Superhero Nation

By James Poniewozik

It's probably the most repeated line from the movie Spider-Man: Peter Parker's ailing Aunt May asks her doting nephew not to work so hard. After all, she reminds him, "you're not Superman." The joke is on her, because we know that her nephew is in fact a superhero; but it's also on us, because she has pinpointed what we like about not only Spider-Man and his geeky-sweet alter ego Peter, but most of the masked marvels we've followed from the comics to the screen. We don't want our superheroes to be invulnerable Supermen--Clark Kent's sad-sack persona is as essential to fans as Superman's ability to turn steel girders into pasta ribbons. It's not enough that superheroes fight our battles. We need them to suffer our heartbreaks, reflect our anxieties, embody our weaknesses.

Superman began life as a kind of populist statement. Created in 1938 by two Jewish colleagues, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, he offered justice for the little guy at the tail end of the Depression and upended the Nazi concept of the Ubermensch. "There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption," says DC Comics president Paul Levitz. "Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution." Batman, a morally ambiguous, revenge-driven crusader, emerged in 1939, at the outset of World War II, as the darker side of the heroic solution. Then when America entered the war, straightforwardly patriotic heroes like Captain America and Wonder Woman hit Hitler where he lived.

But by the early 1960s, when Marvel Comics was introducing Spider-Man, X-Men and The Fantastic Four, the cold war had complicated America's optimism. Marvel's characters embodied the atom angst of the day: the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk owed their powers to radiation. (In the movie, the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker is now bioengineered, perfect for the age of anthrax and cloning.) More important, Marvel characters had psychology. They were conflicted and were driven, like Peter Parker, by guilt (Peter is haunted by having inadvertently caused his uncle's death) rather than simple revenge or honor. They didn't always like themselves and didn't always feel like being superheroes.

"The other superheroes at other companies didn't seem to have too much vulnerability," says Stan Lee, who created Spider-Man at Marvel with artist Steve Ditko. "Peter had money troubles. He wasn't that popular with girls. Getting a date was a big deal with him." If Superman is a hero who dresses up as one of us, Spider-Man is one of us, dressed up as a hero. Says Jeff Ayers, manager of New York City's Forbidden Planet comics store: "Batman's a millionaire, Superman's an alien, and Wonder Woman's an Amazon goddess. Most superheroes are foreign to us, but Spider-Man is normal and flawed."

And he lives in our world, in New York City--not "Gotham" or "Metropolis," a resonant fact, considering the real-life supervillainy his hometown has suffered. Unlike WW II comics' patriotism, Spider-Man's nods to the current war era are more elliptical. The World Trade Center towers were excised from one scene; New Yorkers refusing to be terrorized by the Green Goblin sound a note of Let's-Roll-ism. (The American flag filling the screen in the final moments, on the other hand, is as subtle as a black-widow bite.) It might be off-putting, seeing a superhero saving New York, reminding us that there was no one to catch those airliners in his supertensile webbing last year. But Spider-Man's flawed hero fits naturally into a flawed world, where sometimes the best intentions and superdefenses fall tragically short.

So he is not Superman. But then neither is Superman, in the hit WB TV series Smallville, in which a teenage Clark Kent (Tom Welling) discovers the powers that will someday make him the Man of Steel. He moons over an unrequited crush and battles villains who are really externalizations of teen emotions and self-discovery, as on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Part of the charm of Welling's Clark and Tobey Maguire's Peter, in fact, is that they have a little bit of the feminine in them: they've learned from Buffy and pop culture's other fatal femmes, who make fighting evil just another aspect of the really tough job of growing up.

But Superman's 64-year journey from Man of Steel to Buffy Boy is just part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work, from R. Crumb's counterculture Zap Comics to Art Spiegelman's Holocaust story Maus to the haunting graphic novels of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.

Some of these literary, niche comics have inspired movies: last year's From Hell and Ghost World, this summer's The Road to Perdition. But they weren't introducing new men in tights to the mass consciousness. And with few exceptions, superhero comics became cartoon hackwork. "With Steve Ditko, Spider-Man had these sexual undertones to it that read as being the work of a singular artist," says Clowes. Today's successors, he says, are "just a 10th-generation regurgitation of the same stuff over and over." The comic crowd became older, insular and cultish while kids turned to video games. "Gamers really know how to do power fantasies right," says Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, "and they're riding a wave of technological progress."

But video-game characters are, literally, dumb: they have no animating intelligence except what the player provides, and so--as in last year's Tomb Raider--their superpowers don't help in lifting heavy movie narratives. Instead, our decades-old comic heroes continue to move through the pop-culture cosmos--Ang Lee's The Hulk comes out next year--like the constellations, the movie shows of old in which people once inscribed the stories of their own superheroes. Then, as now, the lights would go dark, and people would gather round for stories they never got tired of.

--Reported by Andrew Arnold, Benjamin Nugent and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York

With reporting by Andrew Arnold, Benjamin Nugent and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York