we came, a world that, unlike Superman we are destined to return to. I have been inspired on just that level by the figure of Superman in comic books, in movies and in television. I hope to be inspired for a long time to come. And for all those reasons, and more, I say, "Happy Anniversary, Superman!"
Here are a couple of quotes, one from the original Christopher Reeve film, and one from the upcoming MAN OF STEEL with Henry Cavill, both are supposed to be quotes from Superman's father Jor-El, and illustrate beautifully the things I've said here:
"It is now time for you to rejoin your new world, and serve as collective humanity. Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed. Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you..."
"You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders...What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?..You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time you will help them accomplish wonders."
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