VM contributor and all-around good guy Tom Spurgeon recently posted a neat review of a Superman comic on his comicsreporter.com site. I don’t read much in the superhero genre anymore, but I’ve been a comics reader since I was a little kid. I’ll flip through issues on the newsstand, trying to figure out what happened to characters I used to read about, but that’s about it.
What I found interesting about this review was Tom’s discussion of writers’ tendency to approach superheroes from an ‘adult’ viewpoint. As he puts it:
I’ve long wondered if the problem with Superman is that his creators, going back to John Byrne twenty years ago, have written from what intrigues them about the character as adults rather than what might have interested them as a child. [. . .]
I think of all the big, iconic characters, Superman might suffer most for that now decades-old shift in approach. The other popular, franchise-bearing superheroes — Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man — at their conceptual core all traffic in emotional states that are of interest to teenagers, to those who fail to outgrow the teenager’s worries and concerns, and to those who don’t mind revisiting them. Beyond the spectacle he provides, Superman’s appeal rockets past adolescence to more of a little kid’s boundary-driven view of the world. Superman is the strongest. He’s the fastest. He’s the toughest. Kids grasp at Superman for the reason they read biographies about LeBron James and Alex Rodriguez and wish to visit the observation deck of the Sears Tower. Superman is the best, and the world gets filled in between what we know about ourselves and what we can figure out about him. It’s a much longer trip to see things from point of view starting out in our adult world than it is to get to the teenager’s insecurities and feelings of omnipotence. This may be one reason some of the best Superman stories are almost automatically written, or, as legend has it, penned by those working through some basic issues in therapy.
I think this is a nice companion to the Stagliano piece below. Go visit Tom’s site somedarntime.