Satin and Steel
- Dec 8, 2017
- 14 min read
by Micah McCrary
“Only the gentle are ever really strong. ”— James Dean
In my childhood home, in a room next to the stairs leading into the basement, I once found a cardboard box underneath a coffee table filled with comics all belonging to my oldest sister, Melissa. I got on both knees on the tiled floor and then flipped through them. The box contained Excalibur, X-Force, X-Men, and The Teen Titans. I remember that with one Teen Titans comic I picked up I saw a cover with the Titans all standing in heroic poses and facing the reader. In front of the team stood (or perhaps crouched, I don’t remember) one striking figure, and when I asked Melissa who he was, she told me his name was Nightwing. He was who Dick Grayson, Batman’s first Robin, would grow up to become as an adult hero.
I already loved Robin, and it therefore became easy for me to love Nightwing. Since discovering him he’s remained my favorite superhero, though he gets far less attention from fans than I believe he deserves. One special, peculiar thing about Nightwing is that his name comes from Superman. After leaving Batman for his solo career, also leaving Robin behind, he searched for his next identity — in a tale about an old hero on Krypton who took on the name of a native bird, Nightwing, Robin took the name in honor of Superman, his second mentor after Batman.
While Nightwing might love and respect Superman, I’ve had a little trouble doing the same. I’ve had difficulty understanding his mythos and his regality, difficulty figuring out whether or not my respect for Superman’s character might have come from contrasting his traits with those I’ve adored in other comic book heroes. I’ve often wondered about how these superheroes influence us in more ways than one — how, while they can be idols and models for our own idealized behaviors, they can also give us models for who we don’t want to become.
***
This is Superman’s origin: The planet Krypton is doomed, and revered scientist Jor-El is aware of the planet’s impending destruction. He constructs a ship able to carry his infant son, Kal-El, to Earth, where he knows Kal will not only be safe but, because of Earth’s yellow sun (Kryptonian bodies are hyperreactive to solar energy), will grow to have abilities far surpassing those of human beings. Kal arrives on Earth, and after crash-landing in a Kansan cornfield he’s discovered by the kindly farmer couple Jonathan and Martha Kent. They raise him as their own, and when he one day realizes his ultimate destiny the boy uses his alien abilities to save lives, known to the world as Superman.
Superman’s story is one we all recognize as a hero’s journey. And he’s archetypal, his origins paralleling those of the Bible’s Moses: outer space as the Nile River, the name “Kal-El” coming from the Hebrew characters אל (Kal) and קל (El) for “voice” and “(of) God.” There’s even a joke in the film Superman II, wherein Superman saves a boy at a waterfall and an elderly woman yells, “What a nice man! Of course he’s Jewish.” Like Moses, Superman is primarily a guiding light, rather than a savior.
In Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, Jor-El explains to Kal his explicit reason for being sent to Earth: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you’re not one of them. They can be great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I’ve sent them you. My only son.” This line, alongside my own childhood regard for Moses as a guiding light, nudges my attempt to view Superman as a role model.
I’ve never wanted to be Superman, however. Even as a boy, when my friends and I would make home movies during superhero dress-up I found myself more enamored costuming as other superheroes: Robin, Spider-Man, The Flash, one or more of the Power Rangers. I didn’t want to be Superman because his powers never gave me an identity I felt I could claim. I never cared much about the “cool” things Superman could do — his Super Strength, Heat Vision, Super Speed and X-Ray Vision and Arctic Breath — because they never, at any point, indicated anything to me about his character. What has spoken to me is the fact that he’s an orphaned son sent across the galaxy away from a doomed planet, raised by farmers in Smallville, Kansas, who has taken up a mantle I wouldn’t push onto anyone. He has chosen, whether by earthly inspiration or not, to be a beacon for mankind, to lead by example, and to protect us in ways we can’t protect ourselves. Any superhero I’ve loved, and I can only try adding Superman to this list, has been about their decisions.
