Superman is Good

Hi Everyone —

Before we get to our Baseball Awards … James Gunn’s Superman comes out in two days — I’ve already got my “old man” ticket purchased for Saturday morning* — and I’ve talked at some length here about how excited I am. I love Superman. I was never a big comic book fan growing up, but I loved Superman. For one, he was conceived in Cleveland — I once won a trivia contest by knowing that. For another, “Superman and Friends” used to play on WUAB Channel-43 in Cleveland every day after school, and it was my everything — three short animated features that usually appeared as follows:

Feature 1: Superman (always)

Feature 2: Superman (usually with his dog Krypto)

Feature 3: A special guest who, unfortunately, was usually Aquaman. I never got Aquaman. I remember, at the age of 8 or 9, saying to my younger brother, David, something like, “Is underwater crime enough of a problem that we really need a Superhero to fix it?”

I would sooner miss dessert than miss “Superman and Friends.”

In any case, I have loved Superman with all my heart ever since … I was Superman EVERY Halloween, and I have seen the movie Superman with Christopher Reeve at least 100 times, and here is a lousy photo of what I look at every single day when I’m at my computer.

As many of you know, it’s infuriated me what the world and Zack Snyder have done to Superman. They turned him into this moody destroyer in the incessant and unending effort to turn everything light into dark, everything fun into horror, everything sweet into sullen and mean. Superman is good. That’s not only his defining quality, it’s the only truly interesting thing about him. He has almost unlimited powers that have been expanding for nearly a century. I mean, you’d think it would be enough for a superhero to have superhuman strength AND be bulletproof AND be able to fly at the the speed of light, but no, there always has to be more, so he can shoot lasers from his eyes, and freeze water with his breath, plus he has this hilarious kind of superhearing that somehow allows him to hear exactly what he wants/needs to hear and not the cacophony that surrounds it.

But that’s OK, the more powers the better, because — and I’ll repeat this — SUPERMAN IS GOOD. He has chosen to be good even though he certainly doesn’t have to be good. He chose not to play on the football team even though, as he told his father, he could score a touchdown every time. He has chosen to work as a lowly reporter when he could make more money than Bezos if he wanted.

He’s good. That’s his true superpower.

And all of that has been lost because, I guess, we didn’t like the Joker as a mischievous villain with a sense of humor; no, we needed him to be a homicidal maniac. We didn’t like Batman as the wisecracking world’s greatest detective; no, we needed him to be a broken soul, unable to let go of the death of his parents, a vigilante of the night. Superman’s suit had to get blacker, his soul had to get gloomier, his face had to have a scowl.

So when James Gunn took over Superman, I desperately hoped for a reset.

It looks like we’re going to get it — from Gunn’s interview with the Sunday Times.

Thank you, James. Saturday morning cannot come fast enough.