⁽ᵗʰᵉ⁾ 𝐌𝐀𝐍 𝒐𝒇 TOMORROW.

there isn't a right and a wrong way to interpret the superman character; he is so extremely old (made his debut in 1938) that he exists in so many different formats. it's literally impossible to make the determination at this point on who's right or wrong. what we, as readers and/or audience members to a show or a film, must do is decide what works best for us and our values and our beliefs. comic book characters are now essentially mouthpieces for whoever wants to project onto them. this entire spiel is how i'm aiming to write clark with what i think he represents, because of the aforementioned character reduction that i feel tends to happen — and again, this is subject purely to my opinion, so i hope i don't sound like i'm standing on a soapbox.

i'm going to be using two particular, and very popular, superman titles as references for the remainder of this post: the man of steel (1986) and superman: birthright (2003). both of them touch upon the idea that clark's birthright lies among the stars, but mark waid and john byrne treat this completely differently (and also this post will be 50 million words long if i try including other examples, and it already feels too long, sorry x2). chances are you're not a superman shill like me (and that's perfectly fine) so you haven't read these comics. to provide some background operating under that assumption: man of steel was a reboot of clark's origin story following the crisis on infinite earths crossover event, and birthright was a reboot of clark's backstory following the smallville series' retcon to include lex luthor as a major player in the titular town that started airing in 2001. what i love most about birthright is that it is the perfect story to have clark explore the relationship between his life on earth and the expectations his birth parents had of him, and how he wrestles with the conflict in his own identity. what i hate most about man of steel is that it spits on the parts of clark that aren't blatantly american, and it's not even a matter of interpretation. i will touch on that further down in this post.

birthright opens to the destruction of krypton, to that moment when jor-el and lara lor-van place their infant son (along with a tablet detailing krypton's history) into a rocket prototype to save his life from the death of their planet.

fast forward a few pages, clark's now sending an email to his mother martha kent, detailing his adventures in africa and discussing how he's able to see the life force of other living creatures. he also discusses a human he meets that's leading the charge for his tribe to receive representation in parliament, and how that gentleman uses his skills to make a real change, before going on to briefly talk about what he believes is krypton's history after he was able to figure out how the tablet works. he can't speak or read kryptonese yet, but he's able to discern that the "s" symbol meant a lot to the people of this mysterious world, that it meant hope, and how he feels he's failing its legacy. what's important about this opening sequence is how isolated and lonely he is. he describes how he keeps everyone at arm's length because they have adverse reactions to finding out he has powers, and this is what makes him descend into journalism: he finds it easier to report on things rather than being directly involved in them.

"ma, there's got to be a way for me to USE my abilities and yet not feel totally isolated by them."

clark's loneliness is one of his biggest attributes that gets overlooked a lot. as i stated above, in a lot of modern adaptations (most recently james gunn's superman film), the clark we're given is a reduction of the superman character into a very basic mannequin of what i interpret to be the real superman: he does good things because he's wholesome and just wants all the other good people to have a good day. what's ironic about people clinging to this interpretation is that this superman doesn't seem to care a whole lot about killing people, even if it's not on purpose, which is a major issue that is very antithetical to the concept of superman as a baseline... but that's kind of what happens when you strip this character of the complexities that root him (most importantly, his tragedy) and the very idea of his survival — you have to remember that in a lot of versions of his origin story, his birth parents had no idea whether or not he'd live or die if sent to earth. when he learns about what it took to preserve his life, it only is natural that he'd care about extending that to others. birthright highlighting this as the reason he adopts the superman persona is fitting, and makes sense with his trauma and how he copes with it.

that loneliness is also the reason he develops a complex about his identity, and why it becomes more important to him to preserve the mission of his legacy than anything else. there's always debates about who clark is at his core — whether he's clark kent, or he's superman — and the answer is that he's superman at his core. birthright, being an examination of his perception of his identity, uses this to drive the entire narrative of the rest of the story. after all, jonathan kent gets short with him when he feels clark is "throwing himself away" for this crusade, which clark has to contend with by reaffirming that no matter who he is, he's still going to be jonathan's son.

"they wanted me to carry on for them here... like it's my calling. my birthright. and if i follow it, everything else falls into place."

the rest of the birthright story is about lex luthor trying to turn the world against superman by using technology he developed with kryptonite in order to harness images from krypton's past; the goal is to share these images, similar to a hologram (in combination with some hired guns) to create the illusion of a kryptonian invasion. what makes birthright such a wonderful and profound story is due to the fact that it tackles the issue of the world not trusting superman initially, making fearmongering so easy to constitute regarding him and his intentions. clark almost doesn't rise above it. he struggles thinking that he failed, failed his peoples' legacy, failed the calling he was meant to answer... but in the end, he gets back up and fights to protect the citizens of metropolis. the thing that instilled so much insecurity and loneliness in him, the "s", was also the thing that liberates him from his feelings of failure and what gives the symbol true power. instead of letting an evildoer co-opt the "s" and turn it into something ugly, when it used to be so much more upon krypton's apex, he decides he wants to defend its meaning even if the people of earth have chosen not to trust him. it's not their trust that's most important to him, but it's the decision to do the right thing even when there's no payoff for it. he values krypton, he values the beliefs that have been instilled upon him, and krypton's legacy is more important to him than his own self doubt.

the man of steel, inversely, begins by portraying krypton as sterile and unfeeling. jor-el explicitly states that he's giving his son what krypton was lacking: a fullness of life. additionally, byrne writes lara as thinking of earthlings as dirty savages. there's also something to be said about her insinuating that clark's powers should make him rule the people of earth and "shape them to proper kryptonian ways" because he'd be above them due to his powers.

