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By Luis Torres De La Llosa, Agence France-Presse
NEW YORK: Superman, the original comic book
superhero, turns 70 this month, but his strength and invulnerability
draws fewer fans in the 21st century world of flawed, postmodern
heroes.
An indisputable icon of American pop culture,
the Man of Steel made his first appearance in the June 1938 issue of
Action Comics. He is the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,
residents of the Midwestern USA town of Cleveland, Ohio.
Superman can fly in the sky, but he’s not a
bird or a plane. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful
than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single
bound.
About 1.9 meters (six feet, three inches) tall
and weighing some 102 kilos (225 pounds), Superman has blue eyes,
black hair and is a mild-mannered reporter working at the “Daily
Planet” newspaper under the alias Clark Kent. He was born on the
planet Krypton, exiled to Earth as an infant, and for decades has
been fighting for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
“He is a complete fiction, but he is so
complete, so ideal, and so well-known around the world—most
Americans will know his origin simply by osmosis by the time they
are eight—that he is a much fuller representation of an American
self-view than Uncle Sam or Mickey Mouse,” said Bradley Ricca, who
produced a documentary titled “Last Son” on the origin of
Superman.
“He really is the quintessential modern
American symbol,” said Ricca, who is a Case Western University
professor specializing in American literature and popular culture.
“He is an immigrant in an imperfect world” who “battles
injustice in any form.”
Superman “is the first fictional superhero,
with all the characteristics at the same time: the powers, the cape,
the secret identity, the colorful costume, the complicated love
triangle, and the unmatched sense of justice,” Ricca told Agence
France-Presse.
Superman “is the progenitor of the genre and
sets the standard for other figures,” said Peter Coogan, who holds
a doctorate in American Studies from Michigan State University and
specializes in superheroes in US history.
“It can be said that all superheroes are
imitations of or the children of Superman,” playing “a
symbolizing function as an embodiment of American mythology,”
Coogan told Agence France-Presse.
“Superheroes embody a vision of the use of
power unique to America. Superheroes enforce their own visions of
right and wrong on others, and they possess overwhelming power,
especially in relation to ordinary crooks,” said Coogan, who also
heads the nonprofit Institute for Comics Studies.
In his 2007 master’s thesis at Georgia State
University, another student of the genre, Aaron Pevey, wrote that
Superman lost popularity precisely because he is invulnerable.
“While Superman might have succeeded as a
modern hero, he fails as a postmodern one,” wrote Pevey. That
explains, he believes, why DC Comics has seen a slump in sales of
Superman comics over the last few years.
Teenagers prefer darker, troubled, sometimes
ambivalent heros, including such classics as Batman, Spider-Man or
Wolverine of “X-Men” fame.
Superman, born in the years before World War II
and a distant heir of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, has seen his
personality change over time.
While aggressive in the 1940s, by the 1950s the
storyline focus was more on Clark Kent’s quest for the love of
Lois Lane, his colleague and future wife. In the 1960s and 1970s
Superman developed a more complex personality, and in 1986, DC
Comics hired John Byrne to carry out a character overhaul. The
result was a character that was less of a messianic figure and more
of a modern-day Hercules.
With sales slumping, DC Comics killed off
Superman in a battle with a powerful character named Doomsday in
1993. But Superman, whose various nicknames include “The Man of
Tomorrow,” of course, came back from the dead.
In a country where the quest for entertainment
is a national obsession, it is more likely that Superman will
continue facing close encounters with deadly kryptonite than he will
be forced into retirement.
“Superman has endured, and will endure,
because he is more than just a silly character with his underwear on
the outside and a spitcurl,” said Ricca. “He is the hope not
that we can be rescued, but that we can be good.”
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