Superman General

And Superman didn't attack him. All Superman told him to do was take off the symbol, which is, after all, his family crest.

To be fair, I don't think anyone really has the right in this day and age to tell anyone to stop wearing their family crest. I, as an American, could not, for instance, go to Japan and insist that someone there not wear a shirt with the American flag on it. Superman knows the culture he's living in, knows how symbols are used and appropriated, and ought to know as well that he really has no leg to stand on to try to physically remove his symbol from Lex's armor. He's not a reactionary twit, so he should not have been written like one.

Except that within the comics the only people who don the Superman symbol are effectively licensed to do so by Superman. People associate the symbol with him, and assume that anyone wearing it has his approval.

The last people to wear it without his approval were the Lucy Lane Superwoman and the Cyborg-Superman. The former was involved in a genocidal plot against New Krypton, the latter killed millions of people on his own, then signed on with the Anti-Monitor. Superman has every reason to want to stop people from appropriating the symbol without his approval.

Now you can contend he went about it in a bad way, but it's a pretty understandable error to make, and Indiana's attempt to incorporate it into his usual anti-Superman diatribe is getting old.

Let's just say that when Superman acts like a dick, he's gonna get called out on it, whether in-universe or by less-than-gushing comic fans. It pretty much goes with acting holier-than-thou in other situations, lest it become a double standard. And I can't help but enjoy the irony of how the same people who all but praise him for acts of pointless aggression refuse to accept him using necessary force in the face of overwhelming and unrelenting opposition. As for the particular story to beget this whole conversation, it was one where Superman didn't foil a crime, didn't protect innocents in danger, but instead arrived only when he saw the guy who did so was wearing his brand name, and then tried to forcibly take it off. That's right, kids, forget actually wanting to help people - real heroism is all about copyright enforcement. About demanding people's adoration, rather than earning it. Still, at least this time he's actually wailing on one of his own villains, rather than a thinly veiled (so not-quite-copyright infringing) ersatz of a competing hero. Progress.

Aaaand this where I'm going to just ignore everything you say, because it's obvious you aren't responding to any of our actual arguments.

I admire your patience and endurance. You certainly are a better man than me.

joseph Illidge on Superman's power as a symbol

http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/power-of-superman-beyond-death-and-rebirth-the-mission

That's how I want to see Superman. I really do. But I find that doing good has become an afterthought to treating Superman's power simply as a symbol of power for its own sake. It's not just the religiously suggestive titles and marketing gimmicks comparing him to a god, but that even stories treat him as the ultimate trump card against any lasting terrestrial opponent. Back in the day, I'd imagine his power and his goodness served a purpose, a symbol of all America stood for against vast external adversaries like China and the Soviet Union. But once the Union dismantled and China got preoccupied with internal issues, that power, or at least that kind of power became pointless.

It's no wonder Superman lost a vast amount of popularity in the nineties, or that Batman has been the premier DC hero ever since. The threats truly needing Superman's power to face are gone, and their colorful comic equivalents have nothing to resonate with. Instead, even Luthor has been redesigned as a chaotic Joker clone, going to Arkham and everything. There's just no need for that kind of power anymore, no vast monolithic enemy to fight. People may not like pre-teen digital tycoons, but they don't really fear them either. Instead, the terrors of today are small, random, unpredictable, like a single guy with a gun in the crowd. The kind of villain Superman would simply be too late to thwart. That for all his power, he'd be useless against. The kind of evil that his form of good can't match.

So instead, the focus is now on scapegoats like the aforementioned tycoons, or clones of the competition, as if it's they're to blame for his decline. It's not innocent people that are threatened by an external force, but Superman himself. And so he fights now to protect none but himself, and just like in the nineties, the last cry for popularity would be for him to die, with the faint hope of being reborn sometime later on.

...I seriously don't understand at all what you are saying.

In any case, read Superman: American Alien by Max Landis. It was one of the best books put out today and one of the best Superman books, probably up there with All-Star Superman. However, while All-Star Superman portrayed Superman as more godlike (including having him perform Twelve Deeds, similar to Herakles, etc), American Alien is much more concerned in showing his human side. In fact, the book is mainly about Clark Kent and not Superman at all, with a very realistic display of being a child and a teenager and even an adult, all the while not forgetting how good and kind Superman himself is.