the reason that i'm explicitly pointing his parents' language out here when i didn't do so with how the el's were written in birthright is because the el's weren't written anywhere near this horrendously, and highlighting this particular aspect of clark's birth parents is significant in this case, since his parents' behavior here pretty much sets the tone for the way clark acts and behaves when he decides to put on the cape in this version of his origin story.

john byrne is a very conservative writer, and it bleeds into every single one of his pages. he really wants to hammer down into your head that clark's as human as the rest of us, and more importantly, that he's as american as it gets. (he retcons clark's backstory to have the rocket act like a womb to make sure clark is literally born in kansas.) additionally, he wants you to know that superman subscribes to upholding the law of his fellow compatriots, to the point where the first interaction he has with batman is to try to turn him into the police because he finds himself to be the paragon of american law and virtue. (it's really telling that byrne's clark has the audacity to call bruce wayne an inhuman monster.) the rest of man of steel isn't really a continuous story like birthright was, it's more like a series of different happenings that just show you what this superman is like when he's out fighting crime.

"Clark grew up as human, thinks as a human, reacts as a human. He lives and loves as a human. And that is what really defines him." (x)

john byrne, for the longest time and probably until the end of time so long as superman retains any pop culture relevance, is always the reason people think that "superman is the mask", and not clark kent. it just doesn't make sense for a character to have literal superpowers to be so hell-bent on denying them that he thinks he's anything other than that: super. from the broader standpoint of immigration and the notion he embodies of leaving your home to take refuge elsewhere, this becomes a lot more problematic; the implication that a person needs to reject their roots and their culture to be more palatable to the people around them in their new culture is asinine and downright strange.

"He's not a freaking Kryptonian pretending to be human! He's a human being who happens to have alien physiology. Changes that put this other stuff into the Superman 'stream of consciousness' diminish the character rather than boost him." "Clark would be proud, too, of his Kryptonian heritage, but later portrayals of him have tried to shoehorn in too much of the pychobabble of adopted children longing for and seeking out their biological parents. Excuse my French, but to me, they fall under the heading of ungrateful little sh*ts." (x)

now i really don't want to let my bias bleed more into this post than it already has, but i think i made my case quite well using words directly from john byrne himself. there is a point in me discussing this though, beyond me making it clear that i hate it. it's so vastly different from mark waid's work. both of these runs brush up on superman's birthright lying among the stars, but how they handle this are vastly different from one another to the point where they're literally occupying two different ends. byrne's superman thinks this is meaningless, that none of it matters because clark's a human, he's american, so "sterile" and "antiseptic" krypton is no longer relevant.

all of this just sucks when you remember that clark kent has a canonical, biological cousin who, in various versions of her existence, was a teenager when krypton blew up and she experienced it firsthand. her relationship to her heritage and to her grief is much more profound and heavy because she lived it, that was her reality — so to think that byrne writes clark as indifferent to this like he doesn't have an active relationship with his cousin is just weird. it's hard to fathom that kara would even be tolerant of this, because krypton was her reality.

the differences in how clark views being kryptonian in these stories is striking, and really plays a part in how a person will interpret the superman character. if one enjoys byrne's take, then they strip the character of his complex feelings: that he feels he has to do the right thing because he's trying to measure up to krypton's legacy in the aftermath of its demise. when you remove this aspect from his character, he becomes a shell of who he is — and ironically, removing his nostalgia and his grief for krypton is what makes him sterile, like byrne loves to "eloquently" state. new 52 superman, in its conceptualization, is closer to the idea that clark is an alien more so than a lot of these modern adaptations. his suit is quite literally kryptonian bio armor that he found up in space, unlike the suit he has in the man of steel that was made by martha kent. the reason he's so cocky and arrogant in the beginning of his superman career at the start of the new 52 is because he's so comfortable with his powers and hasn't yet met anyone who could rival them, so he develops an unwavering belief in his invincibility. this is the crux of one of his biggest character flaws, and what actually makes him much more human than by trying to literally make him human: his pride makes him tangible. new 52 superman starts with him being an alien, and it reimagines his lore in order to drill that into your head as you read his stories — that things keep happening to him, and the world has expectations of him, because he's an alien. and being an alien is what he considers to be his biggest strength: he can use his powers to protect and save the people of earth.

many versions of superman also make great efforts to learn krypton's history, even its language and many dialects, because he wants to immerse himself in the world he could've known. hardly anyone else is going to know what that's like, and is going to understand — which is why he gets so lonely, and waid touched on that brilliantly in birthright. this loneliness, this drive for connection, is why he yearns for krypton. he connects to it on a deep, profound level because it answers a lot of questions and feelings he had that, for a very long time, no one else was able to answer. it's a normal part of the human experience to be proud of your heritage, and this is what makes clark feel relatable: that he feels things, and wants things, like other people do. this yearning, this mourning he does, is what catalyzes superman for him. superman is who he is, superman is destined to be what he needs it to be. and for new 52 superman, clark kent is how he learns of where the corruption is so he's able to be superman and put a stop to it. the version of superman that's more "alien" and foreign in its portrayal is the version that better exemplifies the characters beliefs and core values. i think people get too hung up on the idea that we want to be superman, but it's never really been about that. superman's a power fantasy, something that's intangible; we're not supposed to want to be him, instead he's supposed to inspire us to make better choices because he himself does even when he has the power to do the exact opposite. while clark thinks his biggest strength is his powers, superman's real strength lies in his kindness and his empathy; he exemplifies the best of what humanity should and has to offer.