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.

Wasuperman

(Originally posted to Twitter Oct 11, 2020)

I’ve said a lot of things about a lot of Superman villains on this little site of mine, but I don’t think I’ve said much about his most iconic villain: Lex Luthor. I think the concept of Lex Luthor as a nemesis has reached the world at large. I’m sure I could think of some little ways to improve on Luthor’s usage as a Superman foe, but honestly, once they expanded his mad scientist role to include all the evil capitalists that Clark fought in his early days, they got what I needed from him. Maybe I’m less concerned with him being the “smartest human on Earth” (I think such superlatives are a poison to the superhero genre) and I know I like him to be a little bit goofier than many readers, but in general I think we’re getting good Luthor most of the time.

But one thing that I’ve found controversial even among Superman fans is whether or not Clark Kent and Lex Luthor should be friends who tragically became enemies? I always preferred when they weren’t.

It’s one of my least favourite things when creators think superheroes have to have personal connections to their enemies for the sake of drama. And Superman especially! Superman shouldn’t need personal connections to a problem to want to solve that problem. And anyway, Superman has too many enemies with personal connections anyway! Brainiac is a space-faring baddie who once captured a city right off of Superman’s homeworld! This time it’s personal! General Zod (and most of the Phantom Zone criminals as well) is actually from Superman’s homeworld and maybe even knew Superman’s father! This time it’s personal! It’s a crutch and I don’t care for it.

It also bugs me that Superman just happens to grow up with the kid who goes on to be one of the richest and smartest businessmen in the world? It strains credibility and makes Clark less of the everyman they wanted him to be when they made him a smalltown boy.

But it’s surprisingly popular considering how rarely it’s actually been the status quo. It came about during the Silver Age, and I am acutely aware that Silver Age concepts seem to grow back any time they are removed. A lot of the time I’m in favour of the Silver Age concepts coming back. It was also the case in the live action Superboy television show, but compared to the various movies and show’s where it hasn’t been the case, that show can’t compare. The comics did away with it in the 80s reboot, but it has swung in and out with different revisions of continuity. Of course, the biggest reason for the popularity of this setup today is the show Smallville, which was about young Clark and Lex. That show did run for a decade, so it’s got a generation of Superman fans who like the friends setup.

And I don’t know. I don’t like it, but at this point I’m kind of just accepting it. I don’t know if either of the currently-running Superman shows have Clark and Lex as former friends or not, but if they do, I’ll just accept it.

Here’s what I think we need to do to make it acceptable for Lex and Clark to have been friends: We need Superman to have other nemeses who are as important as Lex but are not This Time It’s Personals. If I accept Brainiac and Zod as being slightly personal, let’s get at least three more who have no personal connection to Clark or Superman before they met as foes. As I’ve said, the Terra-Man is a good criminal inversion of some Superman tropes, so let’s put him on the list. But also, let’s finally give the Ultra-Humanite a chance to shine. I’m sure I’ll do a post about them sometime, but yeah, they were Superman’s big foe before Luthor came alone, so let’s get that back.

Or, of course, there’s always Tal-Var.

In a sprawling urban city, a talented hacker tries to steal from a MegaCorp, but gets caught. The company owner sways the hacker to his side with promises of wealth. Together they hijack and weaponize a satellite and, with the hacker posing as a member of the military-industrial complex, they even try to use a narcotic-based poison to bring down a crusading hero who stands in their way. During their plan to build a giant supercomputer, one of the corpos is turned into a killer cyborg. The hacker ends up leaving the MegaCorp and helping the hero.

Okay, Superman III isn’t actually cyberpunk enough to be called cyberpunk, really. But I’ve amused myself by referring to it as such before and I’ll probably do it again.

What I will say is that the hacker character in the movie, Gus Gorman, should come back. I say we keep him as close as possible to the character as seen in the movie. He’s talented with computers but has trouble making his way in a corporate world, so he does thing underhanded now and then. He probably came afoul of Superman at some point, but Superman can tell that prison isn’t a solution, so he and Gus become allies. Sometimes Gus’ll get in over his head and maybe some criminal types will want to harm Gus, so Superman can save the day. There are definitely times when Superman (or Lois or Jimmy or anyone) might need the aid of a hacker, so he can be brought in for that stuff. I’d be wary of making him a clean-cut good guy, but in a world where Superman is a champion of the oppressed, Gus would be on that list.

