Quote Originally Posted by Ascended View Post
As for Superman.....I said in a few posts above that the "Clark is who I am" mindset of 86 was, maybe, objectively wrong. But giving it a little thought I dont think I can say that. Superman's character was on a pendulum swing; in the Silver Age the only "real" persona was Superman and "Clark" was just a disguise with damn little depth to him. Then when we started to get into the news caster era, Clark started to become more important and more developed, and started having a personality of "his" own. So Byrne taking that trajectory and just swinging it to the furthest extreme where "Superman" was purely a disguise.......it's just following the momentum, right? I still think it was the wrong move, I still think it goes against what Superman is supposed to be (a fusion of god and man, not one over the other) and like Sacred said DC has spent much of the last thirty years trying to put things we lost in 86 back in place, but "objectively" probably is too strong a word.
I think that pendulum move is rather intrinsic for Superman, due to the way the character has been constructed. He is adopted, and both essentially American and essentially alien at the same time. That dual nature is, I'd argue, the most interesting thing about him. A specific writer or a specific story can of course focus on one or the other, but I think Tom King was really into something in Heroes in Crisis #2, when Clark is halfway in his transformation to Superman and talking to Sanctuary:

"But if I adjusted each to be further away from me, then which one was I? Or was I neither? Is Clark Superman trying to be flawed? Or is Superman Clark trying to be better?"