Rolling Stone Magazine - The Superhero

Cops and the president we’re suspicious of, but freaks and masked men in tights - them we trust

By Kevin Smith

Stan Lee, the Godfather of Marvel Comics, the human face of comic books for the last forty years, comicdom’s ambassador to the world, once told me that he’d thought superheroes would be just a fad. But with the first appearance of DC Comics’ Superman, and the red letter (or red-boots) sales that followed, Marvel did what any good marketplace competitor would do when the other guys have a good idea: They aped it. And thus began the decades-long proliferation of the tights set.
So what is it about superheroes that has captured our imaginations for more than half a century? Why is it that we view cops, the legal system - hell, even the presidency - with cynical suspicion, whereas we will still believe in what a man masked in a pointy-eared cowl or a barelegged woman in a tiara stands for?

I say it comes down to two things: altruism and the clothes.

The superhero archetype was the creation of an international coalition of the willing, years before it was en vogue to team up and knock the tar out of an evil menace. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, an American and a Canadian, dreamed up Superman back in the Thirties and established the palette from which all superheroes will be painted, till the end of time. Take a man or a woman with the power or abilities that could be used to enslave the world (or at least a small corner of it, such as Gotham), and have him or her opt instead to employ their might for right. Give him or her two identities - either to protect their loved ones, or simply to maintain some semblance of a normal life outside their work. Wrap them up in clothes worthy of the Halloween parade down Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A., and you’ve got a superhero.

Like Westerns, superhero tales are normally about fixing what’s broken. But the clothes are a lot better. In the real world, cops and firemen perform heroics daily - but they don’t have the great outfits. They’re missing the cape. They’re missing the tights. And where the hell’s the codpiece? That’s how you can tell a superhero, right? They’re all-powerful, they can do no wrong and, apparently, they are also hung like Holmes. When women are superheroes, it’s not the codpiece that’s stacked, it’s the bra. If Wonder Woman really existed, the magic lasso or the invisible jet wouldn’t be the most implausible aspect of her character; it’d be her ability to just stand up without falling over.
But maybe it’s that touch of the impossible that makes them so appealing. The first comic book I ever purchased featured an “imaginary” Superman story, in which Lois and Clark were married. The image from the tale of Mr. and Mrs. Superman that struck me the most was of Superman and Lois Lane waking up together on a bed of clouds. The implication was that they decided to join the mile-high club, but because I was a kid, I didn’t put two and two together, because I didn’t really know what sex was yet (my wife says I still don’t). But I did know that my parents slept together - however, it was on a double Sealy Posturepedic, not a cloud. What I took away from that comic was that superheroes do the same stuff that everybody else does. They just do it way bigger (and probably longer, in more positions and far more satisfyingly).

After nearly seven decades of predominance by comic-book superheroes, their audience is dwindling. Today, successful comic books move up to 150,000 copies; in the Fifties and Sixties, even the less popular titles sold in the millions. It’s been rumored that Warner Bros. keeps DC Comics going solely for the licensing fees that can be derived from their characters. How sad that comic books wouldn’t be published for the value of their story so much as for the financial margin derived from slapping a superhero’s face on a pair of socks or a Frisbee
Even though big business threatens to do what the Legion of Doom couldn’t, the superhero still thrives today, continuing to capture imaginations. But the new superhero icons aren’t born on the page anymore; they’re born on the screen, where special-effects technology has finally caught up with their uncanny abilities. The Wachowski brothers’ ultrabrilliant movie The Matrix not only gave the world “bullet time,” it invented the superhero in the best way possible: by not changing much at all. Neo is the very definition of a superhero. He’s got a secret identity (the guy in the rags he normally is when not inside the Matrix), he wants to save the world, and he’s got the clothes. But if that’s not enough to rank Neo up there with the legends, I submit this final proof: In the trailer for The Matrix Reloaded, the guy can fly now. How fast, you ask? Probably faster than a speeding bullet.