Alright. It had to happen eventually: I have watched the new Superman movie. Overall, I enjoyed it. I went in with high expectations, I think. I’d heard good things and I genuinely found myself thinking “I may wind up having to change my repeated claim that Superman has never had a movie that was more than ‘good’ in quality level.” Well, I don’t have to change that claim. This is a ‘good’ movie. It did not move me in the way I want a Superman film to move me, but it is good. I enjoyed it. It was a fun blockbuster movie. This movie gets 5 out of 6 pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. I have to reiterate this stuff because I will, when you say Superman has never had a movie reach “great” status in your mind, people will act as if I’ve said all of his movies are bad. I never said that! Geez! I just said LOTS of his movies are bad.

Seriously, though. I liked this one at a level I can compare to how much I liked Superman II as a kid. That was my favourite Superman movie back then, so I guess this is tied for my favourite Superman movie. With that cleared up, now I can pick it apart!!!

Presenting a disordered list of my first thoughts, including spoilers:

• Good portrayal of Clark. He gets treated like a person. In fact the whole movie seems to be willing to treat its characters like people.
• Good treatment of Superman as a genre, if you will. The movie is never embarrassed that it is a Superman movie and therefore doesn’t feel the need to mitigate its fun to get respect.
• I went in knowing that it would have a bunch of other DC characters so I had calibrated for that. This movie is being used to launch the company’s latest iteration of a shared cinematic universe after all, so of course they’re leaning on those. And I am fully willing to admit that they made some of these characters work well enough in the story being told here, but that’s because they wrote the story being told here. If a Superman movie ever reaches “great” status in the eyes of PDR, you know it won’t have that kind of corporate synergy woven into it. Heck, even Kara, a character I gladly welcome in Superman stories and whose scene I found amusing, just made me think that it was setup for something else.
• Good portrayals of Lois and Jimmy and Perry. I’d definitely have liked to have seen more journalism on display (it’s basically limited to discussions about interviewing Superman and Jimmy calling a clingy ex for information), but I honestly don’t go into any Superman content expecting I’ll get the amount of journalism content I want. I’d be a fool to expect them to actually commit to that. Someday they may, but that was not today.
• Speaking of the Planet cast: Steve and Cat and Ron get to be there! They don’t do much, and Steve is relegated to a joke the way he always has been post-Crisis. Ron, I think, doesn’t get a line. But they’re there.
• I’m very happy that they chose to make some political commentary in there. Not a lot, certainly not as much as I would’ve liked, more than I probably would have bet on. And even this minor amount led to idiots on the Internet decrying it as too woke? I could write you a Superman story so woke you’d cry, you losers.
• Good Luthor, and perhaps more importantly, a Sydney Happersen so comics accurate I could tell it was him just from looking! They put Happersen in there for me alone, clearly.
• Related to Lex, I found the scenes in his pocket dimension prison kinda stupid. The prison design aside, there’s a Luthorcorp employee who, I guess, is just required to stand there holding a baby forever? And when it is extremely clear that Superman is about to start the escape, he doesn’t have the ability to contact anyone or anything? Dumb.
• There’s a couple of mentioned of “Hope” as a concept, but they don’t overplay it so I was perfectly capable of just letting them slide by without affecting my mood.
• Superman’s costume looks uncomfortable to me. It looks like it would bunch up and annoy me, especially around the collar and sleeves.
• The Fortress of Solitude still looks like garbage inside. Just another icy room. Get a frigging rug or something, Clark!
• There was another thing that was spoiled for me, so I was able to calibrate myself before going in. And thank goodness it was because it would have had a negative impact on me: this version of Jor-El and Lara sent Clark to Earth specifically AND they did so with a message telling him to conquer the locals. The movie has about three characters tell us this message is legitimate, not faked by Lex, and that means this has to be my least favourite thing going on here. My preferred take has always been that baby Kal-El was sent into space as a last ditch effort to save him and he just happened to wind up on Earth, rather than it being Jor-El’s plan all along. But more importantly, they’re basically saying that this character who is famously a refugee has parents who sent him here to rule over the people in his new homeland. Clark rejects this, sure, but the insinuation that this is what refugees are like is bad enough to me.

Anyway, I may develop deeper thoughts later, but those are my fresh-from-the-viewing thoughts. Now to catch up on 11 episodes of various podcasts I have been putting off until after I saw it.

Yango isn’t going to go down as one of the most famous Superman supporting cast members, but he’s still technically out there, a part of the franchise, so I get to talk about him. He was a biker, a member of a group called the Outsiders, who first appeared in Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen’s book. But I’m not here to talk about that run. I wanna talk about the time Yango and the Outsiders found religion.

This was after Kirby’s time with the character had ended, and it happened over in Lois’s book. It’s a weird issue, part of the story that revealed there was a real Morgan Edge and that the evil one was just a clone, so that we could still have the character around. Also, Lois’s sister is becoming an adrenaline junkie or something. That’s not important. What’s important is the reveal that the Outsiders just stopped deciding to be a biker gang and started a little farming community.

