Looking For That Hero

For reasons of which I am still not entirely aware, in the days leading up to the election I had a strange compulsion to look into the 1986 reboot of Superman comics. Maybe it was from going through the comic collections I've finally retrieved from my parents' basement - while I still haven't been able to find them, I had a few post-reboot issues that confused me as a kid and would, over time, learn the circumstances that led the publisher to push for a clean slate and undertake what's possibly the most successful "hard" reboot of a major media franchise to date. For the (blissfully) uninitiated, a devil-may-care attitude stemming from writing decades of crossovers, twist endings, and IP acquisitions with an expectation that the audience won't care enough to be confused (or, more likely, simply grow out of caring) had left the "DC Universe" an incomprehensible mess by the early 80s. But as we've discussed before, readers by that point had started engaging with comics in a different way thanks to extensive reprints and a growing interest in the minutia and wild imaginative ideas found in decades past - in other words, they did, in fact, care. It's written up in plenty of other places, but, simply put, DC put into a single "universe" into place with the massive (and massively successful) crossover series Crisis on Infinite Earths. Afterwards, a number of characters, including Superman, underwent a process similar to the first installment of an adaptation: the origin stories were retold in a tighter and cleaner manner, introducing elements the creators wanted to keep and jettisoning ones they felt were unnecessary or contradicted with the stories they wanted to tell. In the case of Superman, this wasn't simply about reshuffling powers or assembling a more cohesive cast  - John Byrne, assigned to the reboot, took a different approach to Superman as a character. Post-Crisis, he was no longer "the Man of Tomorrow" or even "the strange visitor from another planet," no longer a god overseeing the Earth, but a regular person who found himself with superpowers and a moral obligation to use them to help other people. There was a conscious effort to reverse to make Superman Clark Kent's "secret identity" rather than, as it had been since the beginning, the other way round. And that's the aspect of the character I'd like to talk about today.

I don't think I have to describe how people have felt since the election The grief, the fear, the anger, and, yes, the finger pointing. You've felt these some or all of things yourself, and the ones you haven't, you've witnessed in other people. After all, we'd all done the right thing, the only thing we can do within the bizarre system forced by our ancestors on us at birth like a hereditary disease... or mythical curse. There seems to be something uniquely American about the price of living with people who share your values in a populous state being near-powerlessness when it comes to politics at a national level. But even beyond the issues of regional representation, there's a fundamental separation between the voter and the fundamental mechanisms of power: the best we can do is pick a name and hope that person is able (or even willing) to enact policies we agree with. This time around, there felt a particular desperation... after all, as governmental norms collapse and the executive granted ever more power, the stakes have never been higher. Which meant that, in most of our minds, we weren't putting our support behind a politician - we were crying out for a hero... in the Pre-Crisis sense: one gifted with superior perspective and capabilities, able to make decisions for us and do the things mere mortals like us are utterly incapable of.

Don't get me wrong - I'm certainly not saying that voting is unnecessary or meaningless. Quite the opposite, it's vital that we take part in the process, especially when it comes to local elections and ballot initiatives. But ultimately it's still the simple act of naming one's preferred champion. And for far too many of us, that's the extent of our involvement. The rest is white noise - we're left watching Channel Zero, looking for that hero. But when they don't come through for us, well... we all know what we've been feeling.  And, unfortunately, we're going to be feeling that a lot, even things suddenly turn around. There's so much outside our control, and one person (or one administration) won't be able to fix everything, even assuming they have the same priorities. That's another problem with putting all our hopes on politicians we want to be heroes: they may not be interested in movement significant enough to make a difference (as with climate change) or are actively involved in bringing out death and suffering (such as border and immigration policy, or unconditional support of the genocide in Gaza). The need for a "lesser evil" means we downplay or outright ignore when the people we want to be heroes act like nothing of the sort. After all, the opposition will be even worse on those same issues. Some things, despite being a product of deliberate decisions and plans, are treated as unavoidable inevitabilites, beyond our control like earthquakes or asteroid strikes. And that, put simply, sucks.

So what do we do? Certainly not abdicate from the system - there's a very clear difference when one of our two parties has taken the most evil positions imaginable on just about every policy. But I don't think treating the political opposition as heroes is going to help either, and, if anything, just makes us feel more powerless when they fail. And so, like the young Clark Kent in Man of Steel, we have to become the heroes ourselves. He has the capability to do more than most, but the reasons are the same whether one has superpowers or not. For us mere mortals, that means becoming more engaged, and not letting our civic responsibilities stop at the ballot box. We volunteer, we donate, we educate, we do. There's the old adage about the only thing evil needing to succeed is good people doing nothing... well, voting every four years (or even every two) may not be nothing, but... it ain't far off.  The hero isn't out there, fueled by our support like Tinkerbell, the hero is, and always was, us.

There's only so much any of us can do, of course. The system grinds us down, saps our energy, our time, and our resources... and I don't think it's too conspiracy-minded to say that it's by design. But it's in the act of doing where heroism resides. Even learning more about vulnerable groups and what they undergo is a start, whether they're people in your community, those trying to join it, or even those farther away. There are many, many people that aren't helped simply by the "heroes" winning. That help needs to come from us, in whatever ways we can. It may be a donation, it may be volunteering, it may be the simple act of treating a person with kindness that you're told to despise due to a lack of fixed residence, legal status, or recognition. It can be teaching children (or adult family members, for that matter) to recognize when they're being told those kinds of lies - there are any number of groups right now that are being demonized, and, even worse, blamed for the Harris loss. That's not what heroes do, and we all need to be those heroes if we're going to get through any of this.

I don't think any of this was going through my head when I splurged on that hardcover comic collection, not consciously, anyway. But it's for sure there now that I'm reading it. There's been a lot of talk about superheroes being today's version of mythology. It's not something I agree with, at not while those stories exist entirely at the behest of massive corporations. But we don't need yet another iteration of unreachable gods acting on our behalf. If there's something in these stories for us, it's when the heroes are the most human, when they choose to do the right thing, with or without their Kryptonian powers.

- B

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