Superman is turning 70. I’ve been in love with Kal El since I was about 5. I had stickers from my chewing gum/trading card packs on my wall near my head. He was the first person I saw in the morning and the last person I saw at night. He was my hero. I’ve watched every TV show, cartoon and movie. I read the comics for so many years. They kind of lost me in the early 90s when they changed so much of his character.
I’m a comic book dinosaur, prefering the classic heroes to the post-modern flawed ones. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed X-Men and Alpha Flight in their early days, but they lost something, too. Today’s comics seem to me that they are neither good art nor good storytelling.
Every now and then something is a throwback to the good old art of storytelling, but mainly it’s just story after story of people with all of our flaws, all of our mistakes, all of our greed and selfishness, but with cool powers, that we always wish we had, so they can screw things up even worse. Even classic heroes like The Warlord and Turok are irreverently “revived” and rewritten. The problem with that is their “grit” was what made them so amazing in the first place and, lacking that, there is no appeal, nothing to set them apart from the other post-mod antiheroes.
Comics used to help us escape this world or make our own better. Kazar, The Warlord and Turok took us to the center of our own world where dinosaurs still reign. Atari Force took us where we never dreamed existed in the heart of the universe. Superman brought the heart of the universe to us, to make our world better. What do today’s comics give us? Where do they take us? To the confused, chaotic violence, greed and sexual promiscuity that we see every day on our streets, on our TVs, in our movies.
Where have all the heroes gone? Who will save us from ourselves?