 For the last few months, the world has provided nothing but darkness and depressing news. I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of talking about deadly viruses, horrifying economic collapse, police brutality, impending dystopias, murder hornets, but I have been talking about it. And the inevitable theme that's been running through a lot of our recent videos has been negativity and criticism. From power-hungry politicians and destructive lockdowns to out-of-control police, I realized that I've had a lot to say about what's going wrong with the world, and yet I've spent very little time talking about how to make it better. So at the risk of missing the mark with something completely out of sync with the news cycle, I want to take a break from the carnage of reality to talk about something positive for a change. My lifelong love for Superman as a character, what's made the man of steel an inspiring hero and symbol for over 80 years, and why it's time to stand up for truth, justice, and the American way now, more than ever. This is a video I've wanted to write for a while, and now with the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League in the Works, rumors of Henry Cavill returning to the DCEU, and let's be honest, not many other movies coming out, I think the time is finally right. Before we really get into this, you should know that there are going to be all kinds of spoilers for a bunch of TV shows, movies, and comic books going all the way back to the 1930s. You should also know that this is going to be way less of a history of Superman video, and more of a love letter to some of my favorite incarnations of the character, and the values and personality traits that have made him an enduring figure in global pop culture. There's a lot to cover, so suit up, hit that subscribe button, and join me for this heroic edition of Out of Frame. Since Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster first started kicking around the idea in 1933, Superman has gone through a ton of different iterations. But we all know the mythology that stuck. The last child of a dying planet is placed in a rocket ship and sent to Earth. He's found by two wonderful adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. They name him Clark, and raise him as their own son on an idyllic farm in Smallville, Kansas. Clark Kent grows up to be a reporter at the Daily Planet in the thriving city of Metropolis, and he's also... Over the years, there have been countless variations, reinterpretations, and alternate takes on the characterizations of both Clark Kent and Superman, produced by dozens of different writers all trying to put their own spin on the universe. This is one of the greatest, and yet also worst, aspects of comics as an art form. On the one hand, a single character can span multiple eras and generations, and sometimes brilliant writers get to work with incredible artists to create something iconic and memorable. On the other hand, with so many different creators all participating in a kind of writer's relay race, a ton of plot holes and narrative conflicts get built up over time. And as a result, comic storylines periodically have to be reset, with big, event comics like Crisis on Infinite Earth, or hard reboots like DC's New 52 or Rebirth. There's really no way around it, but it makes it tough for people who aren't regular readers to keep up. It would take hours for me to even come close to explaining the decades worth of storylines and changes Superman has gone through, so I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to focus on a few specific stories and scenes that I think represent the best of who Superman is and why he's important. There's a lot to unpack here, but we need to start with a little bit of psychology and character analysis. There are so many ways to understand the nature of this character and its role in our culture. A lot of people, possibly including his own creators, think of Superman as little more than an adolescent power fantasy. The idea of a power fantasy is that the protagonist of a story acts as a surrogate for the reader, allowing them to imagine themselves asserting dominance over situations that they would otherwise be incapable of dealing with in real life. I get it. Even the name Superman is a translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's ubermensch, a concept from his 1883 book, also Sprach Zarathustra. In the book, Nietzsche presented the ubermensch as a man who created new values born from love of life in defiance of nihilism, in a world where God is dead. Under this conception, the ubermensch, or Superman, creates meaning from nothingness. It's an aspirational idea and something for all people to achieve. Unfortunately, the term came to be associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who arrogantly believed that the ubermensch was something that could be attained by eugenics and racial purity. Nietzsche did not agree with that, by the way. But when Siegel and Schuster, who were both Jewish kids from Cleveland, started working on the first incarnations of the character, Superman was a villain with psychic mind control powers. He looked more like Lex Luthor than the hero we think of today. Instead of a power fantasy, he was more like a will to power