The
Year Ten
Robert M. Price
It has been ten years since the death and resurrection of
Superman. After initial skepticism, thinking the man of Steel's rumored demise
must amount to no more than the cheapest of stunts, then after being pretty
much unimpressed with the Death of Superman story line (what did he die of,
anyway? He looked pretty undamaged to me), I must admit I was so taken with the
Reign of the Supermen sequence that even to this day I find myself noticing
dates of books or TV shows or other events and thinking: "Hmmm... so-and-so
many years after the death of Superman." And of course for the same reason
everything afterward has seemed anticlimactic to me, even the much-vaunted
costume change.
DC as DeConstruction
As Richard Reynolds observes in his book Super Heroes:
a Modern Mythology (University Press of Mississippi, 1992), the Reign of
the Supermen series was so fascinating, in part, because of the way it
deconstructed Superman, breaking him down into warring components of a single
entity. As Lois Lane noted during the Reign, it was the Man of Steel (DC's
shameless cloning of Iron Man and Thor put together, not that I'm complaining)
who seemed to have Superman's compassion. He was the Superman symbolized so
well by Kurt Busiek in Astro City as the Samaritan. And it is no
accident that the Man of Steel was the only one of the four Supermen who lacked
super powers. His piece of Superman was the latter's role as a Bodhisattva of
Compassion, his greatest super power.
The Last Son of Krypton was Superman
the avenger of righteousness, implacable foe of evil-doers. If we had always
felt a bit frustrated at Superman pulling his punches, we needed feel
frustrated no longer! This was Superman as the Punisher (who in fact used to
look like, to be drawn like, Superman in a black and white costume anticipating
the costume the fifth Superman, the "real" one, finally
appeared wearing). This Superman, with his wonderful pseudo-biblical
soliloquies reminiscent of Stan Lee, was the most obvious embodiment of the
Christ-figure premise underlying Superman from the beginning. This dimension of
the whole Superman Mythos had been perhaps made most explicit in the first
Christopher Reeve Superman movie, with its transparent hypertexting of
the Gospel of John. But we knew something was wrong: what was a Superman
without compassion? In terms of the deconstruction, the Last Son of Krypton was
also Superman the space alien, though this would only become fully clear once
we realized his secret identity as the Eradicator.
And
speaking of deconstruction, I must say I loved this costume. It was, I thought
as soon as I saw it, a classic deconstruction of the Superman suit, by which I
mean: the new costume was what the traditional one would look like if the
borders, the break-flows, were burst. The traditional costume wants to be what
this new one is: simply blue about the body, red in the cape. More than this,
the costume was a visual map of the major powers of Superman. The yellow visor
was the sign of his supervision, especially X-ray and heat vision. The Blue
vertical stripe symbolized Superman's body in flight, as against the black sky
of space whence he came. The Superman insignia, made large and separated from
the shirt as a shield, stood for Superman's invulnerability. The cape, flowing
out from the corners of the shield and up over the shoulders, like Thor's,
pictures the mighty shoulders of Superman, with super-strength able to bear any
burden. Nothing particularly represented his super-speed, but that fits with
the superfluity of that power: who needs it? It makes him too powerful and is
redundant of the Flash anyway.
Superboy
represents Superman the "boy scout," as he is sometimes called by
friend and foe alike. Plus, he restores the lost character of Superboy we miss
from before John Byrne. And he is us, the kids (even grown up) who persist in
reading comic books.
The Man
of Tomorrow combines Superman with his legion of robots as well as his other
technological gimmicks, Superman the scientist. Admittedly, we finally learn he
is the villain, no Superman at all, but until that point the character is
written, even to his internal monologue, as one of the Supermen, a good guy. So
we must make sense of him as a part of Superman.
Please Stand Up
I must admit that they had me fooled. I would have sworn
that in the Last Son of Krypton we had the true, risen Superman. Remember how
his droids in the Fortress said they had succeeded in collecting 97 per cent of
his dispersed energy (which we were supposed to understand meant his life-force
or soul)? What about the missing 3 per cent? I was sure we would hear that this
stray bit represented the missing piece of Superman's psyche: his compassion,
and that this had taken up temporary residence, a la Spock's katra, in
John Henry Irons, whence it would finally be restored. I assumed Superboy was
indeed a clone of Superman and was disgusted later to learn that he was not. I
still don't see the point in that revisionism. And as for the Man of Tomorrow,
I guessed that he would turn out to be that suped-up clone of the Guardian who
bade everyone farewell, saying, "If Metropolis ever needs another
Superman..." Even now I suspect this was an intentional Red Herring.
