American Ways: The Superman Family in the 2020s (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

“Superman, where are you now?” asked Phil Collins in 1986, and many people are still asking this very question. As a character, Superman has endured for generations and will be seeing his centenary in the next decade – and yet he is routinely dismissed as dated and irrelevant, and subjected to regular reimaginings in an effort to keep him part of the superhero landscape.

Like all other major superheroes, Superman now exists in a variety of different guises. Cheery and colourful for kids and traditionalists; grim and gritty for readers who prefer that sort of thing. Steeped in continuity for the hardcore fans; straightforward and accessible for anyone who simply wants to enjoy a standalone story. Nearly three years into the 2020s, it is hard to guess exactly which version of Superman will be remembered as characterising the decade – but we can still try.

This article will look at how the Superman saga entered the current decade with a cross-section of titles from circa 2020. Each focuses on a different member of the Superman family; each has earned significant acclaim (two of the three won Eisner Awards), and each comes up with a different way of keeping Superman and his supporting cast relevant to today.

Lois Lane: Enemy of the People

To start with we have Lois Lane: Enemy of the People, a story that was originally serialised between July 2019 and July 2020 as a 12-issue series before being collected as a trade paperback the following November. Written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Mike Perkins, the core concept behind Enemy of the People is to follow the day-to-day life of a reporter in the strange world of the DC superheroes. The comic’s portrayal of the journalistic profession fits into the same quasi-realistic mode as, say, TV cop shows – that is, heavily romanticised but at least trying to look grounded – yet the surrounding universe is made up of coloured spandex.

The plot kicks off with the death of Lois’ former associate, a Russian reporter named Mariska Voronova. As editor Perry White explains: “official story is she threw herself out of the bedroom window of her apartment this morning. Official story is she’d been suffering from depression. The official story makes no mention of the fact that she was in the habit of criticizing the Kremlin.” Lois’ partner in investigating this death is not Superman but Rene Montoya of the Gotham Police Department, also known as masked vigilante the Question.

The story is very much part of the wider DC continuity. We see this in the very first issue when Superman mentions to Lois “the thing you’re not telling me. About something that happened when you were in space with my father and our son” – a line of dialogue that will be meaningless to anyone who has not been paying attention to recent events in the Superbooks. The series’ most severe case of continuity-reliance comes in issue #6, which deals entirely with the death of Lois’ father – an event that occurred in the pages of the Event Leviathan series. The previous issue left Lois interviewing someone in Washington D.C., but now we catch up with her bent over her father’s body on a beach, surrounded by superfolks who appear nowhere else in the story.

Yet, despite its involvement in a universe of superfantasy, the story strives to keep one foot in something resembling the world of real-life reportage. The matter of journalistic integrity is a frequent talking point, and sometimes puts Lois at odds with her vigilante friends – in one sequence she has to explain to Renee “Question” Montoya that dangling a criminal upside-down constitutes coercion, and that any information thus gleaned is inadmissible.

The first issue ends with Lois confronting a White House spokesperson about refugee camps (“Do you deny that the administration is monetizing the separation of children from their families?”) The theme of Trump-era immigration policy runs through the comic, with anti-ICE protests taking place in the background, and becomes a plot point when Lois’ Hispanic hotel maid Alejandra goes missing – and is replaced by the hotel with a new maid who happens to be a supervillain.

Also notable is how the comic is able to build solid character-based drama out of its esoteric continuity connections. A good example is the aforementioned issue concerning the death of Lois’ father. Through a series of flashbacks, we see the strained relationship between Colonel Lane and his daughter as she ages from rebellious teenager to wife of Superman and mother to Colonel Lane’s grandson; the keynote being the colonel’s suspicion of his son-in-law – how, as Lois puts it, he never quite believed in Superman. The entire plot point will come out of the blue for anyone not reading Event Leviathan, yet it still works as a side-narrative.

Elsewhere, we see Lois chatting with her son Jonathan Kent over a pie about his new membership of the Legion of Superheroes. “Other parents send their kids to college. I’m sending you to join a super-team in the far future. I knew something like this would happen – I mean, every parent knows. It’s what parenting is. You raise your child knowing they’re going to leave and hoping you’ve done right by them before they go.” Meanwhile, in Renee’s subplot, the female Question runs into her male counterpart Vic Sage – which comes as something of a surprise to her as she believes him to be dead. The Lois/Jonathan and Question/Question conversations, each taking place over diner tables, are intercut with one another, helping to bind together a somewhat free-floating narrative.

