Some Thoughts on Action Comics #775

I got around to reading the much esteemed Superman story What’s so Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way? a little while ago, and of course I greatly enjoyed it. It seemed like a simple, intelligent, very humane story about the value of an idealistic, mythic hero like Superman that has become a rare breed in the modern scene of “realistic” anti-heroes and a culture that often seems too traumatized to take big blue’s simplistic morality seriously. I also recently saw the animated version of the book, which I thought was really quite awful, but that’s another story.

Then I did some looking around online and found out that although the comic is widely regarded as a modern classic, it’s got quite a few detractors who were making some very interesting and articulate arguments against the book’s message. These people didn’t just think it was a flawed work, however; they freaking hated this story. So I decided I would paraphrase a few of these arguments I’d seen and spend some time giving my responses to them, hopefully with as little misrepresentation and misunderstanding as possible.

I won’t bother giving a synopsis of the story because the content of this post really kinda demands that you read the comic first. Anyways, off we go.

“The message of the book is confused because Superman defeats the Elite by using their methods against them, which really only serves to prove that their way is superior in the first place. If Superman’s way really is superior, than that’s how he should beat them.”

There are a few problems with this argument, and it’s where most people, lovers and haters of this book alike, make what I think is the big error in their interpretation. For one thing, Superman never does take up The Elite’s methods. He does what he always does- intelligently uses his powers to safely incapacitate his enemies without doing any long term damage- the only difference is that he pretends he’s killing them to make a point. He’s not “proving that he can be a badass when he wants to”, he’s proving what a sad, silly façade Black’s been playing this whole time by aping him and showing him just how ugly his way is.

Superman is a cultural icon. He’s an integral part of the American consciousness, as basic to us as apple pie and carpet bombing. He certainly doesn’t have the popularity he did in the first thirty or so years of his career, but you’d still be hard pressed to find anybody in the developed world who doesn’t recognize that S. And that’s true in the comic world just as it is in ours. We expect Superman to act a certain way, a way we look up to. To a large degree, I think he’s so often mocked because he reminds us of a childish innocence we often feel embarrassed to admit we still cling to a little bit. To suddenly see Superman drawn looking mean and angry, seemingly murdering people, is disturbing to us and it’s disturbing to the characters in the story. When Superman makes Black think he’s lobotomized him with his heat vision, Black, who’s been playing the cold, snarky badass up until this point, starts bawling.

Black isn’t crying just because he got his ass kicked, or even because he thinks his team is dead, or because Kelly is saying “HA HA WHAT A PUSSY LOL SUPERMAN WINS”, as many seem to think he is. He’s crying because deep down, even though he’ll deny it and rationalize away his own actions, he admires Superman just like the rest of us, and like he said, Superman doesn’t do this. He doesn’t kill people and violate their brains, because that’s evil. The idealistic vision of a gentle, loving hero who shows us all the right way to act that he’s had in his head since he was a child is being destroyed in front of his eyes and the worst part is that what’s there instead looks a lot more like him. And frankly, it looks a lot more like us. Many characters could do exactly what Superman does here in earnest and we would still be rooting for them. Yet suddenly, this man who’s casually murdered any number of people and indirectly caused the deaths of thousands is calling Superman a degenerate for doing things that, compared to his crimes, are small change. The truth is that even Manchester Black knows that the kind of methods he’s embraced are wrong, he just needs to be forced to admit it.

Oddly, people have tried to claim that Superman is somehow proving that The Elite’s methods are right by using them to defeat them, even when he’s got the leader of The Elite sobbing about how wrong they are and Superman hasn’t actually killed or even seriously injured anybody.

To be clear, Superman didn’t have to pretend he killed anybody to win. He could have been completely up front and defeated them exactly the same way. But what would that have proven? That Superman is more powerful? Big fucking deal. He had to pretend to emulate The Elite to show us how indisputably wrong their behavior is. And that has all the makings of a great Superman story. It’s not only subtle, intelligent, and sends a positive message, but most importantly, it resourcefully employs the unique moral authority Superman has to show us what’s right, cleverly making us empathize with the villain to do so. And if you ask me, that’s beautiful storytelling.

This also deals with the argument that Superman is only re-enforcing their attitude of might-makes-right. His moral superiority doesn’t come from his physical victory, it comes from how he shows them they’re wrong just by behaving more like them than like himself. It’s true that he needs to win the fight for dramatic effect, but compared to some really lame ideas I’ve seen for what people think would have been better endings, I think Kelly handled it in the best possible way, doing something unexpected, gripping and meaningful without betraying the character. When your best criticism of a Superman book is that Superman wins in the end, you need to go back to the drawing board.

“It’s wrong-headed because it’s rooted in the belief that Superman’s morality needs to be defended.”

I guess the main problem with this argument is the idea that the book is really a defense of Superman. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it more as simply providing a much less cynical, more optimistic alternative to the kinds of superheroes that were popular at the time of the book’s release. It’s true that The Elite is clearly analogous to The Authority, Warren Ellis’s more “grown up” and more morally ambivalent version of the Justice League. People have tried to argue that it’s unfair because The Elite are much more unsympathetic than The Authority, which I think is absolute idiocy.

