Why I Am Not Seeing the New Superman Movie

Besides being broke, there is a specific reason I am not going to see the new Superman movie. This post will involve spoilers for a movie I have not seen so, be warned.

I read somewhere, and it may be totally spurious, that Superman is the second most recognizable fictional character of all time. I guess your image of Superman really depends on when you grew up. If you are somehow reading this and grew up in the 40s, I am guessing you have seen Superman through a variety of changes so nothing is very shocking about the character changing anymore. I was a child of the 80s. All of our depictions of Superman were informed by our parents' generation. The first movie came out when I was 1. I think I saw Superman 3 in the movie theater. Anyway, there is one basic character trait for Superman...he doesn't kill.

There are heroes who do kill (most of them rose to popularity in the late 80s and early 90s). I have no problem with Wolverine slicing and dicing or Punisher blowing people up, that is who they are. Batman and Superman don't kill. Also, their own safety is secondary to making sure all innocent bystanders are safe. In addition, Batman doesn't use guns. There have been plenty of deconstructions of these characters who do kill easily and without remorse. Apollo and the Midnighter are two characters from the Authority series who (besides being lovers) are most differentiated from Superman and Batman by their ruthless tactics.

The only pic I could find without the two of them making out.

I have been reading a lot of comic fan reactions to the movie and they kind of go out of their way to excuse the bloodshed. By the way, to make things unambiguous, in Man of Steel, Superman kills his enemy and their fights demolish large chunks of Metropolis. Some have excused the destruction of Metropolis with the old comic book logic of "those buildings were empty." I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know if an entire city could have been evacuated before Supes starts his final throwdown but the character I love would immediately move the fight somewhere less dangerous for bystanders.

You might ask, what are you basing this on? Has Superman never killed in comics?

Firstly, he probably did kill some people in the Golden Age. Back when Batman used a gun and just straight up shot motherfuckers, Superman was known to toss a bad guy into the air where his landing would have no doubt exploded him. These are not the popular conceptions of these characters. Yes, characters change and grow over time. It is true that Superman used to be vaguely socialist in his politics but those days were short. For the bulk of his history, Superman has had a strict "no killing" policy. Just like his famous "S" logo wasn't the same when he started and Captain America's shield wasn't round, characters change and then those changes stick.

And some don't...I miss you, hook-hand Aquaman...

Now, some of you may know that Superman is published by DC comics. In the early 1980s, the company decided that their continuity was too complex and that was why they were losing readers (rather than, oh, say, the rise of home videogames). So, they decided to "reboot" the DC universe with Crisis on Infinite Earths. Like the birth of Jesus, most comic fans divide the DC timeline between Pre-Crisis (BC) and Post-Crisis (AD). Pre-Crisis, Superman's morality was set in stone. See, in order to survive from the Golden Age to today uninterrupted, Superman had to bow to the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s. This was like a ratings board that deemed content safe for children to read. After World War 2, comic heroes stopped killing (hell, stopped their violence almost altogether). Superman would outsmart a bad guy or maybe wrap him in a pipe or something but he could only let lose on robots or aliens. Even then, not so much with the fisticuffs.

For a big chunk of Superman's career, he was almost a pacifist. Once the Comics Code started relaxing a little bit in the 1970s, Superman was held apart from newer heroes by the fact that represented this Silver Age morality. Pre-Crisis, you would only catch Superman killing in an "imaginary story" if even then. In fact, it wasn't really even needed because villains rarely killed anyone either.

Although some surely deserved to die.

I don't think I am going out on too big a limb here to say that from the Silver Age through Crisis Superman was pretty locked in as a non-killer. About 30 years of his history (at that point) dominated by the lack of murder makes it a pretty compelling character trait but there is more.

Post-Crisis, new writers and artists were allowed to reshape Superman's history. In fact, up until the recent 52 Reboot by DC, the Post-Crisis continuity held on for about another 30 years. This is the era I know the best and I would like to pick three stories from it that sum up my argument.

1) Sacrifice- It is funny that I was just rereading this. Part of my summer has been going back through my collection and reading story arcs I liked but hadn't seen in awhile. Sacrifice was a little four issue story that happened between issues of the OMAC Project mini-series. This was all to lead into Infinite Crisis (the sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths, see how it all ties together?). In order to have all the pieces in place for Infinite Crisis, the writer (in this case Greg Rucka, one of my favorites) had to make Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman distrust one another.

