Working in an industry gives you insight and peeks into the behind-the-scenes operations that people seem to have a great deal of opinions and thoughts on, despite often having little interest in how decisions are actually made and companies are actually run. I think the most surprising thing to a lot of comic book, and superhero, fans is just how rigidly controlled the larger publishers are, and how shaky the grips of a lot of executives making critically important decisions are as well. A perfect example was in the mid-2010s, when DC Comics decided to release a pair of mega-collections covering the enormity of the histories of Superman and Batman. And the stories included can tell you a lot about how both characters were perceived at the time: Batman’s was full of varied stories, some origins, some failures, a lot of stuff you’d expect, a few things you wouldn’t. Superman’s told a very different story. A much more apologetic one. Superman’s stories were mostly focused on his origins, his failings, and the few times he became evil, whether in a side-story or the mainline titles. And people loved hearing about what was included in that collection, but few actually bought it. People just seemed to respond to how “OP” Superman was, and enjoyed the concept of him being taken down a few pegs. Not enough to buy it, of course, but they loved to talk about it endlessly. 

And the people who actually liked Superman? All they ever heard about online and in comic stores was how boring, broken, and stupid he was. Why would they want a massive, expensive omnibus to appeal to THAT audience and not themselves? It’s the kind of environment where you might hand your biggest franchise character, the character that could legitimately lay claim to “starting this all,” to a director with a shallow, key-jangling, Randian vision of objectivism that means his inherent might makes him inherently right. He doesn’t need humanizing, his entire point is that he’s an inhuman god detached from the petty woes of stupid ants scrabbling for meaning in an uncaring world. Doesn’t that sound strangely like the loudest complaints people have always had about the character?

I’m not here to re-litigate the Snyderverse movies, I’m not here to defend the James Gunn Superman movie (I haven’t even seen it, as of the writing of this article), I’m here to say: it’s strange that filmmakers from Snyder to Burton all seem to think, when they take on a project like this, they’re the first one to ever have an idea like: Superman is CORRUPT. Or Superman is POWERLESS. Or Batman KILLS! Or Spider-Man has real-world PROBLEMS! They want to shatter a mold that’s already hanging up in a comics museum in 4 broken pieces, yet they think their vision is unique, special, and more adult than anything in comics. The irony can be seen from space.

The most common complaint you’ll hear anyone say about Superman is that he’s just “too boring.” He’s overpowered, so he can do anything, and there’s no peril in a hero who can do anything. Well, okay, he can’t do ANYTHING. There’s this green rock that fucks him up good, but otherwise? Totally invulnerable. Oh! Except magick, he has basically no resistance to that beyond a normal person’s because magick is a fundamental force, not an Earth-based one. Oh, also: that same rock from before? It screws with his mood when it’s encountered in other colors, but that doesn’t count cause I personally don’t find it compelling and they once had a pink one, so it’s stupid forever. The color pink doesn’t belong anywhere near the bright, cheery, uplifting world of fantasy superheroes! And, of course, there’s a half-dozen alien supervillains who can genuinely go toe-to-toe with him in a punchfight! Plus the interdimensional imp that can do anything and likes to mess with him. Oh, even his regular-ass human arch-rival has robots and power armor that can at least make him rate in a punchfight too! But otherwise, he’s SUPER boring and impossible to write a credible threat for. Except when he’s evil. When he’s evil, he’s  interesting because he has even fewer limitations, that’s REALLY when he’s interesting! When he has EVEN FEWER limits!

You start to see where this is a deeply weird complaint, yeah? It’s why the character has often been the subject of social issues since his inception: no matter how much power someone has, they can’t solve fundamental problems of humanity. He was created as an overt power fantasy by two European-Jewish immigrants in the 1930s who wanted to imagine a comic book character so ridiculously powerful, he could solve the World War currently raging across Europe in a few seconds. Yes, while Captain America was punching Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his comics, Superman was plucking Stalin and Hitler out of their respective headquarters and gently delivering them to International Prison. Problem solved forever! And thus was born a modern Herakles. Or Beowulf. Or Sun Wukong. Or Robin Hood. Or Rama. Or…Paul Bunyan? No, he’s boring: Johnny Appleseed? Huh… Yeah, we kinda sucked at modern mythmaking before superheroes, didn’t we? Except all those forest cryptids, Calamity Jane, John Henry Irons, you know: the ones that people still reference. And that gets to the heart of why Superman can come off so boring: he’s a primordial being of fiction. He’s one of the first superheroes, a genre that’s recently become more like a medium to have genres within! But he also needs to come out with three comic book issues every single month, come hell or high water!