It’s several years late, but I have finally managed to finish watching the Supergirl show. Now is as good a time as any to do a post about my thoughts on it.

Now, I have to be honest first of all. I didn’t love the show. It’s definitely a show I would not have watched if it had not been a part of the “Super” franchise, as it were. But that fine. That was also true about Smallville. That was also true about the Superman movies that have come out since I was a child. That is also true about the currently-running Superman live-action show (on which I am similarly years behind). I don’t feel like I was the target audience for this show, so I never felt too insulted by how it wasn’t doing what I wanted, but it did do plenty of things I didn’t like. Some of the things that annoyed me the most:

• They brought Jimmy Olsen into the show. When this was first announced, I saw people on the Internet complaining that this Jimmy was buff and handsome and confident, not the little dweeb that Jimmy often is. I argued against these people, saying this was a Jimmy who spent a decade working alongside Superman, so it makes sense that he would be transformed by that (they also complained that Jimmy was Black, but I didn’t feel the need to argue with them about that, because their opinion on that was self-evidently dumb). But then the show never really did anything good with Jimmy. It was a real waste of a version of Jimmy Olsen we don’t usually get to see.
• Speaking of the supporting cast, they almost all get turned into superheroes. This is something I’ve complained about happening in all superhero stuff these days, but it always irks me when the stories suggest that characters only have value if they can get in fights. If that’s how we judge people in superhero stories, I don’t agree.
• Another thing this show does that most superhero shows do now is to have the hero working with SHIELD. Sure, they don’t call it SHIELD, but it is basically SHIELD. Why is every superhero with a SHIELD now? Stop it, superheroes.
• The SHIELD on this show is about fighting alien threats, so the show eventually settles into a worldbuilding situation that treats aliens the way Buffy The Vampire Slayer treated demons. They’re just regular people who exist in a little subculture around town. I don’t hate the setup (apart from Kara working with SHIELD, as I say), but most of the times the aliens are just TOO human. This show aspired to have aliens as cool looking as Star Trek. Usually, it treats aliens as if they are just humans with super powers, and those powers can just be turned off, as if human is actually the default state and those powers aren’t biological necessities to the aliens, they’re just extra stuff that isn’t actually needed.
• Characters from non-Super-related DC stuff was ubiquitous. Martian Manhunter is there from the beginning and, honestly, he works well enough that I could almost forgive it if there weren’t all the crossovers with other ongoing shows I wouldn’t watch without being paid. And there’s even a big continuity-rewriting crossover in the middle of the run, and if the show can’t maintain its continuity for six seasons, why should I be invested in anything that happens? But it was done more as a gimmick reference to DC comics than anything.

This show was for people who look at the way the superhero genre is today and thing “Yes, I like this.” And that sure isn’t PDR.

But there were things to like about the show and it may be better for me to focus on them a bit. First and foremost: Melissa Benoist in the title role. She’s pretty much perfect in the role. Personally, I would list the show’s depiction of Supergirl as a weak spot above, they too often just try to plug her into Superman/Clark Kent roles without letting her be her own thing, but Benoist does such a good job with it, I simply can’t consider her to be even slightly a weak spot here.

The show also does spend time on the kind of social justice and political stories I actually want in my superhero stories. They do it both in allegory, in which bigotry against aliens is used to show the evils of racism, but also they deal with issues like actual racism and feminism and stuff too. A lot of times the actual results can be clumsy, but at least they’re trying. With the state of things, I’ll take what I can get.

There were other things I liked about the show, but I feel like every one I bring up will come with some downside and I don’t want to bury the show in negativity. It was fine, probably great for the intended audience, and mostly I’m glad the show happened. I will even give it this compliment: I may go back and watch episode again (but certainly never the whole show).