The central plot veers into the occult, with magician Jessica Midnight entering the story after conducting a spell to bring protection from Leviathan (another crossover with Event Leviathan) while a skull-faced villainess, the Kiss of Death, takes on the role of central antagonist. It turns out that the Kiss of Death – and a chunk of the supernatural worldbuilding that comes with her – hails from Crime Bible, a previous story that was written by Greg Rucka and starred Renee Montoya, making it clear that Enemy of the People belongs to the shadowy world of the Question at least as much as it does the Metropolis mythos.

The fractured nature of the story lends it the feel of background noise to the Superman saga – which is appropriate, as background noise is precisely what Enemy of the People deals with as one of its main themes. Throughout the story, Lois is hassled by a relentless buzz of media speculation on the nature of her relationship with Superman, much of which is overtly misogynistic. She has no way to end this: all she can do is try not to let it grind her down as she focuses on her latest assignment.

Even if the script is somewhat free-flowing, the artwork by Mike Perkins does much to keep the narrative grounded. Illustrator Mike Perkins gives a film noir treatment to Earth-DC filled with stark shadows, moody backdrops and expressive characters. Mixing noir with the colourful fantasy of superheroes can sometimes end in disaster, but it works here for the simple reason that the superheroes are sidelined: Lois the reporter is centre stage, and Perkins’ abiltiy to capture all of the complex emotions becomes the true core of the comic. The heroine is an imposing force of truth, justice and the American way on the outside, a mass of anger, sadness, anxiety and hope on the inside. Credit also is due to the colourist team of Paul Mounts, Gabe Eltaeb and Andy Troy, who apply the neon lights of urban intrigue, four-colour spandex of superheroes and glowing magic of occult fantasy to Perkins’ shadowy landscape.

All in all, a successful effort to branch the Superman family into two genres with which it is not generally associated: crime noir and occultism.

Superman Smashes the Klan

Moving to a very different area of Metropolis we find Superman Smashes the Klan from writer Gene Luen Yang and artists Gurihiru, which was published between October 2019 and February 2020 before being collected several months later. The contrast between this title and Lois Lane: Enemy of the People is stark. Where Lois Lane was targeted at older fans, Superman Smashes the Klan is aimed explicitly at young readers (belonging to DC’s YA line) and opts for a colourul, wide-eyed aesthetic a world apart from Mike Perkins’ brooding work on Lois. Yet the two series are united by their usage of the Superman mythos to explore a heavy set of social issues.

The comic’s plot is derived from a sixteen-episode storyline of the Adventures of Superman radio show that aired in 1946. The story was developed with the help of Stetson Kennedy, a reporter who sought to expose the KKK, and depicted Superman – who, up until the previous year, had been battling Nazis – defending a Chinese-American family from a white supremacist group. Although the group in question was referred to as the Clan of the Fiery Cross for legal reasons, it was clear enough which organisation was being condemned. With legal action out of the question, the real Klan resorted to death threats, but to no avail: the serial entered history and is widely credited with dealing a deadly blow to whatever reputation the Klan was trying to scrape together. It has often been noted that, while the heroic portrayal of the Klan in the film The Birth of a Nation spurred the group’s revival, it was Superman who helped to put them back in their place.

Author Yang offers a heavily rewritten version of the radio story, but the basic skeleton is recognisable: even the original setting of 1946 is retained. The comic opens with Superman overpowering a comically ineffectual Nazi villain (“Tremble, American scum! Tremble before the might of the Atom Man, avenger of the master race!”) after which we are introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Lee and their children Tommy and Roberta, a Chinese-American family who have just moved into Metropolis.

The newcomers receive a variety of reactions from the locals. Some greet them with well-intentioned exoticism: a white girl asks if Roberta is Japanese or Chinese and, upon hearing the answer, exclaims “Oh, thank goodness! Y’know, I’ve never met a Chinese before, up close like this, I mean!” Tommy is willing to put up with such treatment if it is necessary to fit in, and – to Roberta’s disapproval – plays along with the stereotypes: “These wontons don’t fry up that easy!”

Other encounters are more overtly hostile. When Tommy joins Jimmy Olsen’s baseball team, he faces racial abuse from one of the other players, Chuck. After being kicked off the team by Jimmy, Chuck heads home and complains to his Uncle Matt. It just so happens that Uncle Matt is the Grand Scorpion of the Klan of the Fiery Kross (note the change of spelling since the radio show) and when night falls, the Lee family receives a threatening visit from the hooded racists.

