My Problem With Superman

Opinion|My Problem With Superman

Superman might be one of the most recognizable characters in the world, but before I immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, I didn’t know him at all. But as a 7-year-old kid in New Jersey, I couldn’t get away from him, what with the “Super Friends” cartoon firing full blast and his comics on every corner store spinner rack. And then a couple of years later, in 1978 — while I was still trying to wrestle my English into something approaching fluency — Richard Donner’s “Superman,” a box office sensation, blew the zeitgeist up like Krypton itself.

You might think an immigrant kid like me — who loved comic books and studied them for clues as to how I should conduct myself in this new world, an immigrant kid who was as bedeviled by his lost home world as Clark Kent is bedeviled by his spectral connection to Krypton, an immigrant kid who also thought of his island as a Krypton of sorts (though mine was destroyed not by cosmic apocalypse but by the banal logistics of immigration), who also labored under three identities (I was someone in English-speaking America, someone else in my family’s Spanish-only apartment and someone else in my memories of the Dominican Republic) — would have fallen hard for Superman.

I didn’t, though. Not like I fell for, say, Spider-Man. In fact, I was something of the neighborhood anti-Superman. Always ready to inveigh against the Last Son of Krypton, always ready with long arguments laying out why he was dumb. What can I say? From Day 1, dude just rubbed me the wrong way. There was the obvious stuff, like how goofy Superman was as a hero, how ridiculously dated his star-spangled patriotism was — Supes loved a country I’d never seen. My landfill America was way more supervillain territory.

You would think Superman’s immigrant/refugee background would have represented a point of connection, but even that rankled me. Sure we both came from other worlds, but Clark Kent’s complete assimilation, his passing, seemed to me as impossible as flying fast to reverse time. Superman might be the Man of Tomorrow, but it was a tomorrow that didn’t seem like it would ever arrive for someone like me, who got spat on in the street by complete strangers or got called the N-word and the S-word on the daily. People literally snarled when they saw my brown face or heard my Dominican accent.

But if I had just disliked Superman, full stop, that would have been easier. The problem was that while dude hit me in a lot of wrong ways, he also hit me in a lot of weird ways that I couldn’t just brush off. I ran my mouth about Superman, but I also couldn’t quite get quit of him, no matter how hard I tried.

For all his four-colored simplicity, Superman is a perversely fraught figure. He is impossibly human, but he is also an actual extraterrestrial. He is the most American of Americans, but he’s also an alien migrant. He is bumbling Clark Kent and supreme Superman and haunted Kal-El, and each identity simultaneously reinforces and erases the others. He is an alien invader who fights alien invaders, a child of the apocalypse who repeatedly saves the world and himself from apocalypses masterminded by his villains. He is a figure of cataclysmic agency who is constrained from experiencing or enacting real change, trapped like nearly all comic book heroes in what Umberto Eco called an “oneiric climate,” a timeless, dreamlike environment that forbids systemic transformations of any kind. (That’s why the all-powerful Superman doesn’t end all war and the emergence of Wakanda alters zero about its world.) He’s a Mr. Rogers who mourns endlessly his lost Krypton. He is the true Angel of Immigrant History, blown by an exterminating storm from his old world into a new one, but always trying to glimpse the catastrophe behind him.