I loved
what they ended up doing, though. I had to go back and buy a few back issues to
figure out who the Eradicator and Hank Henshaw were, but it was worth it. The
Eradicator's Superman delusion was brilliant but should have and easily could
have been better explained as follows: the Eradicator "cloned" a
duplicate Superman body out of transmuted matter, and this must have included
Superman's dormant brain, which held all of his personality and memories. Once
the Eradicator's energy passed into this vessel, his own consciousness must
have clashed and merged with Superman's consciousness, again, in a manner
highly reminiscent of the McCoy-Spock fusion in The Search for Spock. I
assume this is what the writers really meant. If not, they should have. But it
was beautifully carried off in the way the Eradicator Superman would refer to
himself as Superman, then refer to Superman in the third person.
The most
effective bit of writing in the whole series, I thought, was this apparent
identification of the Last Son with the Risen Superman. Whether it was
fortuitous or brilliant, I don't know, but the ambiguity maintained for so many
issues is a prime case of the aporia quality that Tzvetan Todorov makes the
hallmark of "the Fantastic" in literature. Whereas out and out tales of the "Marvelous" make the reality
of the supernatural explicit up front, as in The Lord of the Rings, and
the "Uncanny" tale tricks you into thinking there are supernatural
events afoot until it is all revealed as a hoax (Doc Savage and Weird Menace
pulp novels, some detective fiction), the "Fantastic" maintains the
chill throughout by keeping the reader guessing. It might or might not be
supernatural. In its purest form, such a fiction never resolves the mystery,
perhaps throwing reason a sop, a possibility for a rational explanation, but
not a compelling one. In the same way, Reign of the Supermen kept us guessing
re the Last Son of Krypton. I mean, didn't we actually see him awaken in
the tomb and leave it? Surely this was the real Superman, not the others,
right? But then, that would be premature. But on the other hand, how could any
of the others be the real thing? It had to be him! But... Hmmm...
In case
you hadn't noticed, the very same technique is used with great effectiveness in
the gospel resurrection narratives, where the Risen Jesus appears to the pair
of disciples on the road to Emmaus "in another form" (Mark 16:12);
"their eyes were kept from recognizing him" (Luke 24:16). They think
he is a Passover pilgrim. Likewise, Mary Magdalene "saw Jesus standing,
but she did not know that it was Jesus" (John 20:14). She thinks he is the
caretaker. The point of the device is to introduce that spine-tingling element
of ambiguity and uncertainty, mounting suspicion, to prevent the presentation
of the resurrection from seeming pat and anticlimactic. The reader is drawn
into the wonder and fear of the characters: "You don't suppose...? This
couldn't be...? Could it?"
Aftershocks
I must admit, I loved the Last Son of Krypton character so
much that I wished they had kept him as Superman. I guess it wouldn't have
worked. But it would have been pretty interesting to prolong the uncertainty
for a year or so, making us think there really were now four Supermen where
there had been one originally. In fact, something like this did happen in the
ongoing and highly confused denouement of the Image/Extreme/Awesome series Supreme.
Again, I absolutely loved this character as he first appeared: Superman with a
Super-sized ego. Not Superman the Bodhisattva, not Superman the Samaritan.
Willing to hand an enemy his entrails. Fighting his old foe Thor (in the Superman
versus Thor bout we have never seen for real) just for the hell of it. And so
on. Supreme was so explicitly based on Superman that it was an error for fans
to consider it a rip-off. It was a brilliantly different take-off on Superman.
Frankly, I have never been able to understand the universal (except for me)
preference for the Alan Moore retooling of the character as a gentle parody of
Superman. I would go so far as to say that Moore ruined the character had not
the creative staff ruined the character already.
As you
know, Supreme aped Superman even to the latter's death, only his fatal foe was
the gray-skinned titan Crypt instead of the gray-skinned titan Doomsday. In the
next issue we saw an apparent resurrection of Supreme in a rejuvenated and "kinder,
gentler" form. Only eventually it turned out this was Supreme's daughter
from the future who had temporarily usurped the form of Supreme's future son.