nightmare. But fortunately for all of us, that version didn't pan out, and they quickly rebooted their character as a physically powerful hero. Siegel and Schuster pitched stories and comics to publishers for several years, until one of their strips caught the attention of Jack Liebowitz in 1938. Jack, along with Harry Donnenfeld, co-owned and published Detective Comics Incorporated. At the time, they were looking to start a new magazine called Action Comics, and Superman turned out to be the perfect fit. Siegel and Schuster sold their copyright to the character to DC, and the rest is history. Now, in the early days, it might be fair to think of Superman as just being about power and giving kids a way to vicariously assert control over their world. Back then, Superman was stronger than ordinary people, but not at all like we think of him today. He couldn't even fly. He mostly stood up to bullies and bad guys by punching them in the face. Over time, writers gave Superman more and more abilities. First, he could only run and jump. Then he could fly. At the beginning, he could lift a car or a truck. Then a tank, then an airplane. Eventually, he was strong enough to punch a planet out of orbit. He gained new powers, regeneration, heat, telescopic, microscopic, and x-ray vision. Freezing, hurricane-force breath, also fire breath, for some reason. Super hearing, super intelligence and memory. At one point, mind reading and telekinesis. Super ventriloquism. Not all of these stuck, but between the 1940s and the 1980s, Superman went from having powers and abilities far beyond that of mortal men to one of the most all-powerful characters ever created. Some artists and writers even started deliberately using religious symbolism that would invite comparisons between Superman and Jesus. He's also been used as propaganda. During World War II, Superman fought the Nazis and the Japanese. And after the war in 1946, Superman took on the KKK in his radio show. His whole role in pop culture was to easily beat up people that the rest of us couldn't. So obviously, just a power fantasy, right? Well, no. I don't actually think so. You see, back when Superman was little more than a strong man, socking bad guys on the jaw, every comic book hero was basically doing the same thing. If he was a power fantasy, then they all were, but it's certainly not what made him a unique or great character, nor is it why he survived as a singular icon of pop culture for all these years. What's actually special about Superman is not all of his fantastically absurd superpowers or his alien heritage. It's the fact that underneath all of that, he's just a humble farm boy from Kansas. What makes Superman great is his humanity, and the constant choice he makes not to use his powers to force people to do what he wants and dominate the world. The magic of Superman is Clark Kent. As clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is fond of saying, a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control. This quote perfectly embodies the essence of what makes Clark Kent even more than Superman or Kal-El, the character worth looking up to. Now, for some of you, I'm sure this distinction seems silly. They're the same person, right? Of course. But like all good characters, he's complex, and this duality, or triplicity, is what makes him interesting. Dean Cain probably explained the distinction most succinctly in Lois and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman. This is important, and it also flips the classic idea of a secret identity on its head. Here are the Incredibles. Most superheroes use a mild-mannered secret identity to mask the truth about their more powerful, real personas. Superincredible and Elastigirl are the true characters. Bob and Helen Parr, at least in the beginning of those movies, are the fiction. But in a few important ways, the reverse is actually true for Superman. The cape and tights are the fiction that helped Clark Kent mask his gentle, middle-American reality. Back in 2013, screenwriter Max Landis explained this idea perfectly in a rant he posted to YouTube called Regarding Clark. What's special about Superman is that his parents didn't f***ing die. He's not a selfish, post-traumatic sissy who needed to have his parents shot to death in front of him to understand that maybe you should help people and that crime is wrong and murder is bad. He didn't get stranded on a desert island. He didn't have a ring forced upon him that brought him into an intergalactic police force. He wasn't raised by Amazons. He didn't go up on a ship and get irradiated. He's just a guy from Kansas who has the best superpowers. He's unstoppable. And instead of absolute power corrupting absolutely, absolute power has absolved him from fear and greed and hate and all of the weaknesses that stem from human insecurity. You're looking at someone who's a superhero because being a superhero makes the most sense. Either try to save the world or you can take it over. If you're a Kryptonian on Earth, those are your options. Clark Kent is the most dangerous man in the universe. And yet, he is good. Only a handful of writers have really understood how important this is to the character and as a result we've gotten a ton of stories like Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, Injustice, Gods