Later, Tommy is kidnapped. Roberta goes to a white police officer for help, but he refuses to take her concerns seriously.  “Oh, I doubt that, little girl”, he says. “The city is very, very safe, especially for people like you. Metropolis goes out of its way for you, giving you houses and jobs and promotions you don’t even have to earn – all because it wants to be the blasted League of Nations or something.” And so, it falls upon Superman to save the day, and to save the Lees from the Klan.

Portraying the Ku Klux Klan in a story for youngsters poses obvious problems. Yes, casting them as villains is easy enough – but the trouble is that villains tend to be cool, like Darth Vader or the Joker. In a world where Punisher skulls have been adopted by police officers, one should be wary about the potential risk of glorifying the Klan. Superman Smashes the Klan avoids this by making its hooded bigots conspicuously unglamorous – they are clumsy, bungling oafs, whose captives are sent into fits of laughter by a supposedly antique sword that still has a $2.79 price tag attached.

Yet they nonetheless pose a threat. Depicting them as harmless buffoons would have been another pitfall, and so the comic makes it clear that an arson campaign carried out by bunglers is still a dangerous thing. Like the caricatures of Hitler in the cartoons of David Low, the Klan of Fiery Cross may be comically contemptible, but the trail of devastation that they leave in their wake is far from amusing.

The comic’s masterstroke is in characterising the Klan’s leadership as fundamentally cynical. The head of the group turns out to be motivated by money – he admits to running a “business that deals in the world’s oldest commodity: hate!” – and sees white supremacy as no more than a means to recruit gullible bigots as foot soldiers.

Superman Smashes the Klan’s take on racism is one of its most noteworthy qualities, but to focus on this aspect is to ignore its other charms – particularly the basic detail of how well it works as a Superman story. Yang has incorporated a tale of Superman’s early years (not quite an origin story, but close enough) that harks back to his debut in the first half of the twentieth century.

This is a Superman who is established as the beloved hero of Metropolis, yet is still grappling with the extent of his strengths and weaknesses. When he finds that Atom Man is using a piece of Kryptonite as a power-source, it is his first encounter with the deadly green crystal. Moreover, while he has mastered his super-strength and super-speed, flight and heat vision remain unexplored territory. He is unaware of his origin on Krypton, although his late parents have left a telepathic message – one that initially manifests in distorted form as a series of hallucinations involving bug-eyed antennaed aliens.

Tying in with the comic’s wider themes, this is also a Superman who is a victim of prejudice. Not racial prejudice (as an alien who looks indistinguishable from a white man, this would have been an awkward angle) but rather superstition: flashbacks to Clark’s childhood in 1920s Smallville show him being accosted by locals who have seen his powers and believe him to be demonically possessed. A later flashback reveals that a circus strongman gave him the idea of wearing a costume, so as to appear as a colourful performer rather than a scary invader; we also learn that the reason this Superman has limited powers is because he is holding back his abilities to fit in. Superman – particularly the Golden and Silver Age Superman – is popularly thought of as a one-dimensional hero, but this comic shows how he can be humanised without sacrificing the old-time sci-fi sense of wonder that comes with him.

Gurihiru’s artwork is an ideal fit. In some ways it is modern, sitting somewhere between contemporary anime stylings and the aesthetic of twenty-first-century Disney. At the same time, the clear-cut style that emerges from this mix is not so far removed from the old Fleisher Brothers Superman animated shorts of the 1940s.

Which, really, sums up why Superman Smashes the Klan works. It is a solid enough chunk of sequential storytelling to stand up to adult inspection, but is first and foremost a re-introduction to Superman for a new generation. It is up-to-date while maintaining an old-fashioned flavour. Its engagement with social issues complements – rather than conflicts with – its high-flying fantasy. Anyone unconvinced that Superman can still work in this day and age should look to it for an answer.

Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?

While we expect to see Superman starring in comics, and perhaps are not too surprised to see Lois Lane heading a spin-off, it is less common to see Jimmy Olsen getting his own title. Yet the team of writer Matt Fraction, artist Steve Lieber and colourist Nathan Fairbairn gave the red-haired office boy just that in the twelve-issue series Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. This ran from July 2019 to July 2020 before being collected in October 2020 as a trade paperback entitled Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?

The story opens with Jimmy awakening to find himself in Gorilla City – a city populated by sapient gorillas – and learning that, while drunk, he got married. His new wife (in the same bed with him, and in a similarly flummoxed state) is not a gorilla but Jix, a dimension-hopping jewel thief. Jix promptly departs, leaving Jimmy with an ordinary-looking cat that has the power to vomit copious amounts of high-pressure blood.

