Babel Clash

I have a problem with Superman. And that’s a shame because he’s an almighty juggernaut of superheroic power who could pound me into the ground with his eyebrows. And that’s the problem.

Superman has it made. He’s the envy of other superheroes (1). His capabilities are off the scale and he has no vulnerabilities. No sensible ones, anyway. If you have to invent a bogus mineral to menace your superhero then it isn’t a real vulnerability. Don’t forget, too, that when the Man of Steel was first let out on his own recognizance he was pitched against your ordinary everyday street thugs, with guns. Actual guns against a guy who was bulletproof. And super-fast, super-strong, able to fly, with all sorts of super-senses and heat vision and… well, the impression one has is that he could do whatever the writers wanted him to. What’s that, missed saving Lois Lane one of those many times? No worries, just spin the earth the wrong way to turn back time, eh? Nothing too good for Superman.

If Superman existed then the world would be terrified of him. We really would. It’s just as well that he’s paladin-good, wouldn’t hurt a fly, super-virtuous. And even then, can you imagine how many toes he’d tread on, in the real world? How many big corporations and dodgy politicians he’d end up crossing swords with, whether he meant to or not? Back when the Comics Code held tyrannical sway, of course, you couldn’t have public authority figures as bad guys, leaving Superman sitting happy in his morally uncomplicated world where the temporal authorities would happily let themselves be bailed out by a loose cannon with the power of a hydrogen bomb, from threats to destroy the world all the way down to petty bank robberies, no job too small. Even in later years, when the phenomenal overkill of Superman ended up being balanced by phenomenal overkill in villains, Superman was never going to lose. And even when they (briefly) killed him off, it was in a story highlighting how he was so much gosh-darned better than everyone else, so that only he, after the rest of the world’s heroes had failed, could save the day.

DC’s other big hitter is nowhere near so much of a big hitter, on general power scales. Batman is human, and Batman can be made morally ambiguous in a way that Superman can’t. Of course he can’t. If Batman goes off the rails in his quest for justice then he kills a few hoodlums. If Superman loses his rag he’d take out the Eastern Seaboard. Can you imagine Superman in Vietnam (2)? How about Iraq?

I’m not the only one who has this take on Earth’s Mightiest. In fact it seems as though the concept of Superman, all powerful and all virtuous, is something that makes people uncomfortable. We’re not convinced, basically, that all that punch is backed by the cast-iron morality that they tell is, in the same way that we’re not convinced that Oz is actually the saccharine wonderful place Baum makes it out to be (but that’s another story). After all, we live in a world where an awful lot of people routinely lie to us about their trustworthiness and, for better or for worse, our eyes are well and truly opened to it. As a brief scattershot of Superman models, most of which also include a go at his chums in the JLA, just check out:

-          Soon I Will Be Invincible, a gloriously entertaining novel by Austin Grossman. The Batman and Wonder Woman analogues get a sympathetic treatment, but it’s plain that Corefire, mightiest of mortals, is basically a jerk.

-          Top 10 by Alan Moore, where Atoman and his crew (who map fairly closely onto the Justice League) are arrogant big-money types with a particularly vile sideline (there’s also a vaguely Supermannish, and far more benign, character in Top 10: 69ers, interestingly).

-          The Boys by Garth Ennis, which makes Kick Ass look mild in the graphic violence stakes, and which not only provides us with an utterly sociopathic Superman mirror in Homelander, complete with vicious and self-absorbed JLA, but has a solid, vicious kick in the voonerables for the Avengers and the X-men while it’s on a roll (3)

In fact, the point I’m making is the raison d’etre of The Boys. Look at how the world’s celebrities and great magnates act, in a world where nobody dares tell them ‘no’. Now imagine if they could fly and bend steel bars. Do you really think Superman would be such a nice guy, given that nobody but nobody has any way of enforcing anybody’s laws over him? That kind of power makes a great villain, but in this day and age it’s hard to believe in it vested in a hero.

So why am I taking this opportunity to have a poke at Superman, given that I’m a fantasy writer and not a comic book supremo(4) ? Because heroic fantasy has had the same shift of consciousness. There is an old way of doing things, and the current set of fantasy writers has taken a long, hard look at it, and decided it’s the same “too good to be true” deal as Superman.

Basically, you take your hero. He’s probably a stableboy or similar menial, except he has a Destiny (5). Destiny figures big in this style of plot. Destiny says the hero will overthrow the Dark Lord. The prince then bumbles about the map until he’s done the grand tour, by which time he has acquired (a) the magic sword or similar piece of shenanigans, and (b) the girl (although he may subsequently have misplaced her), whereupon the Dark Lord is met and defeated, as per Destiny. At the end our chap assumes his kingdom, marries the girl, and is then somewhat stumped when the editors demand another series.

So where’s the problem with that? Hasn’t he earned his cheering crowds, you ask? Leave the poor boy alone. The problem is, of course, that he hasn’t, because it’s Destiny, and he’s The Prince. The hero’s victory is as inevitable as Superman’s, because Destiny railroads him to it. Oh, he’s probably had a tribulation or two on the way, and perhaps someone he quite liked even died, but Destiny will out, and in some of these books even the Dark Lord seems to know it, and faces his inexorable defeat with a kind of wretched world-weariness.

The current wave of fantasy authors doesn’t go for Destiny or, if they do, it’s to punch it between the eyes. There’s no destiny to be seen most of the time or, if there is, it turns out to be either manufactured or horribly fallible. See Tom Lloyd’s Stormcaller, where the Destiny plot gets well and truly kicked to touch (6), or Abercrombie’s First Law series, where the main protagonist is the sort of chap who would give last generation’s villains the shudders, and the Destined Hero has some rude awakenings coming his way fast. The heroes of these stories win out, where they win out at all, at cost, and through their own hard work. Nobody is spoonfeeding them the Dark Lord’s downfall, the magic sword broke and the girl doesn’t much like them. And, quite frequently, they’re no angels themselves, and the line drawn between them and the enemies they fight is scuffed and smudged. They have neither Superman’s effortless victories, nor his unassailable moral high ground.

(1) Why else d’you think the Martian Manhunter is green?

(2) Alan Moore could – see Watchmen.

(3) Outside my personal knowledge, but Lou Anders, my editor, also points out Brian Azarrello’s Lex Luthor: Man of Steel. It’s also worthwhile dragging in Marvel’s Squadron Supreme here, which is a fascinating shot across the bows of the competition as Marvel basically photocopies the Justice League, changes the names, and then sets out to show what would happen if they decided to take over the world, for its own good. The heartbreaking thing is, that in Squadron Supreme, they’re genuinely good guys, desperately trying to make everyone’s lives easier, and it’s all the more horrible when it goes so badly wrong.

(4) Yet. Always open to offers, although not, one imagines after this, from anyone looking for a new Superman story.

(5) Probably he’s also The Prince. It’s a weird old hold-over from the days of writers like Mallory, where every character of note was, if not a prince, then actually a king, and Arthur’s court was pretty much full not just of nobles but of actual royalty, all crammed around the same table. The royalist variant of the Destiny story assumes that only Princes get Destinies.

(6) Possibly. This is probably not the phrase I’m looking for, but sporting metaphors leave me baffled.

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