I am not an expert on Superman by any means, but… ever since I was very young, I’ve been a fan of the late George Reeves (Figure 1) starring in The Adventures of Superman on TV (of course, I was only able to watch it sporadically while it was on TV for a couple of reasons; the main one being that my mother felt it was based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, the ones that the Nazis adopted about Übermensch). That idolization inevitably led me to read the comic book based on the TV show. I started reading those in the late 1950s, but I wasn’t able to collect them because of my mother’s beliefs—and no Batman and Robin, either, because an adult man living with a teenage boy? Whoa, Nelly! She believed they were secretly gay back in the time when it was not only forbidden to be gay, it was illegal in most places. (You don’t want to know what she did with my EC horror comics, The Crypt of Terror, etc.when she read the Fredric Wertham book, Seduction of the Innocent.)
Anyway, even after The Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman, etc. became part of my regular reading, Superman—whether comic or TV-based—remained my own, personal superhero. He was the ultimate Boy Scout: never lied (except to protect someone or his identity), never killed anyone, was embarrassed by accolades, and could do almost anything cool a kid (or a teenager or even a grownup) could think of. So over the years, I watched or read anything related to Supes (as we called him). (Oddly enough, I guess, I never cared for most of the animated TV shows featuring him; whether true or not, I thought that they were exploiting him—and I am not a big fan of overstylized animation.)
So I saw (not in order) Lois & Clark; Superboy, Smallville and Supergirl as TV series; naturally, I saw every live-action Superman on the big screen as possible: George Reeves (again) vs. The Mole Men, Chris Reeve (no relation) in four increasingly bad films, Henry Cavill in the most recent Superman/Justice League movies, and I will definitely watch David Corenswet as Clark/Supes next year—but with some trepidation. And somewhere in there, Kirk Alyn should be mentioned as the star of a 1940s movie serial, shown chapter-by-chapter in theaters before various main feature movies.
Will I sound really stupid and juvenile here when I confess I have a big red/yellow “S” on my bathrobe? And sheets and pillowcases (bought for me by my bighearted love o’my life) and a cap with a shiny metal “S” and even a beautiful official WB leather jacket (a Christmas present) shown below (Figure 3)? Yeah, well, maybe I am stupid and juvenile in part.
Anyway, Tyler Hoechlin (Figure 4), who played Superman to Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl (Kara Zor-El), somehow had “the look”—not necessarily giant and muscular like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but a look of gravitas and competence. I kinda liked him as Supes. I watched the show until it became too silly even for me, and quit watching during the final season) and was pleased to see him become Supes again in a new series—even though it’s obvious the showrunners have never read Larry Niven’s story “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”
I’d like to talk about—not necessarily review—this series a bit, mostly about the current season, which is Season Four, I think. We’ve watched seven out of the nine or ten episodes.
If you haven’t watched this series, it—like the Smallville series of a few years ago—is set in the fictional town of Smallville, Kansas. After working at the Daily Planet for a while as reporters, Clark Kent and Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch) got married; she got pregnant (see note about Niven) and they are raising two fraternal twins named Jonathan (Jordan Elsass)—after Clark’s father—and Jordan (Alex Garfin). And now the boys are 16, having grown up in Smallville.
Over the past several seasons, we’ve met several of Smallville’s inhabitants, as we did in the eponymous previous series, like Lana Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who, divorced from her husband Kyle (Erik Valdez) who’s the head of the fire brigade, ran for office and became mayor. It’s not quite a little Peyton Place of a town, but it’s certainly a mini soap opera. There is another superhero in town, John Henry Irons (Wolé Park), who is actually from a different Earth—he wears a flying A.I.-powered steel suit—but his wife and that entire Earth was killed by a rogue parallel Superman (I told you it was a soap!).
Of course there are continuing villains, like Lex Luthor (Michael Cudlitz), who blames Lois Lane for putting him in prison for 17 years for a killing he was actually innocent of. Not that he didn’t kill lots of other people, but still… Lex had created a super-monster that eventually killed Superman (!), but thanks to the serum Lex made using Supes’s blood, Lois’s father, General Sam Lane (Dylan Walsh), who was head of the Department of Defense (DoD), Supes was eventually brought back to life with Sam Lang’s heart, since the monster stole his and Lex stomped on it. (See “invulnerability” below.)
Clark’s twin boys are now evidencing powers of their own and, in the last episode (here comes a major spoiler!) Clark finally revealed to the town and, through them, the whole world, who he actually was.
All that was actually even more soap-y than the Smallville series, and that was pretty bad—even crossing over into Real Life when that series’ Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) was arrested and imprisoned for racketeering on Federal charges and served almost 3 years in Federal prison. Hey, nobody said that TV or movie stars were any smarter or more honest than us ordinaly folk. We’re all human, unlike Superman.
Over the decades, what was Superman canon in the ‘30s changed when World War II broke out (how could Superman not have ended the war?), then in the ‘50s it changed more—Supes got more powerful and more additional powers; the cast of characters changed in the comics and in the movies. His costume changed, from the cursive “S” symbol in the original Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster comic to the stylized “S” in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The original costume had been “woven out of baby Kal-El’s blankets by Martha Kent” and the “S” stood for Superman; now the costume is a super-suit made out of some unknown patterned and three-dimensional “fabric” with an even more three-dimensional “S” that stands for something like “justice” on Krypton.
It used to be that everything from Krypton was literally invulnerable on Earth; even Supes’ hair could not be cut unless he bounced an X-ray or heat vision ray at it from a barber’s mirror to soften it so Clark Kent could be seen to not be invulnerable. Superman’s powers came originally from, first, Krypton was a heavy-gravity planet, much heavier than Earth, and secondly, because of the yellow sun; Krypton’s sun was red (I’m not sure when that came in. Originally he couldn’t fly; he just “leaped tall buildings with a single bound,” as the intro to the Reeves Superman series said.) In Superman Returns, a machine “chain gun” bullet (at least .50 caliber) bounced off Superman’s eyeball! Bullets (and, when the gun was empty, thrown guns) routinely bounced of George Reeves’s chest. So how the heck in this series, did Lex Luthor stomp on and squash Superman’s heart? And he’s now powered by yellow sunlight, so his powers change from minimal to maximal depending on our sun.
But you can’t—well, you could, but let’s not go there—nit-pick all the inconsistencies in the various comics, series, and movies—and let’s not forget the original book: Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (Figure 2), the book that pretty much started the whole super-being thing; Siegel and Shuster (or maybe their publisher) were sued by Wylie’s estate for stealing the idea, though they swore in court they’d never read the book. (Oddly enough, some time before the suit, one of the two had written a review of Wylie’s book in a fanzine!) Of course, Wylie’s protagonist, Hugo Danner, was made “super” through some kind of serum and was no superhero; in fact, being super made his life very difficult. (I haven’t read the book for at least forty years, but if you want to, it’s available to download in digital form from Project Gutenberg.)
So there you have it: my take on Superman in general and more or less on the current series Superman and Lois (which is filmed here in the Vancouver area!). Despite my many quibbles, I’m still watching it. I guess I’m just hooked on Superman!
Please let me know what you think about this. You can comment here or on Facebook, or even by email (stevefah at hotmail dot com). All comments are welcome; you can even disagree with me (politely, I hope). My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!
