Superman Then, Superman Now

Smelting the Man of Steel

August 1, 2025

Superman as a "surrogate dad" – Washington Post

Six "letters to the editor" at the Washington Post explore what Superman/Clark Kent means to them. Some letters provide analysis:

Although he could fly and lift tremendous weights, and bullets bounced off his chest, he was the son of the Kents, that good, kind and sometimes humorous couple in Kansas. That’s why he wanted to use his powers to save lives and help people by doing things that humans couldn’t. And he didn’t want to take credit, nor to endanger people he loved, so he disguised himself when he did those things. His “secret identity” was Superman, not Clark Kent..."

Versioning and reversioning Superman has been an industry for decades, and as a kind of Rorschach test for how DC Comics is thinking (and feeling) about what a "good superhero" is really about (without apology) the character remains a magnet for interpretation, reinvention, and, due to fluctuating sales, gimmickry.

Superman Then; Superman Now

The first version of Superman, the one that didn't fly but hurled himself by great strength over vast distances, had a lot of jocular and biting one-liners at his command, and was almost always holding himself back in the beat-down department. In between rescuing people and unraveling the complicated crimes of evildoers that implicated innocent people, he was generally more concerned with "teaching a lesson." That could mean showing a gang of mobsters that their power behind a barrage of tommy-guns was not the end-all of strength they concieved it to be, or executing a more elaborate plan, such as kidnapping an unscrupulous munitions manufacturer and forcing him into the army of a country at war. There, the man would gain a firsthand view of what his industry really produced, eventually concluding in a mad fit of terror that profiting from violent, chaotic death was an inhumane business — “no place for a sane man.” He would henceforth vow to stay far away from manufacturing anything “more dangerous than a firecracker.”

In that sense, Superman was more than a bit of a costumed Rabbi, built like a Circus strongman (and dressed like one), and performing athletic and scientific feats that gelled together America's fascination with muscles and technology. He was also part John Henry, beating the machines of the age that seemed to dwarf the individual, a super-alien who excelled beyond human capability but always remained human. Instead of relying on the supernatural, his powers were rooted in intergalactic science. In this science fiction framework, it was entirely rational, and not occult or faery tale, for a man to "fly," outrace a train, or hurl boulders.

On top of that, Superman's alter ego was in an inversion of the pop-culture legend of the heroic newspaper reporter. By pretending to be a complete coward to those directly around him (in a vein like that of a precurser like The Scarlet Pimpernel) he was depicted for us so that (like the Pimpernel) the reader knows and witnesses Clark Kent as heroic whether in the suit or not, and more importantly, fulfilling the expected role of a "real" reporter: finding the truth. That truth might then be conveniently handed off to Lois Lane for public credit, much like the actions of a secret agent who must conceal their identity while still ensuring the facts are brought to light.

The modern Superman, compared to his rougher 1930s incarnation, has been simplified into a figure who is "nice for its own sake," doing good purely for the sake of goodness, and playing a goofy Clark Kent mainly for laughs. As a galactic being, he now battles galactic-level villains; as a puffed-up mythological figure, he must have an Achilles’ heel, i.e., Kryptonite. Meanwhile, the minutiae of human life, such as dealing with street-level crime by outsmarting and exposing criminals or "teaching lessons," has been turned into symbolic gestures, which, at worst, is reduced to rescuing cats from trees.

It’s too bad Superman couldn’t better preserve his human side, which now seems to be allowed to breathe only through his interactions with Ma and Pa Kent, Lois Lane, and the threats that inevitably target them. Often used as an alternative weakness by writers tired of relying on Kryptonite, this emotional angle can easily slide into sentimentalism — a bid to make "the Man of Steel" more human and relatable. But, like Batman and a whole host of other costumed heroes in comics, it often sidesteps the real business of why we’re here: to see bad guys, ones we can recognize (and this is where super-villains can muddy the waters) get beaten, and if possible, humiliated. And if they’re not entirely bad, then reformed.

The morality of superheroes, especially when delivered from the knuckles of a fist, reflects the desires of a fan audience that can find fantasy, science and technology, muscles, and crazy costumes from a variety of sources. But when all of that is packed together into a single unit and combined with the moral righteousness of the Good, exasperated and out of patience with the Bad, well, that’s comic books, and that’s Superman.