Meanwhile on an alternate earth, a parallel-world Supreme landed in a rocket on
still a third earth. On the earth he had now reached there was a bearded,
power-drained Supreme, whom we later realize is the Supreme apparently killed
by Crypt. This one manages to switch bodies with the new arrival. But then he
flies into the hands of Alan Moore and is changed up again, even with a new
origin. Whew! Here ambiguity has degenerated into total confusion. In fact,
when I moved from New Jersey to North Carolina, I thinned out my comics
collection and gave away all the issues of Supreme after # 25 where the
one I knew and loved was killed. You see, I couldn't really tell if he ever
came back!
Last Son of Oa
Back in the DC universe, the major aftermath of the Death
and the Reign was a kind of instant replay of the whole scenario starring Green
Lantern. Having been asleep at the switch for the destruction of Coast City, he
redeemed himself, or tried to, by joining Superman and the rest for the final
battle with Mongul and the Cyborg Superman (as we must call him at this point).
But this was not enough. He went mad with grief and self-reproach, seizing the
god-like power to undo his tragic error and becoming a kind of Nietzschean
hero-villain in the process. Once he appeared as Parallax, losing his role as
Green Lantern to Kyle Raynor, and later still becoming the Spectre, Hal Jordan
in effect recapitulated the deconstruction of Superman. During the Engine City
battle itself he had already taken on the likeness of Steel (John Henry Irons)
by encasing himself in armor. Parallax was pretty much like the original Eradicator,
trying to wipe out one world to replace it with another (in Zero Hour),
whereas the Spectre persona was like the Last Son's "avenging son"
persona. Kyle, of course, is the GL version of Superboy. With the return of
John Stewart, we even have another Steel GL, a black Superman.
Neither
may we ignore the reflections of the Super-resurrection elsewhere in the Reign
storyline itself. Obviously the clone Superboy was a reflection of the Guardian
clone from the same vat, both rehashes of once-retired characters. But he was
also like the alien, shape-shifting Supergirl, another different-origin
substitute for a Superman Family character missing since the Crisis on Infinite
Earths. The Man of Tomorrow was analogous to the Lex Luther redivivus, his
brain having survived death and been placed into a borrowed body. Likewise, it
seemed what was left of Superman had been salvaged by grafting it onto a robot
frame. And then, after giving his life for Superman, as Superman had sacrificed
his own, the Eradicator is himself raised from the dead, and that by yet
another fusion of one consciousness with another, near to death. Ripples across
a pond.
Dead Again and Again
If it is hard to follow an act like the Death and the
Reign, one cannot say DC didn't try. In fact they tried to follow it by
repeating it! How about the "Dead Again" story line? Superman's
corpse reappears, forcing him to wonder if he is not some sort of a substitute
clone, and not the genuine Superman at all. An interesting premise, though I
could not really buy the notion of Superman becoming so paranoid as he did.
The
introduction of the temporary (what a surprise!) new costume and powers was yet
another replay, for who can deny that what we saw was another death and rebirth
of Superman, and it even included another subplot dealing with the family life
of Lex Luthor. Nor did it lack the proliferation-of-Supermen element, as that
ram-horned refugee from multi-cultural Kandor fished Superman's old costume out
of the garbage and donned it, and when the Electro-Superman split into Superman
AC and Superman DC, I mean Superman Red and Superman Blue, a story arc with a
"resolution" as bad as the "Maximum Clonage" fiasco over at
Marvel (which, come to think of it, was
yet another version of the same damn thing).
Over in
Superboy's title, the Black Zero stories formed an interesting piece of
apocrypha to the gospel of the slain and resurrected Superman. One might almost
see Black Zero as a worthy addition to the four horsemen of the Reign.
The utter
exhaustion of the Superman saga of late may be evidenced by the endless
repetitions of the "What if Kal-el's rocket landed someplace else?"
premise. Among the Amish, the Soviets, the Nazis, on Apokalips, in England, in
Luthor's clutches, on Rann, on Oa, on Thanagar. Reminds me of the Jataka
Tales of the Buddha, according to which there is not a foot of ground on
the whole earth where the Buddha did not give his life for others in some
previous incarnation. Yeah, all right. Maybe I ought to get rid of all my
issues after the Reign, like I did with Supreme. Like I say, a tough act to
follow.