Warren Ellis (maybe the only guy alive who can wear a fedora and still be taken seriously) doesn’t like superheroes. In many ways, The Authority is about deliberately awful people, I suspect because as far as Ellis is concerned, that’s what superheroes would be like in real life. They are trying to make the world a better place, and they are in many respects actually likeable characters, but they are only really the good guys because there are other folks out there who are even worse. The Elite kills a few supervillains; The Authority has actually deliberately murdered whole countries, both excusing their actions as being for the greater good. But that’s really what Kelly’s problem with The Authority as a Justice League allegory seems to be- yes, maybe a more “realistic” Superman would be a murderous bastard who forces us to be better people instead of simply leading by example, and maybe in the real world that approach would do the most good- but Superman isn’t that way, and there are good reasons for that. Kelly’s point isn’t that The Authority is a bad or amoral book. His point is just that as a myth, it’s a perversion of Superman, using a pastiche of him to illustrate the abuse of great power rather than the responsible use of it. To be fair, though, I plan on re-reading The Authority soon, and my feelings on this may change after having a refreshed look at it, but even in Ellis’s own words, The Authority are not at all meant to be seen as real heroes.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Kelly made the same mistake in misinterpreting Ellis’s intent and thought The Authority were actually supposed to be heroes. And criticizing the story for that over-simplification of Ellis’s position isn’t unreasonable, I just think it works much better when you look beyond that possibility and consider that maybe Kelly is only pointing out that superheroes really aren’t all that bad.

I was about the age of the kids Superman watches in the playground when the comic came out, half a year before 9/11. Honestly, that scene rang extremely true to me because when I was a kid that was exactly what all my friends thought of Superman. A lot of that came from me being the kid reading Silver Age comics while (at the risk of sounding like a certain cranky old racist on Fox News) my friends were listening to gangsta rap about selling drugs, killing people and raping women. In elementary school.

As you can imagine, a guy in a red cape and underpants saving lives didn’t really grab them (unless it was Captain Underpants, but, y’know, different thing).

Somewhere down the line, it has become unfashionable for characters to be kind, decent people who really just want to make the world a better place, and this is one of the first comics I can think of that seemed to actively be fighting to resist this trend. Action Comics #775 wasn’t the first or last comic to do this, but it was one of the most effective. A nation’s myths reflect its values, and if America’s heroes are a bunch of sociopathic bastards, what does that make us? Perhaps there are some people who would rather not admit it, but that era of comics, that era in our culture in general, intentionally or not, did make us rather desensitized to the cruelty and brutality of many of its so-called heroes, and we did need to be reminded that killing is wrong and that hope isn’t silly. Looking at many of the comics I see on the shelves these days, we still do.

“The public’s almost immediate shift of support from Superman to The Elite is unrealistic.”

There’s no long-winded refutation for this, all you have to do is look at the real world mere months after this book was released and 9/11 happened. Suddenly the country was clamoring for vengeance and by May of 2003, 80% of the country thought bombing and invading Iraq was justified, whether or not the evidence of WMDs was conclusive, Gallup polls confirming that the majority of Americans thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. This wasn't a case of Superman having to save us from a great tragedy- all we had to do to save lives ourselves was not fucking kill anybody, and we couldn't manage that. A public that feels threatened will quickly turn to violence and hate if they lack a powerful example to set them straight. Unfortunately, instead of Superman, we had only a handful of liberal radio and television programs that weren't able to turn back the tide of propaganda and fear, and we all know of the result.

“Superman’s speech at the end is too smug and preachy.”

I’ll admit, good Superman stories give me a really warm and fuzzy feeling. When I saw Superman rescuing the airplane in Superman Returns and then calmly quipping to the passengers in the cabin after laying it in a baseball field, I was grinning from ear to ear like a fucking idiot. Those little moments of confidence, modesty and nobility make me feel like a kid again, so you can imagine that Superman’s speech at the end was like Christmas for me when I first read it.

There’s nothing very challenging here. Anger, vengeance and spite are wrong, and Superman will never give up on humanity’s capacity to be better. All old territory, powerful in context, but it all relies, in my opinion, on the one line which kinda sums up the whole comic: “Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us.”

I had to read the story a few times before I got the meaning of that, but in my own interpretation, yes, Superman has his own dream, but more importantly, Superman is our dream. That’s why we need him: he’s not realistic. He’s the Man of Tomorrow, a guy who wields his unparalleled power with decency and grace humanity as a whole hasn’t achieved yet. We can’t have a Superman in real life at the moment, and we probably never will, but we can try our best to live up to his example. We did create him; all of his ideals are ones we gave him because we instinctively know they’re good and right. We all know we should be kind, we all know we should help the helpless and try to empathize with each other and use our power thoughtfully and without ill will, we just have a hard time doing that in the real world sometimes.

Superheroes are not and could not be real, and frankly I’m not especially concerned about the likelihood that maybe if they were, they’d be fucking pricks. I don’t pine for superheroes to start saving the world here in reality; I pine for us to start acting more like them. For all the potential Ellis’s heroes have as characters and vehicles for great stories and exploring the idea they set forth, The Authority can never be something anybody tries to live up to- and that’s not how they were intended, but for that reason it seems wrong to consider them a suitable replacement for “20^th century” superheroes, as they may have been at the time.