Infinite Crisis and the Narrowcasting of Superman
This decision in favor of Jerry Siegel’s family is a thrilling and weird thing… Superman isn’t entirely controlled by his corporate owners any more. That frightens some people. There are some pretty fascinating message board threads that side with Time Warner/DC fairly unilaterally: who are these creator people, to insult Mother Corporation?
It’s a good time for an official shake-up, I think. Superman is in an interesting place. The Scottish Superman is the best Superman storytelling in years… actually, I can’t think of better. And Superman in mainstream continuity is, well… weird these days.
There are lots of Supermen these days. There’s “our” Superman, who is supposed to be canonical, but he’s kind of second-string these days, subordinate to the collective, the many Supermen who are deployed to satisfy various publics and demographics. With him, there’s the aforementioned Scottish Superman; Ultraman, the criminal Superman; haunted older Superman from Kingdom Come (who is the best looking Superman, in my opinion). There was an older future Superman who looked a lot like the haunted older Superman; he was also haunted, but I think he was different. There’s the original Superman, from Action Comics #1, who made a to-do about how superheroes these days (including “our” Superman) were terrible pale reproductions of older, better superheroes; he was beaten to death by a Superboy that indulges in a very personal fascist fantasy of the past (imagine a twisted Pleasantville) and slaughters people. Seriously.
The last two Supermen, along with “ours,” co-starred in a thing called Infinite Crisis. In the dissertation I talk about how “Crises” in DC Comics are opportunities for iterations and revisions of the ongoing comics narrative to engage in dialogue with each other. These dialogues form a metanarrative, an embedded commentary on how the narrative and its characters are unfolding. As you can imagine, the particular metanarrative of Infinite Crisis is pretty juicy.
If Superman is the American dream — the dream of immigration and urbanism; the figure of world-changing American strength, judiciously and justly applied; our country’s folklore as consumer brand — what happens to Superman when the dream is in trouble? When many of us struggle with the thought that our country is, intentionally or not, representing nightmarish things, both to ourselves and to the world? When our strength is badly applied, to the misery of others and ourselves? When our myth of ourselves is dysfunctional and fragmentary, with our leadership and media badly spackling over our disillusion and generating sad, incompetent propaganda? What happens to one of the most powerful advertisements of our national culture at that time?
This is the implicit story of Infinite Crisis – the story of Superman falling apart, breaking apart. His American story is one that cannot cohere. His conservative meanings — truth, justice, and the American Way — are outdated ideals (original Superman), beaten to death by a figure that manipulates those meanings towards oppression and horror (homicidal Superboy). It’s a narrative born of a culture watching cultural memes of the Greatest Generation being mobilized to justify Abu Ghraib. “Our” Superman stood around a lot and watched it happen. He managed to win the fight at the end, of course, because a psychotic Superboy beating his progenitor to death and getting away with it is a pretty terrible superhero story.
Infinite Crisis was a couple of years ago (I’m a slow blogger), and while there have been some great Superman stories since then, none have represented a moment where “our” Superman — or any other — has symbolically declared, “I am canonical.” Superman is narrowcast now. We all can pick the one we like and run with him. And that’s cool: in some ways, it works better. But I can’t help but be sad for “our” Superman, the canonical figure we used to all agree on, now something of a placeholder, holding a spot for a common understanding of cultural ideals and fantasies that no longer exists.