Among Us, and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns where virtually all the drama is built around Superman's physical powers instead of his moral values. That's a shame because it really seems like the world needs to remember how to be more like Clark Kent right about now. Fortunately, there are some good stories to look at. In All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely gives us a look at the final moments of Superman's life. After saving research facility in outer space from a plot by Lex Luthor, our hero has absorbed too much solar energy. He's going to die. And yet, in his last few days on Earth, he rescues an innocent young boy and his runaway dog as Superman. He saves a rude man from falling debris as Clark. He saves the life of an enemy. He talks a girl out of suicide. He cures dying children he's been visiting in the hospital. He shows compassion for an insanely dangerous creature. He becomes friends with Bizarro. He even saves Lex Luthor. Twice. Meanwhile, he reveals the truth about himself to Lois and shows her what it's like to experience life the way he experiences it. Then he has a heart to heart with his father and plays one last game of fetch with Crypto. He's both super and human. And through all of that, he consistently demonstrates the values that make him a hero. In one important scene, he confronts a pair of conquering Kryptonians, Bar-El and Lilo. They mock him for failing to use his powers to dominate the people of Earth and build a new Krypton. His response is humble. That's not fair. What right do I have to impose my values on anyone? You can either try to save the world or you can take it over. Clark chooses to save it. And you know what? Even after he saves Metropolis from Bar-El and Lilo, when they become ill, Superman shows them compassion and helps alleviate their suffering. All-Star Superman is one of my favorite stories because it isn't really about Superman's physical strength at all. It's an exploration of his character. This is also the focus of Paul Dini and Alex Ross's Superman piece on Earth. There are aspects of this story that I really don't like, but its core is a valuable lesson about humility and the limits of power, even for the man of steel. It opens with Superman encountering a starving girl on the streets of Metropolis. As Clark, he follows up on her story and learns more about global hunger. He reflects on the lessons taught to him by his human father and decides that Superman should do something about it. But what? Although he knows it's not his place to set policy for mankind, he offers to transport food to starving nations. Volunteers step up to help, but as he begins to deliver shipping containers and entire container ships to hungry people around the world, he realizes that the problems are bigger than he fully understood. A one-day reprieve from starvation did not resolve the underlying causes of poverty. It did not stop repressive governments from terrorizing their people or stealing their land and resources. It did not change the fact that societies without decent institutions, markets, trade, and the free exchange of ideas, people would never be able to take care of themselves. Superman is forced to accept that for all his physical power, global hunger was a problem beyond his abilities. In the end, he chooses to teach young kids how to feed themselves. Not as Superman, but as the son of a Kansas farmer. And that brings me to one last story, Superman, American Alien. Written by Max Landis, American Alien is one of the best modern Superman books. It's a seven-part series of vignettes depicting critical moments of development in Clark Kent's life, from relying on his parents to help him navigate the horrifying shock of suddenly floating into the air or seeing through people's skin to learning how to manage his emotions when even the slightest outburst could level buildings and kill innocent people. Like All-Star and Peace on Earth, American Alien isn't really about Superman. It's about Clark and the values that make someone a hero. These values aren't instinctive or guaranteed in any of us. No one is born knowing how to be a good person or what moral principles are actually worth believing. These are things we have to learn. Superheroes, most of all, Clark Kent learns them from his human parents. In my favorite scene in the series, a young Clark is frustrated and embarrassed, hating himself for being different after failing to control his ability to fly at a drive-in movie. Hiding from the world, little Clark looks at himself in a mirror and sees a monster in the reflection. He lashes out, destroying both the mirror and the wall behind it. His dad picks him up at the theater to take him home. In the truck, they talk. Jonathan tells Clark that he can't just act like a jerk whenever he's upset. Clark is sad and scared. He just wants to be normal. The next day, Jonathan tries to help Clark learn to control his powers. After a while, they sit together on the front porch and Clark gets introspective and remorseful about his actions from the night before. His dad asks him, what are you thinking about? The mirror. I was thinking, somebody had to make it. Like, somebody at the factory took the time to make it. Then, somebody had to