Another Taste of the Non-Fiction Project (Patreon)

I've shown you some teases from my Superman Non-Fiction Prose book before. Here's another one.  Fingers crossed that I can finish it before the end of May!

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Why Do You Love Superman?

JOSH ELDER (writer, Adventures of Superman Vol. 2)

I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for the character, he’s actually been a huge part of my life, for the entirety of my life. That’s why I love him. I don’t know if I can extricate myself from him now. He’s in my DNA. I just thought he was amazing, when I was a kid and I still do. You’d see him doing these super things and standing up to these impossible threats and winning. It was just awesome. And, then, when you take a step back and say: “Why does that matter to me?” You start appreciating the character in different ways and now I would say the reason that I admire Superman above all others and that I always find it an honour to work on the character. Superman is the receptacle of all these ideas of who we are as people. What we want to be. We could be use that character to point a way towards a better world. The original Superman stories weren’t just rip-roaring adventure tales or action spectaculars. There was a real attempt to say: “A better world awaits us. It’s out there. We’re going to show you this avatar of it. And he comes to our world and these are the changes that he makes. Here’s the injustice that he fights. That’s a powerful thing. I think more than almost any other fictional character whether in comics or literature and cinema Superman represents something powerful and fundamental. And, much as I love Spider-Man or Iron Man or the Hulk or Batman and I think they all represent some big things. You can use them to tell meaningful stories, but nothing like Superman. 

He is power. He is strength and what does he do with it? He helps people. He fights against injustice, but he also doesn’t let himself become a tyrant or let himself think that he’s figured it all out. He keeps himself humble. These are some of the most important life lessons that anyone can learn in life and, I think Superman’s one of the best vehicles we have for teaching those lessons/ I love Superman because Superman matters and Superman tells a story about us that, I feel, needs to be told.