We’re not explicitly told why they do this. They try to make it sound like they’ve grown up, basically. One of them says “We left the world of violence, wars, greed, and fear– for the good earth. We grow our own food. We make out own clothes.”

The baddies come along (former Outsiders hired by the evil clone Edge) and try to fight the Outsiders, but all they get in response is turned cheeks and welcomes. Unable to fight against that, they run away and the comic gives us a quote from the Book of Proverbs! I’ve read a lot of Superman comics and I can’t think of another that just drops a Bible quote in a narrative caption like that. And they really do defeat the baddies that easily too. Edge had also tried to frame the Outsiders for being a “murder cult” by throwing some clonal “dead bodies” onto their land, but Superman shows up the very second the authorities find the bodies and confirms they’re not real. The Outsiders aren’t a murder cult, just a regular cult. All that’s on the same page as the Proverbs quote. The issue resolves so quickly, it’s strange.

I don’t really have any deeper thoughts beyond “This is weird, even for a Superman comic.” Yango would appear in the “Post-Crisis” continuity, but he and the Outsiders were back to their starting point as bikers. Their brush with religiosity is a thing of the past. Unless I get to do anything about it, Yango will probably only ever appear in things directly trying to homage Kirby.

I need to be clear, I do like the idea of a Superboy character who is an attempt by scientists to create a Superman of their own who then goes on to be a hero in his own right. So when a Superboy like that appeared in the wake of the famous Death of Superman story in the ’90s, well… well, I wasn’t reading the comics then. But I got around to it, and I liked the kid! And I also read the entirety of the kid’s own book, which ran for like sixty issues or something. For most of that book, his name was literally just Superboy. It certainly was not Conner Kent.

But at some point I noticed that the Internet was referring to this kid as Conner Kent. It turns out to have been revealed in some… shudder… other DC book. Certainly I don’t detest that the kid could have a name other than Superboy, I support it if that’s what he wants, but the problem is this: whatever comics did this also changed the kid’s backstory. I’ve never read this retcon-filled story, but here it is as I understand it:

The Superboy I liked was a clone of Superman, kind of. He was not a clone in the sense that they took Superman’s DNA and grew another one. Instead the Project took some base DNA (provided by Project leader Paul Westfield) and tinkered with it to give the clone the appearance of and more importantly powers that emulated those of Superman. Being non-Kryptonian, the kids powers were actually various kinds of psionics, of the kind they had learned from creating Dubbilex. This Superboy could lift things and fly, but because of telekinesis rather than alien strength. Here’s what’s cool about that: It gives Superboy powers that are similar to Superman, but different.

Maybe this was too complicated for some corporate idea of “the masses”? I don’t think so, but who am I? Maybe someone thought it would simplify things to make him just actually be a clone of Superman. And because Superboy being Superman’s clone removes Westfield from the equation they decided to go ahead throw Lex Luthor into the equation. Now this clone Superboy character is half Clark/half Luthor. I hate that.

Firstly I hate the idea that everything in Superman’s life revolves around Luthor like in that period in the early 40s when it seemed like every time a masked villain appeared he’d be unmasked as Luthor. It makes Superman’s world feel so small. You know how people say Superman doesn’t have the rogues gallery of characters like Batman or Spider-Man? Well that’s because of stuff like this (For the record, Paul Westfield’s daughter actually served as one of Superboy’s foes. She wasn’t anything especially great, but she was there). But even worse is this: this seems to have been a change made so that they could play up drama where Superboy is full of angst because half of his DNA comes from a supervillain. That bothers me. I don’t think being a “bad guy” is genetic and I don’t think we should be telling stories that suggest it is.

I don’t know if this revelation also undid the idea that Superboy has psionic-based powers or not. I expect it hasn’t, I feel like I’ve seen images of him still doing his own thing, but I haven’t bothered to check. But if it did, if he wound up being just another person with the standard Kryptonian set of abilities, well that would mean that, in every meaningful way, Conner Kent just is not the Superboy I liked. Whereas right now, he’s only 80% not the Superboy I liked.

A month or two ago I was at Walmart. Since that is something that happens most often when I am looking for a gift for my niblings, I spent a lot of time in the toy section. And, in spite of myself, the same thing happens every time I am in a toy section at a store like that: I wonder why Superman is so underrepresented.

I know I shouldn’t be bothered too much. The Superman of my mind wouldn’t want to be too represented in overpriced merchandise sold by corrupt corporations. But I also see such toys as a way to open the minds of children to the ideas that I wish were being delivered by Superman media.

Still, it doesn’t bother me that much until I see something like this:

It’s not a great picture because I just snapped it with my phone while looking for other things, but what that is is that that is Batman-branded playset featuring Batman, Superman, and Lex Luthor and named “Wayne Tower Mayhem”. I don’t know if this is referencing some specific story, and don’t get me wrong the whole thing looks like crap, but it still bugs me. We’ve got two figures for two Superman characters and a tall building theme. There are plenty of tall buildings this could have been as a Superman-branded toy. Coulda been the Daily Planet or the LexCorp building just for starts. But no, instead some toy making people said that this is Batman’s house and Batman has two jerks from Metropolis show up and ruin his night, the playset.