And here’s the thing (not Ben Grimm), I get it. I do. Superman has all of the powers and he got them by being born on another planet and coming to this one. In many ways, he’s the jingoist nightmare of immigration realized: someone who arrives and does better simply because they were born somewhere else. Writing a story where he’s imperiled isn’t the easiest thing in the world, despite my above list, but I hardly think it’s worth the gallons of analog and digital ink spilled over the decades to describe what an impossibility it is. And here’s where I would normally recommend the transcendental All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, except I’m not going to do that. Mr. Myxlplyk’s not the only one with a trick or two up his interdimensional imp sleeve! A lot of people probably already have recommended the book, and I probably agree with most of them because it is absolutely worth all the hype. But I’ll tell you something funny: when I first read All-Star Superman, when I was 20 and had just started in a comic book store for the first time? I hated it. I despised it. I thought it was the most overrated schlock I had ever put my eyes to, and I’d been deeply ensconced in comics for two, maybe even THREE, whole years! It’s bright and colorful, and the characters have this odd look to them where they don’t look traditionally beautiful or glamorous, but they don’t look “ugly,” they’re just…ODD! What was this book DOING?! I hated it. Passionately! And then a very funny thing happened around the same time: people started taking Batman way too fucking seriously. Myself included.

All-Star Batman & Robin: The Boy Wonder (written by Frank Miller, drawn by Jim Lee, and yep: that’s the whole title) came out around the same time, the two books were meant to be “twins” in celebrating the legacy of both characters, and perhaps even starting something new. Things did not pan out that way. Batman & Robin became this bizarre time capsule of ultra-edgelord, reactionary writing as Miller seemed to internalize internet feedback in real time and openly mocked it in the pages of the issues as they came out, each more delayed than the last. Each snipe and swipe at the very fanbase that was supposed to be supporting the title seemed less and less biting, accurate, or even necessary. While it managed a few startlingly good issues, it was never at the level of All-Star Superman. Because I can tell you the NEXT time I read that book, it just clicked and I suddenly understood the hype.

And I wouldn’t deny anyone that experience, instead I’m going to swerve and talk about Emperor Joker. And that’s going to be tricky, because Emperor Joker wasn’t a planned, prestige, mega-collection, it was a story that stretched across the normal monthlies of various ongoing Superman titles. Passed from the hands of Jeph Loeb, JM DeMatteis, Mark Schultz, and Joe Kelly and that’s not even getting into the artists! Except I am getting into them! Don’t like it? Don’t read comics! We’ve got Ed McGuinness, Cam Smith, Tanya & Richard Horle, Richard Starkings, Mike Miller, Jose Marzan Jr., Kano, Marlo Alquiza, Carlo Barberi, Scott McDaniel, Duncan Rouleau, Todd Nauck, Jaime Mendoza, Richard Bonk, Richard Starkings, Armando Durruthy, Bill Oakley, Ken Lopez, and Moose Baumann along with WildStorm FX and Comicraft (WHEW!)

Written from the ground up to be Superman Vs The Joker, the ultimate do-see-do, or “Castling,” as it’s also called in the pages of Superman/Batman (by Loeb and McGuiness), the arch-nemesis of Batman is menacing the Big Blue Boyscout! Now, of course, there’s some heavy-lifting to be done to make those two stand on equal footing, and the Joker’s trick of Emperor Joker is, of course, the creative team does exactly that! Without introducing any new characters or breaking any existing rules, the creative team brings Joker well beyond Superman’s level and takes the audience along for the ride.

There’s going to have to be a few necessary spoilers, but the title of the collected issues itself is a spoiler: we open on Arkham Asylum with a black-suited Superman breaking out after declaring he isn’t insane and will no longer be held. Tearing through the Asylum into a world gone mad, he’s immediately confronted by the Joker’s League of Anarchy, led by the ever-irritating Bizarro, who keep stomping Supes back into the Asylum. Every night, Superman tries to leave, and every night he’s forced to yield and return, trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results in a world where insanity is the new norm. The Joker being behind everything isn’t even revealed until nearly midway through the title, it was called Superman: Arkham Asylum until then, but his presence is all over the opening half.

Superman and Steel, renamed Hank Aaron Irons in what feels like a veiled jab at the character’s original ham-fisted moniker, are at the forefront of the fight for rationality in a world where reality has truly come asunder. The other Justice League characters are all brilliantly re-imagined satirical takes on their most glaring flaws, and the villainous team is made up almost entirely of new creations from Loeb and McGuinness, but none are so wildly powerful that they become a backdoor contrivance to get the creators out of this pickle of a plot. There’s even a red-herring or two on the team to let the reader think they’re two steps ahead of the creators, but it never feels like a rug-pull when the truth is revealed. The creators ARE going to return to the status quo by story’s end, but they’re also not just going to have Mr. Terrific invent a Reality Machine to just “fix everything” after they run out of ideas for credible threats.

While I don’t think the team set out to do this from the start, the whole story reminds me of an anecdote Frank Miller and Alan Moore both tell of when they were tired at a comic convention’s end way back in the ‘80s, and had sat down to just shoot the shit over food, drinks, and to just recharge some of that energy that’s lost on the “working” side of convention life. They started talking about their writing methods and processes as peers often do and they began to debate and one-up each other on the worst situation they could put Superman in and still be able to write their way credibly out of: both settled on “Superman In Hell” being the most compelling. Rather brilliantly, that’s what Emperor Joker is: it’s Superman in Hell. But it’s Hell as shaped by the DCU and its decades-long history and stories. Supes is the only sane person in a world forced to go mad by The Joker and his near-omnipotent stolen power. And I hear you! The DCU is known for some of the most OP space gods in all comics, so surely the answer is just the Spectre, Darkseid, Ganthet, or some boring cosmic crap head just fixin- nope, stop, they’re there. They’ve been accounted for with one of the most “it was definitely the year 2000 when they wrote this” references possible.