Batman had already created a spy satellite to keep an eye on all the other heroes, so Superman and Wonder Woman were already pissed at him. The villain of the piece was Max Lord, former leader of the Justice League. Lord had taken control of Superman's mind. In the Sacrifice arc, Lord made Superman believe he was seeing the brutal deaths of Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and anyone else he cared about. Superman goes into a rage and Lord tricks him into attacking Batman. Poor Batman, being only human, is almost killed. Wonder Woman has to step in and murder Max Lord to get him to release his control on Superman.

In fact, there is a pivotal moment in the story which I believe is probably echoed a bit in Man of Steel (from what I've heard). Wonder Woman has Lord defeated. He is tied in her magic lasso and must tell her the truth (that's how the lasso works). Lord taunts her by saying he will be free again at some point and, as soon as he is, he will take over Superman's mind again and cause more destruction...

That is the moment that causes Superman to no longer trust Wonder Woman. Even when he had been brainwashed into thinking he was fighting Doomsday or Darkseid (two opponents he would not need to hold back his strength on) he still managed to not kill Batman somehow. Even not in his right mind, he didn't kill. When Wonder Woman tries to explain, "There was no other way." He says, "There is always another way." That is Superman, post and pre-crisis in a nutshell. He would move heaven and earth to find a way not to kill someone. To kill is a failure and you are pulling yourself down to the level of your enemy.

2) What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?- From March of 2001, this story appeared in issue 775 of Action comics and was written by Joe Kelly. In it, there is a new superhero team in town called The Elite. The Elite are parodies of the badass super teams that sprang up in the 1990s like the Authority or X-Force. They are all about killing criminals to make the world a better place. Superman decides they are as bad as villains and needs to stop them. The Elite keep mocking him in public and soon, the people are on the side of the Elite. Superman challenges them to a televised fight where it appears as if he is murdering the Elite one at a time. He finally reveals that he just defeated them and spared them all but wanted to scare their leader into acknowledging that there is always an alternative to violence. Again folks, defining trait of Superman!

3) The execution of Zod- John Byrne had the most influence on Superman's post-crisis origins. Byrne wrote and drew a large portion of the Superman titles after Crisis. In one such story, he had Superman meet General Zod, a Kryptonian villain who had been banished to the Phantom Zone. This involves pocket dimensions and a lot of plot contortions to but Zod gets free, kills all the humans on Earth (not the real Earth, long story) and Superman shows up to stop him. Superman takes away Zod's powers using Gold Kryptonite and then, when Zod says he will find a way to get his powers back and come jack up the real Earth, Superman kills him with Kryptonite.

And the horse you rode in on, Zod.

Wait, what's that you say? Superman killed someone in your precious post-Crisis continuity? Yes, yes he did. The point of the story wasn't to make Superman a badass, it was to forever alter him. He regrets that he executed Zod and vows to never take another life. The implicit becomes explicit as we see Superman, early in his career, make a mistake.

So why am I judging Man of Steel, which I haven't even seen, for doing what the comics did? I mean, isn't this set pretty early in the career of Superman?

If Superman does not kill again in subsequent movies, then I will take this as a tip of the hat to Superman's Post-Crisis timeline and enjoy it. I do not have a crystal ball and have no idea what future Superman movies will actually contain. Instead, I have to go off of what I do know based on the creative team...the Dark Knight Trilogy and the Watchmen.

Now, I love the Dark Knight movies, don't get me wrong. The entire second movie revolves around the fact that Batman doesn't kill. The ending of the first movie really irked me in that Batman just lets Ra's Al Ghul die.

That is, again Golden Age notwithstanding, the opposite of the Batman I know. He doesn't just not kill, he holds life as sacred and will do whatever he can to save even evil-doers. I thought there was some character growth in the way he stopped the Joker from dying at the end of the Dark Knight. He didn't "have to save" the Joker either, but he did. Of course, by the Dark Knight Rises, he is cool with letting Bane get blown away and Talia getting her spine crushed. Any sort of stance he made in the second movie seemed to be largely forgotten.

David Goyer wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins. He also did the story, but not the script for the other two Batman movies. He also wrote Man of Steel. I don't trust him to display character growth in Superman but maybe I will be wrong. And Zak Snyder...I mean, he got the plot of Watchmen right but missed anything remotely compelling about it. I also do not trust him to "get" Superman.

Will this Superman play to a massive audience? Sure. Will it be the most popular version of Superman? I don't see why not. Is it a betrayal of a fictional character's defining personality trait? It sounds like it to me. Just like I had no interest in a Jonah Hex movie where he somehow has magical powers, I have no interest in a killer Superman movie. Two years from now, after the next one has come out, if it turns out the killing of Zod and the allowing of thousands of innocents to die was a learning moment for Superman, I will eat crow then and watch the shit out of it. If it was just a poor character choice, I always have my back issues.