It's Superman's 75th Birthday!

On this day, 75 years ago, Superman first appeared in newsstands and magazine racks around the country.  Created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, he's become one of the most recognizable icons in the world, has a new movie coming out this year, and can be found in every multimedia platform known to man, though it hasn't always been very good.

For instance, I was going to post a picture of the worst Superman video game of all time, but then I realized that it's pretty much all of them.




However, I know there are a lot of people who aren't really big fans of Superman.  They feel he's "boring" or "too powerful."  They'll complain about his villains not being as good as Batman's, his personality isn't as expanded as Spider-Man's, or he doesn't come across as interesting the way so many other characters are.

But I think that, sometimes, the idea of who or what Superman is sometimes gets lost.  Yeah, sometimes it's fun to simply watch him throw giant boulders at space aliens or punch evil suns into submission, but that shouldn't describe what Superman does.

What Superman does, when you boil away the powers, the cosmic fights, the Lois Lanes, Lex Luthors, Lana Langs, Lara Lor-Vans, Linda Lees, Lionel Luthers, Lyla Lerrols, and Lori Lemaris...es, what, really, makes Superman "Superman?"  He's a character who is, and always should be, inspiring everybody to be the best person they can be.  The man is idealism personified.  But don't just take my word for it, let's start by adding on some layers to his character again and see how they tie to this.

Let's start with his origin.  Everybody knows his origin story if they know anything about Superman, but for the sake of anybody who might be new to the character or stumbled to this article while looking for my recipe for Brussels sprouts, let's break it down with the best one-page summation of his back story you'll ever need:

You can click on the picture to make it bigger.  Don't worry, it doesn't bite.

You see that third line there?  "Last hope."  Superman is, quite literally (and yes I'm using that correctly), the last hope of not just the "El" family (no, really, that's his family's "house" last name, one more "L" initial) but the entire planet of Krypton to keep their technology, culture, and existence from being snuffed out in one big explosion.  The picture works on multiple levels, since the rocket itself was the "last hope" to keep Jor-El's son alive, and if I keep digging into metaphors like this, I'll probably strike oil.

So we have his past.  Rocketed from a doomed planet, raised by loving parents in Kansas.  Next up, of course, is the powers.  Superman needs to be ridiculously powerful, because without that power, his message loses meaning.  Let's compare him to another symbolic character in Captain America.  Cap, of course, always does the right thing, and is in many ways identical to Superman. They both fight evil, lead teams, and get twitchy when people start to worship them too much.

But the key difference is that Cap is "fixed" at being "at peak everything for a normal human."  He's not technically superhuman, so when he does stand up to mad space gods or deadly robots, he represents a person rising up, like how many of us hope we would do when confronted by bad situations.

Superman, on the other hand, only really has trouble against huge dangers (or magic, or Kryptonite, or- well, you get the idea).  So, for him, it isn't quite as impressive when he punches a robot's head off.  Where Superman comes into play is the fact that he's so powerful, if he wanted to he could conquer the entire world...but never would.  Superman could do anything he wanted to do and not have to worry about consequences for his actions, but instead he chooses, each and every day, to help people.

Captain America is all about choosing to stand up for what's right, Superman is all about choosing to help other people.

Now, let's bring back a few more things, namely the other people in his life.  Superman could easily destroy Lex Luthor. He could bury Lex's body at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, he could drop him into a volcano, he could throw Lex's body into outer space, but he would never do any of this.  Instead, he simply stops Lex, turns him in, and then continues doing the right thing.  However, multiple authors have shown just how disappointed Superman is with Lex, with all the power he has and what good he could do but chooses not to.

Lois, of course, is the love of Superman's life.  Again, Superman could choose to use his powers to seduce Lois and decide "I want you, you're mine."  Instead, he works at winning her heart as Clark Kent, minus the powers, and with pretty much what makes him a person being there to see if it is enough.

So we have his origin, his powers, and his connections...but what about the future?  Well, for that, we go forward a thousand years to the 30th/31st century and look at the Legion of Superheroes.

The Legion is one of my favorite superhero teams, but that's not for this article.  What is, however, is the fact that this is a team that starts out as a group of children (teenagers, really) who make the decision to work together to protect not just Earth, but an entire galaxy, since each one of them is from another planet.  It's a book about people of all types (races, you might say) choosing to work ttogether to try to help everybody with the powers that come naturally to them.  Sound familiar?

It should.  The Legion, in canon, exists because they were inspired by Superman.  Not the Justice League, not Batman, not Jonah Hex or any other DC comic book character, they're inspired by Superman, whose name has carried on one thousand years into the future.

I mean, seriously, how many characters, fictional or otherwise, can you think of that are from a thousand years ago?  But less than that, look at the characters who do still act as our legends.  We have our Robin Hoods, our King Arthurs, our Beowulfs, Achilles, Odysseus, and all the other classic heroes who we read about when we're young and think we want to be like.  This is just like that, but stretched out to the next level in that it not only inspires these kids to behave like how Superman inspired them, but to even name themselves in his fashion (he was Superman, so the Legion has Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, etc.).

What does it mean?  It means that Superman's never-ending fight against evil has a point.  It's not futile, it's not just someone barely holding back the tide of everything bad in life.  It's a man with a basic, simple message about making a choice having the impact he wants and having it last to a future we can barely comprehend and even beyond.

Is it hard to write stories about such a character?  Probably.  Can they be boring if not handled correctly?  Yes.  But when I crack open a book like Superman: Earth One where Superman decides to help a rebel army get guns so they can take down a dictator themselves, or any number of other stories where it's about the powers and not the man using them, I don't blame people for not being interested in Superman.  The movies also seem to have this problem, since we can see Superman being selfish (spying on Lois, revealing his identity just to wipe her mind later, and many other worse things).  The cartoons did a pretty good job, but when it's 22 minutes of plot, it's probably easier to keep the character consistent than when you're writing monthly stories in multiple books about him for decades.

We need writers who understand that Superman would help out every person any way he could, but he would do it in a way that inspires them to then help out someone else.  He wouldn't irrigate a desert just to help one group of people be fed, he'd do it so those same people would take the food they grow and share it with people who don't have any.

Superman is everything we should be, whether we're a person with a menial job or someone who managed to get their hands on a magic green ring that makes whatever the wearer wants, he is that ultimate goal for how to make the world better.