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.
For an immigrant like me who didn’t want to think of himself as an immigrant but was in no position to deny it to anyone, Superman was an unwelcome portent. Other people might note his alien-ness and quickly forget it, but I couldn’t unsee it — and because I couldn’t unsee his, I couldn’t unsee mine.
Even his overwhelming all-American power disturbed me. Maybe this was because I had grown up in a country recovering from its very own dictatorial Superman or because my family had, during the 1965 U.S. invasion, experienced firsthand what America could do to people with far less power. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t comforted by Superman’s chimerical combo of Boy Scout and world-ending hyperpowers. He is both too familiar and too uncannily strange. A ubiquitous cultural figure both risible and terrifying, who raises far more “issues” than he resolves.
I moved on from my Spider-Man phase, my X-Men phase, my Akira phase, but I could never entirely break free from Superman. He wasn’t a haunting or an obsession, but the older I got, the more I found myself unconsciously tracing what the writer and academic Wai Chee Dimock called his resonance: “the traveling frequencies of literary texts: frequencies received and amplified across time, moving farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places.”
I found myself curious about Superman’s origins as a literary creation, the forerunner material from which he sprang. I read Philip Wylie’s “Gladiator” and Lester Dent’s “Doc Savage.” I read Olaf Stapledon’s “Odd John” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter books, of whom the early Superman was an obvious inversion. John Carter travels to Mars, where the lower gravity grants him incredible powers, including the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Superman, similarly, travels to Earth, where the yellow rays of the sun give him almost every power imaginable. Like John Carter, Superman is not just a physical prodigy; he’s also a moral one. That’s what sets him apart from, and above, the people he’s going to care for — or rule.
Ultimately, I began to obsess over one specific kind of Superman.
There is a subgenre of Superman stories, pastiches of Superman that exist outside the official franchise. He has more clones, more duplicates, more sendups than anyone — what the villain Bizarro (himself an imperfect copy of Superman) called his “perfect imperfect duplicates.” These stories break Superman out of his oneiric purgatory. They make him and his terrifying powers consequential, exploring rather than strangling the troubling contradictions Superman introduces.
The master of this genre is the legendary comic writer Alan Moore. He penned what are widely considered the greatest Superman stories — “For the Man Who Has Everything” and “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” — stories whose refusal to gloss over Superman’s losses gave the character an almost heartbreaking poignancy. But Alan Moore also wrote the two most influential perfect imperfect duplicate Superman stories — the much lauded “Watchmen” and the lesser-known “Miracleman.”
There is no better or darker Superman story in my book than “Miracleman,” in which the British government creates superheroes and controls them via a Matrix-like hallucination (another unchanging climate), where the supervillains are a former Nazi scientist and a super-psycho so genocidal he makes Thanos look like Jimmy Olsen. When our superheroes fight, they destroy London and kill hundreds of thousands. Our hero, Miracleman, “wins” the battle but faster than you can say “Kimota!” he takes over the planet, imposing on humanity a benign utopian dictatorship where many of civilization’s ills are banished and all can gain super bodies and normal, base line humanity is slowly driven extinct.
The end.
“Miracleman” is the reason we have stories like “The Boys” that feature the star-spangled sociopathic hero Homelander; it is the book that comes close to being the final word on the myth of the Man of Tomorrow. It was in stories like these, which follow the apocalyptic logic underpinning an all-powerful hero to its exterminating conclusion, that Superman finally spoke true for me. If, as the historian Julian C. Chambliss observes, “comic books and superheroes offer a distinct means to understand U.S. culture,” then the subgenre of perfect imperfect Superman duplicates offers a means to wrestle with the nature of U.S. hegemonic power, a power that these stories suggest might be less about liberty and justice than about mass death and its almost immediate forgetting. It was in these Superman clones that I found the Superman I’d long looked for, the one I could believe.
On Friday, a new Superman movie is arriving. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it will deliver all the standard beats: Superman will fly, fight other superpowers, woo Lois, act salvifically. He will wrestle with his three identities in a desultory fashion, but in the end he will no doubt side more with his human/American side — because, of course. He will be different from the other Supermen before him but not too different and will naturally still be trapped in Umberto Eco’s timeless climate: Despite all his world-saving activity, he will be unable to really change the planet or himself. But no matter what this new “Superman” sells us, Superman will always contain within him, be haunted by, other weirder stories. Dude might be as American as apple pie, but he is also stranger than strange, a real alien.
It is obviously an awkward time for a peace-loving refugee American like Superman to return to us. We are in a time when someone like Clark Kent, an undocumented liberal-leaning journalist, could easily be scooped by masked, unidentified government goons. Beaten, imprisoned and even deported to Sudan or Jarhanpur without due process.
What might a Clark/Superman/Kal-El do in such a situation? What stories might such injustice awaken?
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “there are certain truths which Americans can only learn from strangers,” and I will add that there are also truths that Americans can learn only from those it calls strangers who are not strangers.
Truths without which our democracy will not survive.
Superman, like the nation that created him, contains many contradictory stories, but the question that all of us always must face is: Which ones will we listen to? The stories that thrillingly imprison us in the fantasy of our annihilating exceptionalism? The stories of alien invaders and avenging oneself in endless fractious war? Or the stranger stories that remind us how vulnerable we all are, how much we need one another’s help?
You don’t need the Justice League to know that our world is in peril: Chasmic inequalities, climate calamities and rising unreason threaten us all. What is needed in times like this, to quote Frederick Douglass (who knew all about the evil of monstrous superpowers), “is not light … but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
What is needed, if you’ll allow me the final corn, is Superman.
Not him, though.
The other, multiple one:
Us.
Junot Díaz is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of four books, most recently “Islandborn.”
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