I promise, as someone who was there: it was funny at the time…ok, it was funny-ISH at the time.

This isn’t some Johnny-Come-Lately filmmaker with his head below the clouds because “gray skies are cooler” thinking they’re the first person to try and break the foundational rules of a character and world whose history goes back almost a century, these are comic book writers and artists who know their shit because they live that shit. Once you stop trying to find loopholes in the story that this team is telling, you might even find yourself really enjoying it. It’s chock to the brim with background gags, references to deep-cut characters, and even pop culture of the time, and that all feels like part of the point. And the book is incredible, it’s one of the best Superman stories ever told. And Batman’s even in there too! And, oh he’s so brooding. He’s so grim. He’s so everything the weird martyr fanbois want out of their rich gadget Daddy, and he’s not even funny once! And it’s fucking tragic.

There’s a reason the same few Superman books are being recommended by a lot of people now: they’re stand-outs that are still referenced by modern creators for making the character more than he was: a rough, blunt power fantasy for people who were truly disempowered at the time. But he’s still that too! He IS still hard to write for, harder now than ever! It’s hard to continuously imagine problems he can’t punch, heat-vision, or frost-breath his way out of, it’s why him being a tentpole character is so WEIRD: he should be a character who only shows up when he’s needed. He’s perhaps the least suited to being written constantly and by a deadline rather than by an idea, because the quality floor is so much lower than someone like Batman, who seems to cycle through ideas like changes of costumes.

It’s little surprise that people gravitate toward the one of those two that seems more approachable, but c’mon, now, be real. Is Batman REALLY “unpowered,” or is he just very conveniently written? He’s not even “rich as a superpower lol wink nudge,” he’s got a pocket-dimension belt and gadget-crafting like Forge from the X-Men. That’s all. There’s nothing he can’t buy or invent in a single night in his lab, he’s just as OP and boring as Superman when he’s written badly. Apologies if this is news to you, but if you like “realism over superpowers,” you should know: there’s no real “body-armor reinforced eighty times with Super-American Military Kevlar Weaves and Uncle Sam’s Own Reaganomics Plating” enough for someone like Bane, Killer Croc, or a cosmic space-warlord to punch him hard enough to detach his head and still let him “walk it off.” If you want to get into stuff like “ninja training in the mountains,” I’d really like to ask for clarification on how that’s more “real” than giving him a magickal flaming sword, a suit of mystical armor, and calling him “Azrael the Batknight.” If Ra’s al-Ghul gets no credit for having no powers, then neither does Batman. He’s just OP with tech and convenience rather than magick or alien biology.

But here’s the thing (STILL not Ben Grimm) that’s important: Wonder Woman is OP. Green Lantern is OP. Plastic Man and Aquaman are OP. Jimmy Olson and Crazy Quilt are OP! Characters are only as powerful or weak as the creators who bring them to the page. That sounds obvious, but apparently not, people still talk about characters like they make their own decisions. People see a character with the multi-layered powers of a living alien god, one who came from the stars and is now trapped on a planet where people equally ask him to solve all their problems and warn him to not do too much because they hate being ruled, and he doesn’t even want to conquer, he wants to co-exist. If you were given that character and your first thought was, “BUT WHO CAN HE CREDIBLY PUNCH REAL HARD?!” maybe…just MAYBE…the character isn’t the one who’s being boring?

He’s the ultimate deus-ex machina, but he can still be vulnerable. And not just his Canon List of Plot-vulnerablilities, vulnerable in an emotional, human way. Or an aloof, alien way! He can be unapproachable by normal humans, and still be a decent person under it all. One of my favorite Superman moments involves Green Arrow and Black Canary trying to save their son Arsenal’s life while trapped at-sea. Arsenal’s taken an arrow to the torso, everyone on the boat is panicking, and then Green Arrow begins whispering the name “Clark,” gradually getting louder until he is full-throated screaming the name. The book smash-cuts to the Daily Planet in Metropolis where we see Clark Kent’s ears perk up, his eyes widen, he hears fear in cherished friend’s voice calling his real name. And suddenly Superman is landing in the boat, picks up Arsenal, tells everyone the hospital he’s taking him to and leaves. Yes, they’re still technically stranded at-sea, but he knows: the rest of the crew is resourceful enough to get back to land, just not fast enough to save Arsenal’s life. But Superman has that covered, because he’s Superman. He shows up when and where he’s most needed, sometimes even in someone else’s book! But not always. Never always. These characters don’t exist in a vacuum, at least not in the stories that stand the test of time. The way they’re written matters, the way they’re drawn matters, and the way they change matters the most. And I’d say no one superhero has changed more over the years than Superman.

Which is why he isn’t boring. He’s just very hard to get right.