Comics: A Tale of Two Supermen!

Or is it three Supermen? DC Comics currently publishes three different versions of their flagship character – not three different Superman titles (I think that number is up to eight, yes? If we use the yardstick of ‘title which wouldn’t exist without Superman’ and thus exclude Justice League but include both the idiotically-titled Batman/Superman and the idiotically titled Superman/Wonder Woman), but three different conceptions of Superman himself. I can’t recall another time in the company’s long history when that was the case.

The first version, by default of ubiquity and popularity, is the Superman of “The New 52,” the re-envisioning of the character in the wake of the company’s soup-to-nuts reboot a couple of years ago. That Superman is decked out in a kind of super-armor, a corseted suit complete with military-style upright collars and seams of piping in random locations – and more importantly, he’s a self-absorbed and aloof douchebag, perfect and judgemental, very much an alien among us (it’s no coincidence that this version was the one handed to Zack Snyder for use in what turned out to be the most successful Superman movie of all time, the one where he lets Pa Kent die, flattens Metropolis, and murders his enemy). When “The New 52″ launched, this new Superman starred in newly-renumbered runs of Superman and Action Comics, and they were in their own separate ways almost physically painful experiences for any long-time Superman fan such as myself.

Those long-time fans recently got something of a gift from DC: a new series called The Adventures of Superman which features (bizarrely, and almost certainly for murky legal reasons of copyrighting) the traditional Superman, the one I grew up eagerly reading. The quick field-guide style identifying signs of this traditional Superman are his hair (there’s a spit-curl) and his costume: the reds are brighter, the blues are brighter, and the bright red underpants are on the outside as Rao intended. But the deeper, more important tags are here as well: this Superman, despite his vast powers, is a caring, human figure, someone well-loved and well-trusted by humanity at large. He’s a hero, not just some weird alien guy who’s dating Wonder Woman and might decide to turn against mankind at any moment. And one more little tip of the hat to that “traditional” Superman: the stories in The Adventures of Superman (which had their origins online, the kids tell me) are not only heartfelt but short and self-contained, no inflated multi-part arcs designed to be overpriced trade paperbacks.

And then there’s the third ongoing version of the character, DC’s Smallville: Season Eleven, which, again almost certainly for murky legal reasons, continues the story-lines of the popular TV series Smallville, which ended with Clark Kent (played by pucker-mouthed tobacco addict Tom Welling) taking on the identity of Superman for the first time. The Superman in this very odd series is largely undefined as a character, and since the artistic directive mandates that he and his supporting cast be drawn to resemble the actors from the show, everybody looks like they’ve had botched reconstructive surgery. But even so, this is a Superman – fighting severely re-imagined versions of the comics’ super-villains, teaming up with severely re-imagined versions of other DC superheroes (including, just recently, Batman), but in love with Lois Lane and famously – almost by definition – imbued with the very human values of his Smallville upbringing.

Reading the most recent issues of Superman, Action Comics, and The Adventures of Superman (hard-core fan that I am, I still can’t really bring myself to stomach the mostly necrophilic shenanigans of Smallville, although I’ve glimpsed fleeting signs that it could, if allowed, morph into something interesting), I was struck by something that gave me a twinge of optimism: convergence. Leaving aside the bewilderingly antagonistic world of the movie franchise and just concentrating on the comics, I couldn’t help but notice this week that that “New 52″ version of Superman seems to be moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, closer to the traditional Superman. In the latest Action Comics, for instance, written by Greg Pak and drawn mostly by Aaron Kuder (he gets a couple of assists for a few pages, because it’s a well-known fact that no human being can pencil all 22 issues of a comic book by himself), although still a god-being who floats rather than walks and who lives in a gigantic arctic fortress instead of an apartment on Clinton Street, at least shows a more openly emotional connection to his Smallville upbringing – and thanks to Kuder’s pleasingly offbeat artwork, it’s certainly thrilling to watch him fight monsters alongside his childhood sweetheart Lana Lang. There’s idealism creeping in here too, and I think this is only natural: the “New 52″ A-hole is a very new creation – today’s up-and-coming comics writers didn’t spend their youths dreaming of some day writing that unappealing character. They spent their youths dreaming of writing the real, ‘traditional’ Superman who gradually re-emerged after John Byrne’s catastrophic revisions of the character back in 1986. That re-emergence happened for the same reasons: writers want to add to the lore of Superman, not the lore of Hot Writer X.

Of course, the lore of Superman is on full display in the latest Adventures of Superman, written by Marc Guggenheim and wonderfully drawn by Joe Bennett in a heartwarming story called “Tears for Krypton” in which the Man of Steel is shocked to learn that his home planet of Krypton never in fact exploded – and that his father Jor-el is still alive. To put it mildly, it’s an old, old story idea – but that hardly matters when you’re dealing with a legendary character, and Guggenheim and Bennett knock it out of the park.

I’ve given up hoping DC Comics will ever fully restore this Superman, the brightly-colored much-admired hero who’s in love with a human woman because he considers himself human. I’ve largely made my peace with this new version of Superman who plays video games, calls people “dude,” and mostly thinks people less powerful than himself are kinda lame. But as long as The Adventures of Superman limps along at the comics shop, I can still get a little taste of that grand tradition – and if something of that grand tradition slowly terraforms the soulless new version of the character, so much the better.