Why Superman Will Not Save the World: Theorizing the Relationship Between Suffering and DC Comics Superman

Kwasu Tembo

doi:10.46539/gmd.v2i3.114

Abstract

The hypothesis that there is an inextricable link between comic book superheroes and suffering would, to anyone with a cursory knowledge of superhero characters found in DC, Marvel, Image, Wildstorm and other houses, and their histories, ostensibly seem valid. This validity depends on which character one is applying said hypothesis to; the psychological and physical suffering of a Batman being more acceptable as such than that of a Plastic Man, for example. However, using DC Comics character Superman as a case study, this paper explores the inextricable link between Otherness, power, and suffering within the remit of the character's mythos. In order to do so, this paper refers to psychoanalytic concepts elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) as a way of demonstrating that despite the character's conventional appraisal as a positivist humanistic symbol of pure altruism, an insuperable, unimpeachable symbol of selflessness and good morality, there is in fact a fundamental link between Superman's 'tridentity' of selves (Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman), the character's own suffering, and human suffering on a terrestrial scale, as represented within the numerous realities of the DC Comics Multiverse.

Highlights

INTRODUCTIONThere are many ways to describe 'suffering'. Suffering can refer to physical and/or mental pain, or more broadly to any and all unpleasant sensations and/or emotions
SUPERMAN AND SUFFERINGThere are many ways to describe 'suffering'
The active pursuit of a sense of belonging, the act of being Superman, and the situation of its power on a diegetic earth invariably perpetuates the character's own suffering, and the suffering of billions of DC's human beings across its multiverse who look up with joy, relief, wonder, and adulation at the coming of the Superman. This is the darkest irony of Superman. If it derives a sense of pleasure from being Superman and helping others, as Waid posits, this pleasure is irreducible from the pain, misery, suffering, and fear of those it saves: its alien pleasure is indivisible from human pain

Summary

INTRODUCTION

There are many ways to describe 'suffering'. Suffering can refer to physical and/or mental pain, or more broadly to any and all unpleasant sensations and/or emotions. Like religious totemism which obfuscates the originary violence of sacrifice, murder, and cannibalism of the primal father that is the true origin of the religious system, Superman's symbolic super-subjective position of perfect morality, and its latent totemic quality helps “gloss over the real state of affairs and [...] make[s] one forget” the problematic confluence of invulnerability, power, and subjective and idiosyncratic morality the character simultaneously embodies and problematizes (Freud 213) In this sense, the humanities of the DC multiverse's reliance on Superman as a symbol of two central ideals of modern Western civilization summarized as 'truth' and 'justice', makes their saviour, as well as their society it protects, built and sustained by a shared complicity in the character's sense of guilt at seeking belonging over true justice. Moore suggests that it is the psychological trauma of presenting the character with the opportunity, real or virtual, of being able to choose to be other to itself, to be 'normal', to be totally human, all all too human and subsequently taking that option away or worse, revealing it to have always-already been spurious, is the source of Superman's truest and most resonant suffering (Weldon 215-16)

SAVED FROM SUFFERING BY A SUFFERING CHAMPION

CONCLUSION