Originally published at: Superman now officially fights for "a better tomorrow" instead of the American way | Boing Boing
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right now, 'merica doesn’t deserve Superman’s support.
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A Better Tomorrow
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Something something Confederate flag too.
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Sure, there is a cynical interpretation that this is pandering to anti-American progressivism.
Which means this will be the outrage o’ the day on Faux News.
The fact is that Superman is indeed a global superhero and has been for decades. It’s also true that the tacked-on “American Way” of the 1950s (built on consumerism, unregulated capitalism, and fossil fuels) is too unsustainable to secure a better future.
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A better tomorrow is entirely antithetical to the American Way, so I warmly welcome this volte-face.
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Obviously, they had to decide whether he wants truth and justice or he wants the American way. I think they made the right choice.
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“There’s a war on Superman.”
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Those exact words will be used on Faux today. Guaranteed.
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If a conservative gripes about ruining the institution of Superman, they should be reminded he’s an undocumented immigrant from a non-Christian culture who writes for the mainstream media under an assumed name. If he were real, he’d be everything they fear.
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Fox News is going to be so pissed.
For a better tomorrow:
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Add to that terror by reminding them that he was created by a non-'Murrican (Canadian) artist and an American writer, both Jewish.
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And then drive the point home by directing them to the work of Stetson Kennedy against their fellow white supremacists.
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well done
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But I think the way he has always been written is very tied into American culture. That’s what makes the “what if” scenario Red Son in which Superman arrived as an infant not in FDR’s US but Stalin’s USSR so interesting – while the US, was, and is, imperfect, “truth” and “justice” were quite something else in Stalin’s USSR (even if the story has Supes eventually rebelling against Stalin).
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He’s tied into a certain kind of American culture. An urban immigrant’s idealized version of Middle American agrarian working class. The point is made in Superman 3 that he would only sell his parent’s farm to a family.
The unloved 90’s syndicated series Superboy had a string of episodes with alternate Supermen based on where they landed. One landing on a corporate owned farm across from the Kents ends up being groomed as a fascist dictator.
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For one period he was tied into it, but for decades now he’s been portrayed in the comics as operating outside the American context as often or not more than he’s been shown operating within it.* People over age 35 or so who don’t read the comic books encounter him through the older serials and the TV show and 1970s movies and Saturday morning cartoons, which are more stuck in the old-style jingoistic “American way” narrative of WWII and the 1950s (though not the original immigrant narrative). The non-comics portrayals in the more recent movies and cartoons are changing that and this is DC trying to keep up.
[* “Superman: Peace on Earth” stands out in that regard. When it came out, conservatives hated it.]
American right-wingers are now effectively Stalinists in their political praxis. We’ll be seeing an expression of that as they decry this decision and demand that Superman continue to be portrayed as an American version of “Red Son” (without the rebellion against authority).
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