The film Superman II (1980) has given us the best cinematic representation of Superman to date. In the film we see not Superman, but Clark Kent, make the tough decisions. Regardless of his responsibilities as Superman, for example, he at one point chooses romantic love instead, relinquishing his Kryptonian abilities to be in a relationship with the character Lois Lane. In doing so, we get to see his human upbringing shine through — a boy raised in Kansas who has now grown into a man, rather than someone with an alien chip on his shoulder. Here, Clark Kent of Kansas is the film’s real protagonist, and Superman only emerges in the film’s most necessary moments.
Clark’s problems throughout the film aren’t just problems for aliens. They’re also problems for us. And this can help us scrutinize the quotidian emotions that everyone both in the audience and onscreen learn to process throughout our lives. More than anything Superman should be an example, perhaps even an exercise, in learning to trust one’s gut.
Superman, generally, is for me as much about one thing as he is about another. He represents goodness. He represents choices. He represents anxiety, identity, insecurity, and the significance of taking chances. More than anything, though, I think Superman is about being willing to try, and the fact that our choices are more a mirror of identity than our abilities. He shows us how important it is to learn to try to trust oneself. This is a notion that even stretches into the film Man of Steel (2013), in which Jonathan Kent tells his son, “You just have to decide what kind of man you wanna grow up to be, Clark,” he says. “And whoever that man is, good character or bad, he’s gonna change the world.”
This is the essence of Superman for me, because this character lies in all of us. We’re all made of good and bad, satin and steel, and we all, at some point, make difficult choices. We want to change the world — we want to make it a better place. Maybe this is a jumping-off point, and one from where we can figure out what our desire to better the world means. So, can we learn, from people like Clark Kent, to take a deep breath and leap?
***
The way I was raised, goodness often meant sacrifice. It was about what you’re willing to give up for the people you care for. Or, even, for the people you don’t. It seemed when I was younger that my family loved talking about sacrifice: What or how much was given up for a child, a spouse, even for a parent. Goodness, linked with good behavior in my home, meant doing the things we didn’t want to do but that we had to do for the sake of others — keeping a lawn short or the windows clean, giving up our time with the television, letting the little one take the last cookie.
This connected to the things I learned about the goodness of superheroes as I grew up. My favorite superheroes often had some tragic circumstance to overcome, but overcome it they did. A super-powered teenage boy watches his uncle die, turning his grief into the will to make his city safer; an orphaned mutant girl makes a family out of strangers, even those she doesn’t like; a trapeze swinger watches his family miss the net, and rather than grow angry he instead carries his family’s lightness within him. This was what attracted me to these comic book heroes — while I didn’t see myself in these characters I valued watching them pull through dire circumstances still coming out better than anyone I knew in reality, their heads held high, smiles still on their faces, the will to keep looking for the good in us all. The will to sacrifice their contentment, so that we can all be safe.
If superheroes aren’t somehow supposed to embody goodness by being our modern myths, our modern models, then I don’t see their point. In the same way that I fell in love with Greek mythology as a boy I fell in love with superheroes, watching their stories unfold while I learned to make choices based on what I thought my favorite heroes might do. Equally crucial for me, though, was that these characters, when male, also began contributing to my own definition of what it meant to be a good man. I’d spent my time growing up looking for a man I could trust, a role I felt was vacant in my young life, and which was therefore also a role I sought to model my own male behavior on as I got older.
I’m focused here on both the words “good” and “man.” A good man, to me, was someone who could suffer and sacrifice and still retain his kindness. Being a good man has never been about toughness or projected strength, but about the internal strength one holds, to do what’s right both on instinct and in the face of reluctance. This was something I eventually noticed in Superman, and part of the challenge of writing here is in looking at a hero who isn’t my favorite but for whom I try to carry a great respect. Superman has sometimes been a model of good manhood for me, and even my beloved Dick Grayson chose his alias Nightwing based on Superman’s influence. Pairing these two heroes, the Boy Wonder and the Man of Steel, as I zipped through the graphic novels I bought at stores or read in the library as a teen, helped me gain a sense of the kind of man I hoped to grow into: one whose strength was on the inside, and whose goodness I wouldn’t have to question. A man who, in essence, could help me define the parameters of noble masculinity.