sell it to the movie theater. And then, other people had to fit it to the wall, which somebody else built before them. The gravity of his outburst becomes clear. And he goes on, when you break something, you're not just breaking the thing. You're like hurting everyone who made it what it was. Man, that is one of the most insightful realizations anyone could ever have about the world around them. And it was written in a comic book. These stories have survived for decades. They've been retold in dozens of languages, and they're known all over the world. They are mythology. And like all mythologies, they're ultimately about human values. They're how writers and artists convey their ideas and share lessons about character and morality with everyone else. But not every value anybody puts on screen or in a book is good. The ends don't justify the means. The collective isn't more important than the individual. Appealing to the greater good is often just an excuse for the abuse of power. Not every moral lesson anybody takes the time to write down is actually going to make the world a better place. So the stories we tell each other matter. That's why it's frustrating for me to see portrayals of Superman in Man of Steel or Batman versus Superman who have unbridled power and no clear moral compass. The heroes in some of these movies don't seem to care about anything. It's also frustrating to see writers who clearly hate Superman, like Frank Miller, depict him as a state worshipping goon or an inhuman alien god one bad day from becoming a brutal dictator. That's bad for business. I understand, sir. And although it's fun to imagine alternate versions, they can't all be evil. Certain people must die in order for the system to work. Wise words. If Superman's only role is to punch things really, really hard, there's nothing to look up to or be inspired by. That might be a power fantasy, but it doesn't help us understand how to use the power we have for good. And that's not what's great about the character or why it's worth telling stories about. He's so much better than that. And more and more, I think we need to start reminding each other that there are some values that are worth standing up for and some that really aren't. We need more truth, justice, and respect for individual freedom. We need fewer people trying to lie and mislead in order to impose their values on everyone else by force. We need more humility, compassion, and kindness. We need less anger and division. More calm, less noise. What I'm saying is we need actual heroes. On our recent episode about cop shows and police brutality, one point I made was that even though those stories tell us that everyone with a badge is a hero, all those characters go around acting like villains. A couple years ago, I said the same thing about Captain Marvel. The idea that it's cooler and more dramatic to make every character as dark and violent as possible has permeated pop culture for years. And now we live in a world where it's often impossible to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart. All Rangers, I need you to engage the targets. Guardian, this is batter zero one. What about the giant blue? I said engage all targets. Anti-hero stories work when they actually make sense for the character and the world being portrayed. But blurring that line when it comes to the characters that are supposed to represent the best of humanity has done a lot of damage to the way people think about what it means to be good. I think it's time for that trend to end. Looking around at what's been going on in our society, I can't help but feel that maybe we've lost our way. And I suspect that this is largely a result of bad ideas and nihilistic philosophies that have taken root in virtually everyone of our cultural institutions. But if we're going to hold on to all the things that have led to human progress, the enlightenment, science and the industrial revolution, division of labor and global trade, expanding individual liberty, civil rights and economic freedom, we can't lose the values that make those things possible. To do that, we need better heroes and good role models. And we need stories and mythology to help us share these values with everyone. And that is why we need Superman. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. As I said at the beginning, there's no way I could cover 82 years of comic history. So what are some of your favorite stories? Who are your favorite heroes? Let's talk about that in the comments. I'd also like to give a shout out to all of our patrons with an extra special thank you to our associate producers, to Matt Tabor, Dalin Case, Victoria Manshart and Laura Turner. Thank you. If you love the show and wanna help us keep making more episodes, check out the Patreon link in the description below. And for those of you who have been wondering where Common Sense Soapbox went, I have some news for you. We've created a brand new channel just for Common Sense Soapbox and Seamus is working on new episodes right now. If you're a fan of that series, click that link in the description and subscribe today. As always, don't forget to like this video and subscribe to this channel and follow us on all our social media at YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for watching.