And it also had Superman bursting in Luthor's office over a barely muttered tip he didn't bother to confirm, with Luthor rightfully chewing him out for it. It presents the exact same issue of Superman being angry and indignant without anything solid to base it on. And as origin stories go, it's still better than Birthright, but nothing special on its own.

Except in this case, Luthor had done some wrong (creating and unleashing Parasite) and the only thing Luthor chewed him out for was not having any evidence. And Superman did have something solid to base it on, the fact that Parasite said it was Luthor.

edited 13th Jun '16 11:30:53 PM by alliterator

Like I've asked regarding the attempted strip in #957, can you say exactly what Superman was going to accomplish by confronting him? What was the endgame? Who was in danger at the time, so as to necessitate an intervention? Luthor rightfully points out that the guy who just wrecked downtown isn't the most trustworthy source, and following that, busting up his window gains nothing. It's not that he's right, either in the moral sense or even in the brainpan, but that when he points out such tactical flaws, he tends to be correct. In a way, Luthor exemplifies precisely the kind of enemy that Superman is woefully unfit to fight, the subtle, subversive and legally bulletproof threat that superpowers are useless against, while traditional tactics only perpetuate a stalemate. He can be great as a character on his own, but as a Superman villain, even jokerizing him was an improvement.

edited 13th Jun '16 11:32:25 PM by indiana404

Except that's the whole point of Luthor. I get what you are saying, but the way you are writing it seems like you think it's a flaw in the storytelling. It's not. It's clearly meant to be that way. Luthor is Superman's arch-enemy because he is Superman's opposite.

Also, there are storylines where Superman does confront Luthor with proof and puts him away.

edited 13th Jun '16 11:45:56 PM by alliterator

Being Superman's direct opposite means nothing; it's the same symbolic bullshit that marketers use to prop up bad writing. The problem is that Luthor mostly exploits Superman's weaknesses and voluntary restrictions instead of posing any challenge to his strengths. At least with the Joker you can say that Batman's detective skills are truly put to the test, as he is famed for them even more so than for his fighting ability. But with Superman, the story is always that he's the most powerful being on Earth, which must have felt all nice and reassuring to read about back in the cold days, but now that kind of power means nothing by itself. And when his most prominent foe is all but immune to that kind of power, to that kind of hero, the question becomes why other heroes aren't dealing with him. And the answer, as of What's so funny..., is that Superman beats them up instead. Even Batman has the same problem - his methods are noted in-story to be all but useless, and he spends just as much time fighting competing heroes as he does fighting villains. Luthor as a mad scientist may have been cliched, but it was actually challenging, while retaining the yin-yang distinction of a powerful fighter versus an inventive engineer. It was a fight where Superman's power had a purpose, and symbolized something other than itself.

1) That's not what Shaped Like Itself means.

2) That is all just your opinion, of which I disagree.

3) Also, Luthor is still a mad scientist. The part of him went away for a bit, but then came back.

4) Batman's methods are "noted in-story to be useless"? Huh? When? Where? What story are you talking about?

5) Once again, I allowed myself to be sucked into a conversation with you, when it's clear you don't care about having a conversation, only spouting these random opinions about how Superman is useless even when the conversation wasn't about that. So, uh, bye.

edited 14th Jun '16 12:34:00 AM by alliterator

Given how Batman's methods being useless has been a frequent tune ever since The Killing Joke, with Under the Red Hood being a prominent recent incarnation, I take it that's the same kind of selective ignorance that spawned the post-MOS "not muh Superman" wave. Meanwhile, the conversation was about Superman acting out of turn in #957, which on the whole is symptomatic of him lacking a properly challenging opponent, leading to little more then outbursts of impotent rage. Feel free to rage quit yourself, but I have to say, it's getting less convincing every time.

edited 14th Jun '16 12:44:22 AM by indiana404

Neither one of those stories has anyone who not a villain say that Batman's methods are useless. The Killing Joke is clearly about the Joker, not about Batman, so Batman's methods aren't even brought up (unless you are reading into the fact that Batman says that one of these days, one of them is going to kill the other, in which case, that's a severe misreading — almost as big a misreading as Grant Morrison thinking Batman killed the Joker at the end). And in Under the Red Hood, Jason Todd is a fucking bad guy. He's mad that Batman didn't kill the Joker in revenge. He doesn't care about justice at all, he just cares that Batman didn't care about him enough to kill the Joker.