My favorite comic book heroes have either been women or hypomasculine (i.e. not fitting with stereotypical tough masculinity) men. In DC (and in order): Nightwing, Supergirl, The Flash. In Marvel (also in order): the X-Men’s Jean Grey and Spider-Man. I’ve loved these characters because I’ve trusted them most — I’ve trusted their softness, in a way I haven’t been able to trust characters like Batman or Aquaman or Wolverine or Cyclops or Thor, all of whom have been, although in good characters in their own right, too rugged. Among others they’re characters who are just too tough for me, so I’ve avoided them in the same way I’ve avoided too-tough boys and men in reality.
This became a part of my conflict with Superman, as Superman is too often written in a position of toughness. What turns me off most about him is that he’s often rendered as hypermasculine, mighty, and cocky. I like it more when instead he’s a little insecure, and I think that every battle he enters should be an attempt to hold this insecurity at bay. Insecurity is antithetical to machismo, though. And it’s a quality I’ve avoided forever when trying to decide which men in my life to look up to. For me to look up to Superman, it needs to be transparent that he’s insecure about his very being.
When Superman is written to show off his brawn and might, it’s stupid. The Superman I like questions his abilities at every turn, wondering whether he’s made the best use of them — whether he’s made the best choices with the abilities he’s been given. “He’ll be a god to them” is a line often uttered in Superman stories, regarding Superman’s birth parents’ fears about how he’ll survive on Earth; but what helps define his character is that godhood is the last thing he wants. The Clark Kent I admire is more content as Clark than Superman, happiest on his family farm.
***
I’m often connecting my favorite renditions of Superman to my readings of Jean-Paul Sartre in high school and early college. Existentialism and Human Emotions in particular comes to mind when I judge Superman’s actions and his character, because Sartre’s famous line, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,” is a solid Superman foundation.
Superman’s behavior is something we can model ourselves after. It isn’t his might, but his choices, that we should regard, respect, and awe. Sartre himself writes, explaining his version of existentialism, that its directive is “to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” Part of the weight on Superman’s shoulders is this very responsibility: To make himself an example for how all good men should act.
I’ve seen Superman punch fire. I’ve seen him drawn with biceps larger than his head and accomplish feats in competition with actual Greek gods, and I hate all of this. Superman shouldn’t be about what he can do, but what he chooses to do — he should therefore be regarded as one of the most existential comic book characters ever written. Perhaps even more key to Sartre’s existentialism than the famous Spider-Man line “With great power comes great responsibility,” Superman embodies this idea to an extent we don’t ponder as much with other characters, because of the notion that we can connect Superman’s nature with our own.
Superman was thrust into incredible privilege, being an extraterrestrial with the appearance of an attractive white human male who crash-landed in the United States, of all places, then gained super powers as he grew through adolescence. It isn’t farfetched to believe that, given so much privilege, he could conquer the entire planet on his own if he wanted to; the fact that Superman doesn’t want to speaks volumes to the way he sees himself, and to the notion that he recognizes, despite his façade, that he must consciously avoid exploiting any of its benefits. This lens even bolsters Superman’s Kryptonian villains a bit — they’re megalomaniacs acting on their mania, and so we cheer for Superman. Unlike his villains, he doesn’t extend his power in full, and this is something we trust.
Superman at his core, then, is about the performance of identity. Even in the comic book world Superman is a façade, a show put on by Clark Kent of Kansas, née Kal-El of Krypton, in an attempt to put the world around him at ease. And we can be all the more sympathetic toward how he might feel about his title “Last Son of Krypton” if we see him as this lonely being made to perform on the world’s stage. It might urge us to trust him, even like him, a little more.
Who among us hasn’t performed in front of an imaginary (or even theistic) audience? And for Superman, whose audience isn’t imagined but very real and constant, wouldn’t there be a bit of dread over the possibility of fucking up? Superman is supposed to act “as if all mankind has its eyes fixed on him” (Sartre) to show us that he’s trustworthy, that he’s here to help, and that we can follow his luminous example.
