Clearly, this is an idea that movies, TV, and video games are obsessed with, so we might as well dive in and talk about it.

Personally, I view it as the laziest and easiest route to take with the character. The whole appeal of Superman is that he's the most powerful man on Earth, capable to doing whatever he wants, but he chooses to only use all those abilities to serve rather than rule.

That said, the roots of this approach to Superman have been there from the beginning. Seigel & Shuster's Superman was, when you boil it all down, a bully who happened to be on the side of the angels. He was very much "might makes right". That Superman was very much a power fantasy created by a bunch of nerdy Jews to work out their own feelings of powerlessness in a world that was going increasingly crazy.

So, in a sense, I can understand why Evil Superman is a button that gets pressed so often.

For me, it can work, but the conditions have to be exactly right, otherwise I tune out completely, as I do with the Injustice games because the basic thesis of that story is that Superman would succumb to evil as long as you inflict a big enough blow to him emotionally, like the murder of Lois and his unborn child. That's nonsense to me. Superman would absolutely be emotionally devastated by that, but the idea that he would allow that to warp him into a dictator is a complete misunderstanding of who the character is.

However, there are times when it could work for me. I thought Superman TAS made it work by having him be brainwashed by Darkseid. I also think Snyder's notion of Superman sucumbing to the Anti-Life Equation could work in theory.

What about you guys? Would it ever work for you or is it a dead end?