So there’s this Superman comic I really like called Superman: Earth One, written by J. Michael Straczynski, and I enjoy it because it portrays a version of Superman who’s believably angry about the state of the world and often has to work around that in his decision making. And as a follow-up to that, I also really, really like the comic because it directly addresses the elephant in the room about why Superman doesn’t get involved in politics.
There’s a sequence in the second volume where Superman is providing disaster relief to a minority-dominated area of a country, which the local dictator has been passively trying to genocide by denying conventional relief. Said dictator shows up and starts executing and mutilating the local populace until Superman leaves; this causes Superman to throw in with the local revolutionaries, and he subsequently storms the dictator’s palace, disarms everyone present without actually hurting anyone, and then leaves the dictator open for the revolutionaries to do with as they please. Very messy things subsequently happen to the dictator.
And this is the point at which the United States Government drops everything to begin working out a way to kill Superman, because they surmise that it’s only a matter of time before Superman does the same thing at the White House.
And then, after Superman barely scrapes out a win against the CIA’s half-baked predictably-nearly-apocalyptic plan to kill him by cutting a deal with General Zod, he goes to the United Nations and says, “Look, I can’t survive you assholes pulling out all the stops to get rid of me, but you can’t survive the fallout of a successful plan to get rid of me because anything the CIA makes or recruits that’s capable of killing me, is almost certainly going to immediately turn around and kill all of you. As this whole mess demonstrated! So how about I pledge to stop couping dictators, you stop growing evil Superman Clones, we all go home really unhappy and do our best to get on with it?”
And, you know, ask any Superman fan who hasn’t read this comic why he doesn’t fight the government and you’d get an answer along these lines! It’s not hard to intuit the realpolitik of Superman’s position on the world stage, he can’t help people if he’s constantly fighting every government at once. But most Superman comics that get political in this way either have him stay out of it entirely due to personal ethics, or have him become a crusading tyrant to demonstrate why it’s a bad idea. So even if it required a generally angrier and grittier Clark than you usually see, it was really refreshing to see a version of Superman that dipped into this kind of thing just enough to canonize the obvious answer as to why he usually steers clear of outright political violence.
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