A Geek’s Guide To Storytelling

The Big Blue Boy Scout

Tripwire’s columnist, author Joshua Khan, writer of the forthcoming fantasy book series Shadow Magic, gives us off the latest in his occasional column arguing that Superman is the finest example of the superhero, even eight decades after he was first created.

Super. Adjective. Of the highest degree, power.

Hero. A person distinguished by their courage, or ability, admired by his brave deeds and noble qualities.

Look at the definition above. Combine it into the word ‘superhero’ and ask yourself, who qualifies best? And put those Marvel prejudices aside just for a second.

He wears a red cape, wears a blue all-in-one and has a big proud ‘S’ on his chest.

That’s pretty much the article.

Look, I love Batman. I’m pretty fond of Daredevil and read plenty of X-Men all through the eighties and my comics shelves are as much Marvel as they are DC, with a fair splattering of Image and Rebellion and the like, but Superman RULES.

Superman’s not edgy. He’s not cool. He doesn’t kill the bad guy. All he does is go around saving cats outta trees. He’s got all these powers it’s too easy for him.

He’s too good.

Oh, wake up!

Being good is easy?

©2015 Joel Meadows

I reckon the biggest criticism we throw at old Supes is his goodness, as if it’s no big deal. Time to claim ‘goodness’ back as the No.1 hero quality. If you don’t think its relevant in the real world, then your world is a sad, hopeless place and I don’t want to live in it. Who would?

Doing the right thing is hard. In fact it’s nigh on impossible. Doing the right thing when you’re the most powerful being in the world, capable of wiping out cities if you get it wrong, well that’s going to weigh on your mind. Doing the right thing can lead to a world of chaos.

Don’t believe me?

POTUS is the most powerful man in the world. Obama even joked about coming from Krypton. Before him we had Bush, the pervious most powerful being in the world. I bet they all thought they were doing the right thing, the good thing, when they bombed Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria and before that Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea. I’m not going to be partisan here, Putin thinks he’s a superhero and has plenty of good to spread in Chechnya and Ukraine and you’d better be bulletproof (and radiation proof) if you’re a mild-mannered reporter out of the ex-Soviet Union.

The point I’m making is that adding power to goodness is a recipe for Armageddon.

Superman’s moral centre is his greatest quality. No other hero has it. Batman, in the end, is motivated by bloody revenge. Spiderman by a sense of guilt (poor Uncle Ben). Captain America comes close, but the stars and stripes brand him, for better or for worse, an American through and through.

Superman believes in the American Way, along with Truth and Justice. But his America is a country made great by the immigration myth, because that’s what he is, the ultimate immigrant. Leave your (old world) troubles behind. Come out to America and you can be more than you were. This is the land of opportunity. You can have hope here. Superman is American by adoption, not birth. He’s not originally Irish, or Italian, or Greek or British or this or that. He didn’t come woven—tangled—with a past of prejudice. He came with nothing but hope.

It’s cool how the ‘S’ symbol has been branded as the Kryptonian ideal of ‘hope’. That’s the best of all human emotions. It is the only defence we have against cynicism, against the fear that things are bad and only ever going to get worse. Hope keeps us going through the darkest moments, it sees us beyond the despair of our present day. To see Superman is to hope. He’s not here for himself, he’s here for us. All of us because, unlike God, he does not judge. He’s going to save you if you’re black, gay or have a funny accent.

What must it be like, floating amongst the stars, looking down at us? Superman hears and sees our folly, and oh how hard it must be not to judge us and our idiocy, yet he hopes. The ‘Man of Steel’ trailer from a few years back nailed it. By example, by being an ideal, he hopes we can rise above what we often are, which is petty and selfish and cruel to our fellows, and be, well, super in our own way.

We can’t have an article on Big Blue without discussing Batman. The light and dark natures are too obvious to mention, so I won’t. What I want to compare, in my own clumsy way, is their iconic statuses.

Batman is the World’s Greatest Detective. Why? How? Could it be because he thinks the worst of people? He has no faith in humanity. How could he? He saw his parents murdered for a wallet and handful of pearls. Nothing at all. There was no grand plan, no conspiracy, just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pure, stupid random luck. Banal, even. He sees the world the same way as the Joker does, all chaos and arbitrary. While the Joker has embraced it, Batman looks for a pattern, some defining logic. It makes you question who out of the pair is the most insane.

Superman is the Big Blue Boy Scout. Growing up in Kansas, being a farmer, seeing the seasons come and go, his world view is that bad things happen to good people but that is the way of nature, not chaos. You can have droughts, tornadoes, blizzards and floods. These things can’t be prevented, but what happens afterwards is down to you. You can help. You can rebuild. Replant. You save what you can, be it grain, livestock or the farmer’s family. Yes, sure, today was shit, but tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a better day and the sun will shine and the clouds will clear. It’s not by chance Superman chose to settle in Metropolis, the City of Tomorrow.

So, faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Isn’t that all just… super?

Joshua Khan’s Shadow Magic is out in April. Follow him on Twitter @WriterJoshKhan

Shadow Magic