If there's one thing that DC comics got right later on, it was portraying Jason Todd as a whiny manbaby obsessed with looking "cool." Because that's what he was.

No Jason got portrayed as a whiny manbaby to take attention away from the fact that Bruce is completely ineffectual in Gotham and that he completely let Jason down. And frankly I'm amazed how you come to that conclusion about Jason. We're talking about a kid who grew up in poverty and was betrayed by him mom. He has way more reason to be pissed off at the world than Bruce does. This article shows how much DC dropped the ball with Jason following his death by blaming it all on him and ignoring the part Bruce, Joker and his mother played

https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2821274.html

Um, again, how did he "let Jason down"? By not killing the Joker? No, yeah, Batman was never going to do that. Especially not in revenge. And Jason was a whiny manbaby before he came back from the dead.

How about not getting him involved in his war on crime? Or maybe showing a bit more empathy to kid who saw way more crap than Bruce did? Also, aside from the diplomat's son, Jason wasn't that angry and wasn't anymore whiny or wreckless than Dick was back in the day. At one point he was trusted by Donna Troy to lead the Titans.

And if Jason is whiny, what the hell does that make Bruce?

edited 14th Jun '16 1:22:03 AM by windleopard

@ Multiverse Luthor: Well the main universe Lex will always end up as a dick because he's more well-known as the villain, and that we expect it. But Supes can't break the fourth wall, so he doesn't have an excuse(at least he doesn't say non-Lex Luthors are evil). Actually, counting every parallel universe where we see them, how many Clark Kents are good, neutral and evil respectively, same with Lex. Just to see if he has any evidence for his idea.

So yeah, I kind of think it's preposterous that Superman is immortal. I get him being Long-Lived due to his solar battery and being part of an advanced species, but there should be a limit. If he wants to become immortal, he needs to earn it in some sort of epic quest. I feel that if Superman One Million is ever revisited, we should have stories detailing how he became a god of sorts. Get to see Hercules-esque labors and tasks as he lives through the centuries, starting with a time where every mortal character is long dead and so on. A character driven story on how he deals with this immortality

And then there would have been no story and no Jason Todd. So you would rather he never exist? Not whiny.

The guy whose only way he could make sense of a random mugging was to dress up as a Bat and beat up the poor and mentally ill? That guy doesn't strike you as whiny?

I never said that he wasn't unhinged, I said he wasn't whiny about it. And he isn't. Hell, Tim Drake wasn't whiny and he was a better Robin than Jason Todd. Even Damian Wayne was less whiny, because when he realized how much wrong he had done (his "Year of Blood"), he actually went about trying to fix it. Jason Todd can't even admit his own mistakes, rather placing the blame for everything on Batman.

edited 14th Jun '16 8:14:50 AM by alliterator

Guys the Jason discussion probably belongs in the Batman thread.

Anyway, when alliterator said he wasn't going to respond to Indiana anymore, he probably had the right idea. The more he argues the more apparent it becomes that he either doesn't read Superman comics, or reads very few of them.

Case in point—his argument that Superman can't protect people from random shootings. While simultaneously dismissing "Birthright" as a bad origin story. You know, "Birthright" where one of Superman's first acts is to stop a random shooting at a school, save everyone he could, arrest the shooters, and then track down the guy who knowingly sold them the gun. His argument is rendered invalid by one of the very stories he is referencing, yet he made it anyway. Once that's the case, there's not a lot of point in engaging in a debate.

The one thing I will say directly to Indiana is that three years ago you actually complimented the Superman/Luthor rivalry on its inherent symbolism. Sure you spent the rest of the thread complaining about the execution, but you had no issues with the basic premise.

edited 14th Jun '16 9:00:01 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar