I always find it funny how Superman isn't a good Superman unless he's imperfect. To me, it's just people looking for an excuse to ignore or denounce him.
I always find it funny how Superman isn't a good Superman unless he's imperfect. To me, it's just people looking for an excuse to ignore or denounce him.
Depends on what you mean by perfect.I don't believe in such things.Clark just feels rule book clinging and too caught up with his image.He puts himself as the Saint figure and constantly falls short. Clark is not truly a saint(even the best version),yet he gives that vibe.That too on purpose and as is part of the characters motive.so here is the thing,either the character is portrayed as a true saint or the character shouldn't. Otherwise, people see through the façade.
"People’s Dreams... Have No Ends"
Eh, perfect isn't bad but outdated. Siegel's Superman was perfect.
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I would say Siegel and Shuster, their Superman was perfect in its righteousness. In the 50s and 60s that’s where the character seems to invert on itself. It started to wrestle with weird dilemmas that summed up bigger stuff.
That's basically it.
A "perfect" character faces no internal conflict, presumably no external conflict of real merit (because perfection doesn't struggle) and that just makes for a very boring narrative.
And Clark's never been perfect anyway. He's always been flawed....people just either forget that, or don't know in the first place because they don't actually read the books.
"We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe."
~ Black Panther.
“Perfect” is subjective anyway. One person’s saint is another person’s sinner. Look at how Miller took the piss out of Pre-Crisis Superman’s patriotic iconography and Boy Scout attitude.
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Yeah there is... that. One of the things that bug me most is when a writer comes along with the tired idea that Superman is still the unflinching good guy from the 40s and they need to humble him, because no one else has attempted any depth or tension. Maybe that Ridley story was decent but I was biased against it to start, for example, because of him saying something that felt like that imo.
And speaking of Miller, I'm actually quite glad he has never drawn much Superman. I think his early 80s stuff looked nice but even that had the most awkward body language I've ever seen.
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For Ridley I felt like he was actually challenging that attitude in Other History. The characters make assumptions about Supes before having that assumption pulled out from under them. For B&R, I liked the story but I get why others didn’t.
Miller’s Superman was never iconic for me even before his skills as a writer and artist fell off a cliff.
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I feel like the read that he's "perfect" usually ignores his quirks and flaws. Dude can and has been a neurotic weirdo.
And in the attempts to tone that stuff down, it sometimes ends up with making him blander and more vanilla, more "perfect." Creating the problem it was attempting to solve.
Usually the side that is saying they don't like Superman to be perfect usually don't see how the takes they prefer that are less perfect can be perceived as "perfect" and equally bland by others. And vice versa.
I feel like so many attempts to reinvent Superman boil down to focusing on Superman's flaws because, in the story creators' minds, the average Joe thinks Superman is boring because he's too good. So essentially, a lot of takes on Superman starts with guys' thinking portrayals of Superman show him too good, so they focus on how flawed he is, and the result is there are actually very few stories about a Superman who's too good and a glut of stories that show us a guy with faults, and there is a disproportionately high concentration of Superman stories in outside media that stress his f-ups.
90% of the superman stories try to show that he is not perfect, they show you all his faults, both as a person and as a hero, the other 10% are stories that try to show a more human superman. At the end the 100x100 of the superman stories show a quite useless hero and man who cannot do anything by themselves, if someone believes that this is perfection they would have to go to the psychologist because something is not working well.
I think the drama comes from the idea that he is dealing with an imperfect world, even when he is perfect, how does he deal with a flawed reality.
Paraphrasing a bit, but Gwenda Bond said "Superman is only boring if you think being good is easy." The idea that he's "boring" because he's a good person or whatever concept of "perfect" you're trying to impose only works if you think that it's super easy to be a good person, when in reality it's not. It's actually far harder and presents far more conflict for a character to try to be "good" and than just presenting him as a typical morally gray character so many other are. There is TONS of conflict to mine in a character who actually tries to always be good and do the right thing than the typical "by any means necessary" characters.
It's kind of hard for me to square the Siegel's Superman was perfect. It seemed one of the questions that has raged the hardest in the Pre-Crisis vs Post-Crisis discussion has been Superman losing the boyscout reputation he had built up since Chris Reeve played the character if he ever went back to what he was like under S&S's pen. People feared the Golden Age Superman up ending the moral balance of the modern DCU and frequently called the guy a would be tyrant.
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