In Carol A. Stabile’s essay “ ‘Sweetheart, This Ain’t Gender Studies’: Sexism and Superheroes,” Stabile writes that “he superhero is first and foremost a man, because only men are understood to be protectors in U.S. culture and only men have the balls to lead.” If the comic book world operates under this same idea, that men are the only real superheroes and saviors, then this should be reason enough for me to hate Superman as much in name as in principle. The addition of super to man is grosser than the idea of plain machismo, and I’ve always found the idea of the “super man” repellent.
My wish and suggestion is that Superman just rid himself of the nom de guerre altogether, allowing humanity to call him by his birth name, Kal-El. If he could divide his identity in two rather than into three, if he could rid himself of the man bit in his name that prompts him to act onstage with so much masculinity and might, would it dissolve his need to live up to the name Lois Lane and other humans give him? Superman is too much about performance, and masculinity is already tragically tied to how it’s performed.
***
When I was younger my first observations about Superman were, as it turns out, not about Superman at all. I was introduced to the pilot episode for the TV series Smallville, which was a show in which Superman didn’t exist. It was about Clark Kent’s journey from ages fifteen to twenty-five, over the span of ten seasons before he put on the red cape, and it almost mirrored my own coming-of-age, as Smallville’s Clark and I were a year apart in age (the pilot aired when I was sixteen). And it didn’t hurt that we both spent our time around corn fields — Clark growing up in Smallville, Kansas, and myself in Normal, Illinois.
I don’t believe my journey through adolescence and early adulthood was the same as Clark Kent’s, but I recognized Clark’s teenage and very human feelings, because I felt them too. I struggled with figuring out how to act around other growing boys. I struggled with sexuality and love. I had a hard time deciding what kind of person I wanted to be based on my relationships with other people, and I didn’t see Clark as any different. I loved Clark because he was, like me, a boy growing into manhood who rejected the emergence of manhood. For ten seasons, he showed us over and over that he just wanted to be Clark Kent, son of Jonathan and Martha Kent, and that he didn’t want the burden of being the Earth’s protector.
He also didn’t act the way many teenage boys would have acted had they possessed his powers, and I respected this. He was kind and gentle, even made fun of for it, but my knowledge of who this kind, gentle boy would one day become was enough to get me through every episode, good or bad, with the knowledge of a secured future for a beloved character.
This kindness and gentleness, coupled with my comic book clairvoyance, attracted and attached me to Clark Kent’s character. I began to seek out renditions in movies, other television shows, and of course comics and graphic novels, where Clark’s Kansan persona was prevalent, and where the stories had little or no focus on his mightiness as Superman. The Superman I want to love is mind over muscle, and spending so much time with Clark Kent on television made me wish to see this portrayal more often — one where Clark, using logic and intuition, adopts an almost detective and scientific mind to solve his problems. A Clark who’s a little more like his scientist birth father. Maybe a Clark who’s a little more like me.
Too many male superheroes use their bodies to solve their problems and I want, if I’m going to idolize a superhero, to do so because of the way they use their mind and hearts. This is why Dick Grayson is a good fit for me: he’s cheerful, flirtatious and playful, a lovely blend of stylishness, grace, and flamboyance. And he’s a protégé of both Batman and Superman at once. Maybe Grayson deserves more writing of his own, but my thoughts here are centered on reluctant love, rather than one that’s already been established.
***
With my exposure to superheroes after snooping through my sister’s collection, I wish that Superman had been a hero I could’ve confirmed she loved — maybe this would’ve been something over which we could bond. As a five- or six- or seven-year-old I would’ve been able to ask her all about what she loved about him, letting myself become impressed with his every tale and admired characteristic.
Instead, my reluctant love of Superman prevails. Every evolved rendition of his character provides reasons for me to give him a closer look, and the closer I look the pickier I get about the qualities of his character that should be ever-present. If Superman/Clark Kent is going to model noble masculinity for me then I need, more often, to see him with his guard down, and in a place where he’s far from cocky about his significance as a powerful male. I need, I think, a Superman who’s humbler about his ability. Maybe a Superman who isn’t afraid to kneel before us all.
Micah McCrary is the author of Island in the City (University of Nebraska) and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His essays, reviews, and translations have also appeared in Essay Daily, Brevity, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is an assistant editor at Hotel Amerika, and a contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. A doctoral student in English at Ohio University, he holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago.
