Evil Supermen are everywhere.
Is this trend a brazen act of countercultural deconstruction or does it just reflect a punishing lack of imagination?
I just loveTyler HoechlinonSuperman & Lois.
Credit: Illustration by Laurie Greasley for EW
He wears black, just likeHenry Cavill’s resurrected Kal-El inZack Snyder’s Justice League.
These fallen gods have company.
Amazon Prime Video’sThe Boysfeatures Antony Starr as Homelander, an uber-American sociopath.
He shares a streaming service with Omni-Man (voiced byJ.K.
The classic character offers easy signifiers to deconstruct.
He is toxically masculine, supremely white, a whole surveillance state unto himself.
Comparisons to certain monster presidents and canceled icons are welcome.
“But Dad, I’m not.”
That kid goes on to incinerate Homelander’s Nazi girlfriend: Great job, youth!
Their malicious elders stand in for larger societal decay.
And even the WarnerMedia-approved Supermen withstand suspicion from paranoid worlds.
Recent events in our own world offer little hope for a brighter future.
Everything has gone wrong with everything.
Why should the Man of Tomorrow be any different?
There’s a long history of Superman turning bad; there’s a long history of Superman doinganything.
Way back in 1964, he met Ultraman, a dastardly double from Earth-Three.
The ’90s brought aTerminator-ish super-doppelganger, who pretended to be Superman before destroying fake Los Angeles.
Hoechlin already played adifferentblack-suited impostor in a 2018 CW crossover.
There are multiverse scenarios where he’s raised by Soviets, Nazis, or Darkseid.
(Clark’s son playsInjustice 2onSuperman & Lois.)
In the classic 1986 tale “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”
This Superman believes even a wholly justifiable homicide spoils his moral code.
A generation later, that’s where these stories begin.
In a strange way, Evil Superman is now the conventional Superman.
(Where, it should be noted, Ultra-Man has a starring role in DC’s newCrime Syndicateminiseries.)
Last year, the videogame developer Rocksteady revealed their long-in-the-works follow-up to their acclaimedArkhamtrilogy.
However I feel about these individual projects, their malevolent super-guys collectively represent empty shock value.
The cynicism is trendy and cynicism is unquestionably a logical reaction to life lately.
Well, no, not everything; ask a scientist how amazing the coronavirus vaccine is.
Luthor lost his world tothatSuperman, so now he thinksthisSuperman will also go kill-crazy.
Respectfully, I doubt it.
Evil Superman can neverreallymatter as much as he ought to within any straightforward canon.
That is pretty much the default look for Snyder’s heroes.
And the draining of color marks a draining of emotional possibility.
Evil Superman is always the most monstrous monster ever, less a character than a weather pattern of brutality.
This makes the nominal satire of the Amazon shows feels oddly tame.
In the second episode, Omni-Man attacks an entire alien world, city by city, building by building.
The global decimation seems to take months, long enough for Omni-Man to grow a beard.
It is, indisputably, very awesome.
This is a good evolutionary trend, in theory, because censorship stinks.
Yet the normalization of transgression runs alongside a deadening narrative repetition.
(Vought execs onThe Boys= the Global Defense Agency onInvincible=Superman & Lois' General Father-in-Law.)
Now our generation keeps refining the sound effect for heat vision scorching living flesh.
This is a problem, because permit me Superman’s greatest power is imagination.
He can go anywhere, do anything, invent new impossibilities to accomplish.
His iconography is rooted in survivor’s sorrow.
But the best stories embrace that melancholy as part of a vast psycho-cosmic landscape.
(Invincibleis the exception, for now.)
Warner Bros. has planned a new Superman movie,written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and produced by J.J. Abrams.
Their new direction can only be an improvement.
The coming-of-age series earned acclaim for a serialized mythology, as well as its welcoming all-fluid-everything sensibility.
But season 1 is a total golden age, 50-plus episodes of world-hopping wonder.
He also hangs out in his beach town, eating pizza, loving doughnuts, and playing video games.
When he time-travels to meet his past self, he time-travels twice more toform a one-man band.
His super-friends saved him with a group hug.
Heat vision is just a fantasy.