I get that Batman is popular and probably moves toys, but honestly I bet he’s got characters enough of his own who should be fighting on that rooftop.

There is, I have to assume, no line of Superman toys coming out. I’ve heard claims that Batman is easier to make toys of because Batman has all kinds of cool toys like batarangs and the Batmobile, but once you have a Superman toy you have everything you can get from Superman. I don’t agree with that. First of all, you’ve got all the supporting cast members and villains that could be turned into figures. Sure, people could argue that a lot of them aren’t very toyetic, but if I were in charge, I’d be trying to improve them as characters, so I could work on that too. And there’s no reason Superman and friends can’t have a bunch of cool gizmos. It’s a sci-fi franchise! Make stuff up!

Now, I don’t know anything about modern toys, but if I take this line from the Wikipedia page for TMNT toys as correct, “The premiere series included the four Turtles, Splinter, April, Shredder, Rocksteady, Bebop, and a Foot Soldier. Vehicles included the Cheapskate, Turtle Trooper, Turtle Blimp, and Foot Knucklehead” there were ten figures and four vehicles in the first line of Ninja Turtles toys. Well, I can replicate that for Superman, surely. And all the weird transformations and stuff!

Figures:

1. Superman: Obviously you need to have him. We’d need to start the run off with a pretty basic Superman figure. Accessories? How about a Phantom Zone Projector? We could make it look cool and light up or something.
2. Lois Lane: Famously the toys in the era I grew up in would avoid the lady figures because they wouldn’t sell as well, but I’m not going without Lois.
3. Jimmy Olsen: I figure there’s a couple ways to go with it. You could do a thing about his transforming, where he has different heads and hands and can be like a werewolf or whatever. Or maybe you do a camera thing where the camera flashes? Or it could be a viewfinder thing?
4. Steel: He’s got a cool look and a big hammer. You need to have him.
5. Lex Luthor: For a toy we’re probably want a Luthor in some sort of power armour, even though I think the suits look cooler. He could definitely have kryptonite as an accessory.
6. General Zod: The other big one of Superman’s foes, we stick him in the first set.
7. Toyman: He’s had several designs, so we’d have to figure out which would be best, but I think he’s an obvious fit for a line of figures.
8. Metallo: Cool robot design and maybe he can open up to see his kryptonite heart? That’s something. Some glow in the dark might be cool.
9. Bloodsport: Tons of guns are his accessories and that’s what toys were in my day.
10. Bizarro: You get to basically reuse the Superman design with minor differences, so that’s good.

None of that is revelatory. Apart from maybe Bloodsport I assume they’ve all had toys before (and even Bloodsport probably has now that he was in that movie). I kinda wanted to delve into more obscure territory, so maybe I should’ve done this thought experiment as the second wave of toys instead. Ah well, I’m too tired to start anew right now, so let’s let that happen some other time. We still have to deal with:
Vehicles:

1. Supermobile: The classic Supermobile design, but I say we make it so it can transform into a “normal” car.
2. Bizarromobile: We take the Supermobile design and make it all weird. And it transforms into a weird car. I’m in.
3. Lexcopter: A LexCorp-branded helicopter that probably can shoot missiles.
4. Teddy Mech: A teddy-bear-themed mech that a figure can ride in, designed for Toyman.

And I didn’t even get into playsets. Anyway, the fact I didn’t have to get into the obscure stuff I wanted proves how easy it should be. It’s clear that the reason I don’t see more Superman stuff in stores is simply because companies don’t want it there. What a shame.

If I revisit this, I’m sure I’ll get weirder with it.

Here’s the one about how I prefer my Bizarro, I guess.

The thing I feel about Bizarro is that he is doing the opposite thing on purpose. It’s a choice. I don’t like it when Bizarro is some cosmically-opposite version of Superman, I prefer the term they originally used, Bizarro is an “imperfect duplicate” of Superman. He’s not “Reverse Superman” or “Mirror Superman” or something like that. He’s “Bizarro Superman”.

I’ll accept the weird power inversions, I guess. I don’t require them, but if people want him to have flame breath and cold vision or whatever, sure, that’s cute. But saying that, personality-wise, Bizarro is just backwards version of the protagonist doesn’t do it for me. It’s much more compelling to me if Bizarro came into being, wired differently (“imperfectly” by someone’s standards) than his clone-brother. He tries to get by in the world, but he just can’t get it right. Things don’t make as much sense to him as they seem to to everyone else. He would be like his more popular sibling, but it doesn’t come natural to him. And people just don’t accept him in that role. He gets frustrated, he acts out. And THEN he decides if he can’t be like Superman, he’s going to be as unlike Superman as possible.

It’s a tragedy, his rejection of Superman. It’s a shame, it’s a shonda, but it’s a choice. This gives Bizarro both more agency and more poignancy, I think. It also gives him room to think about how he wants to be Superman’s opposite, and change his mind about things. All in all, I just think it makes him more interesting.

And, for the record, I don’t think of Bizarro as a “villain”. He’s a supporting cast member whose circumstances cause him to sometimes fight Superman. Bizarro is like Superman’s younger brother who is kind of a mess. That’s what I want from him.