And this is just the prologue. The real story begins with Jimmy on board a spacecraft, where he turns into a giant tortoise and falls to Earth, destroying one of Metropolis’ most prominent monuments in the process.

If the preceding summary is making you scratch your head at how it could possibly fit into a single coherent story, then you are likely unfamiliar with Jimmy Olsen’s role in the comics of the Silver and early Bronze Ages. This was a time when Jimmy had his own series, and storylines in which frequently involved him being transformed. One vintage cover shows Superman up against a giant, Godzilla-like Jimmy (“I warned you not to experiment with that growth ray!”). Another cover has Jimmy and Superman united against a band of distorted Jimmy-clones: an elastic Jimmy, a fat Jimmy, a spiky Jimmy and other such “weirdie doubles”.

All of this was delivered with a nod and a wink, as evidenced by a 1971 issue of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen in which Jimmy goes up against a vampire. “It’s the VAMPIRE bit! But like you’ve never seen it before!” trumpets the cover; the promised novelty factor turns out to be the revelation that the vampire comes from the tiny planet of Transilvane – a globe the size of a small house, with two devil horns on top.

So, Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? is true to its kitschy roots; yet it does much to update the formula for the twenty-first century.

The space-tortoise-monument incident nearly costs Jimmy his job at the Daily Planet, which is forced to pay an additional insurance premium for all Olsen-related incidents – until Perry White learns that the cloud has a silver lining of ad revenue from viral videos. “Jimmy pivoting to video while the rest of print media continues its long, slow death spiral means that… well, even after what he costs us… Jimmy Olsen is the only part of the Daily Planet that makes any money”, points out one staffer. The world of the Daily Planet, still rooted in a Hearst-era concept of how newspapers are run, has collided head-on with the modern world of online media.

Meanwhile – and this is where the plot reaches its most coherent point – somebody tries to assassinate Jimmy. They fail, instead taking out an inanimate clone of Jimmy that had been created in one of his various bouts of retro-Silver Age silliness. The real Jimmy is now in a position not only to try and solve his own murder, but also to forge a whole new role quite unlike his old status as the Daily Planet’s resident doormat. Under his assumed identity of Timmy Olsen, Jimmy begins creating videos under an abrasive persona and pulling frat-boy pranks like “how many jokers at the cookie pagoda ‘til Batman notices?”

As this indicates, the comic spends a lot of its time poking fond fun at the DC universe. See also, the awkward moment when Bruce Wayne learns that people only laugh at his jokes because Alfred pays them to, or the scene where Clark Kent’s habit of winking at the reader is shown to look rather eccentric to the rest of the Daily Planet crew. Yet it also finds interesting ways to build on the canon: running through the comic is the story of a generations-old feud between the Luthors and Olsens. Flashback sequences take us back to the earliest settlement of Metropolis, where Joachim Olsson is bullied out of his territory by Luthai Alexander, starting a dispute that still impacts Lex Luthor’s machinations today.

With its tone of cartoon optimism, Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? Is closer in spirit to Superman Smashes the Klan than to the noir-inflected Lois Lane: Enemy of the People. Unlike Klan, it is knee-deep in continuity – but unlike Lois Lane, it shows no expectation that the reader will recognise any of this lore. It delves into the weirder corners of the DC Universe not to provide deeper-rooted fans with a game of spot-the-reference (although it does work on this level) but to celebrate the all-around spirit of the Silver Age. This is a story about a world where all manner of nonsensical events can happen, where reality is as flexible as Wile E. Coyote's skeletal structure, but it all holds together through the sheer escapist charm of a world where good triumphs over evil and a guy like Jimmy Olsen can get one over on a guy like Lex Luthor.

So rooted in the Silver Age is Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? that it is best read in the format that it was originally published. Unlike so many comics these days, which are written with a collected edition in mind, this is very much a throwback to the era before the graphic novel. The story gets a little repetitive when too much is read in one go, but sampled one chapter per month is just about right: a dash of regular silliness, as refreshing in small doses as a chunky of chocolate-dripping ice-cream.

Conclusion

Looking over the above three titles, it is clear that – yes – Superman and his family still have their role in modern comics. While Lois Lane, Superman Smashes the Klan and Jimmy Olsen all have different target demographics and different attitudes towards Superman’s legacy, they each point to the best way forward for Metropolis: ditch the gimmicks and give the comics to creative teams that love Superman and can celebrate whichever aspects of his mythology appeal to them the most.