Profile: Superman will soon return to the silver screen, but will a modern audience, more used to dark, vulnerable superheroes, send this pure, old-fashioned all-American hero crashing back to earth, asks Davin O'Dwyer
The flowing red cape, the iconic "S" emblazoned on the chest, the blue tights and the unfathomable underwear (or should that be overwear?): they've been away, but now they're back. It's taken Superman nearly 20 years to return to the silver screen (Superman Returns is released on July 14th), and a lot has changed in the superhero landscape since then. When we last saw him he was in the noble form of Christopher Reeve, and preventing the Cold War from turning into nuclear doom was his preoccupation. Back then, fighting for "truth, justice and the American way" was a relatively straightforward prospect. Now though, with the US engaged in a perpetual war on terrorism that appears beyond the help of fantastical intervention, and his superhero rivals Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men having gone all dark and vulnerable, it's a very different world the Man of Steel returns to. His greatest challenge is not fighting disaster, but proving he is still relevant.
It wasn't always thus. Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, both born to Jewish immigrants and raised in Cleveland, created Superman in the early 1930s (with no thought to Nietzsche's Übermensch, they claimed). However, he didn't make his debut until Action Comics No 1 in June 1938, when the world was on the brink of war and a super-powered force for good was just what was needed.
Originally, his powers were somewhat less super than we have become used to - he was essentially just a very strong man who could "leap tall buildings in a single bound" - but he quickly acquired the ability to fly, X-ray vision, laser eye beams, a powerful pair of lungs, basically all the good stuff you wanted to do as a kid (who didn't want to bake a soufflé with their eyes?).
His back-story was also developed - the infant Kal-El was sent by his parents to Earth in a rocket ship as his home planet of Krypton exploded, the ship crashed on a farm outside Smallville, Kansas, and he was found and adopted by the Kents, who named him Clark. They did a good job raising him, because Clark grew up to be a reporter for the Daily Planet newspaper in Metropolis, while as Superman he saved the world from destruction and cats from trees. A career as all-American poster boy was guaranteed, and Superman became a comic book phenomenon for publishers DC.
Over the years, he has starred in radio serials, TV series, movies, and several different comic book titles. The cast of supporting characters are well known - principally spiky love interest Lois Lane and of course his frankly dull arch enemy Lex Luthor (no superpowers, he's just a greedy capitalist). Famously, his only weakness is kryptonite, which makes things relatively easy for him, though he was actually killed off in the comic books in January 1993, before a miraculous rebirth nine months later.
Since his last big-screen outing, he has been occupying our TV screens in both Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and Smallville, but TV doesn't lend itself to myth-making quite as well as cinema does. His big return, then, has the world asking: are we too cynical for Superman? As a pop-culture icon without peer, the question of what Superman actually stands for is regularly asked, and the array of answers proves only that if you stick a man in a cape and underwear, he'll mean a lot of things to a lot of people.
With his blue and red costume, small-town values, love of justice and decency, and above all his unrivalled power, Superman is most frequently described as an allegory for the US - if the bald eagle ever succumbs to extinction, Superman could easily take over as a national symbol. Indeed, this conflation of Superman and the US reached its peak in the 1980s with the classic Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, in which Superman has cynically become an agent of the US government, a secret weapon against the USSR, the ultimate boy scout fighting for the American way rather than truth or justice. (There have also been a few attempts to experiment with Superman's sense of nationalism - most notably in the graphic novel Red Son, where Kal-El lands on a Ukrainian farm and helps the Soviet Union become the dominant superpower.)
However, there is also the widely-held belief that Superman is an allegory for the immigrant Jewish experience. He has come from a home to which he can never return, indeed which no longer exists, and feels himself perpetually an outsider, having to hide his skills just to fit in. For Siegel and Shuster, the creation of an all-American hero must have been the ultimate act of fitting in. (In addition, as Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer pointed out, every Jewish child knew Superman was Jewish: "Who else but a Jew would make up a name like Clark Kent?") In a comic strip in February 1940, Superman tackles Hitler and the German army, before dragging both Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations. The weekly newspaper of the SS published a response excoriating Siegel in vile, anti-Semitic terms, while bizarrely mocking Superman for "lacking all strategic sense and tactical ability". In any case, Superman successfully took on Europe's anti-Semitic dictators nearly two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the US's entry into the second World War.
NOTWITHSTANDING HIS JEWISH roots, another popular interpretation has Superman as Christ. Though in some respects he is an extraterrestrial Moses, borne away in a vessel as a baby, Superman's role as saviour of mankind begs comparison with Jesus - indeed, his original name, Kal-el, roughly translates as "voice of God" in Hebrew.
Superman Returns apparently makes this fairly explicit. An apparition of Superman's father, Jor-El (as played by Marlon Brando, digitally resuscitated from his expensive cameo in the first film in 1978) tells Superman (played by Brandon Routh): "Even though you've been raised as a human being, you're not one of them. They can be a great people, they only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, I have sent them you, my only son." He hovers over Earth, arms spread in a crucifixion pose, and when he takes a brutal, sadistic beating from some thugs (when weakened by kryptonite, of course), it is clear that this is a post-Passion of the Christ Superman. A book detailing the parallels between Christ and Superman has even been published, The Gospel According to the World's Greatest Superhero, by Stephen Skelton.
OF COURSE, NOT even Superman can get away with wearing colours that bright without accusations of campness. A recent cover story in The Advocate magazine asked "How Gay is Superman?" - struggling with a secret identity and struggling to come out have a lot in common - but Superman isn't the first cartoon character to have his sexuality questioned; he is in the good company of Batman, Robin and SpongeBob SquarePants. Despite the perennial attentions of Lois Lane, Superman is a largely asexual character. It is perhaps that square-jawed blankness that has caused Superman to seem a hero out of time. He is so perfect, so earnest, so invulnerable, so "super", that he is impossible to identify with, and as a result becomes merely boring.
When all the other superheroes he paved the way for proudly wear their dysfunction and vulnerabilities on their costume sleeves, and the country he is so closely identified with less proudly grapples with its own dysfunction and vulnerabilities, Superman has to be more than the paragon of an idealised American power and morality. Superman has returned, all right, but he has returned to find a world where having the most power raises the most troubling questions. That S on his chest could just as easily stand for self-doubt.
TheSupermanFile
Who is he? Superman, aka Kal-El, last child of the planet Krypton.
Why is he in the news? He will return to cinema screens to save us from post-World Cup boredom.
Most appealing characteristic: Regularly saving Earth from total annihilation.
Least appealing characteristic: Making it look so easy.
Most likely to say: "Where have all the phone booths gone?"
Least likely to say: "Okay, enough Y-fronts, today I feel like a thong."