Should Superman Go Dark?

PRO: “Just treat ‘Superman Returns’ as the Ang Lee ‘Hulk.’”

Both Morrison and Geoff Johns have pitched the film studio on how to reboot Superman — properly reboot him, as if “Superman Returns” didn’t even happen.

“I told them, it’s not that bad,” Morrison said. “Just treat ‘Superman Returns’ as the Ang Lee ‘Hulk’. The Hulk’ has proven the audience will forgive you and let you redo the franchise,” Waid said. “You can reboot from scratch. Superman is a character more recognizable than Abraham Lincoln or Mickey Mouse,” Meltzer said. “But no one knows crap about Mickey Mouse. He’s a symbol. Understanding a soul is much harder. So don’t treat him like a walking American flag.”

To understand Superman, Meltzer says, you have to know why Superman was created in the first place — because a young Jerry Siegel’s father was shot and killed in 1932 (a fact first uncovered by Gerard Jones in “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book”).

“Superman was created not because America is the greatest country on earth, not because Moses came to save us from Krypton, but because a little boy lost his father,” Meltzer said. “In his first appearances, he couldn’t fly. He didn’t have X-ray vision. He was only bulletproof. So Superman’s not a character built out of strength, but out of loss.”

“When you hear that, it puts on a whole new spin on Superman and his origins,” Waid said. “The understanding was that Batman was born out of traged and Superman out of hope and aspiration, and it turns out that it’s about not wanting to lose your loved ones. That’s critical, and it means that we can connect with him. He’s not an untouchable character. Bad things still happen to him. His father passes away, and his powers can’t save him.”

And even if Superman still seems like too much of a Boy Scout, we’re supposed to be identifying with Clark Kent anyway. “Everybody knows what it’s like to see the pretty girl and think, ‘If only she could see me for who I really was,’” Waid said. “Past the glasses and acne or whatever. But he has to hide, and half his co-workers don’t even know his name. That’s a critical part, too.”

“It is so much deeper than, ‘He’s an alien with superpowers,’” Meltzer said. “I never wanted to write a Superman movie before, but I do now. I understand what Superman is now.”

CONTRA: “”How stupid is that?” exclaimed “Hellboy” and “Buffy” writer Christopher Golden. “That announcement made my head spin. ‘Iron Man’ isn’t dark. ‘Iron Man’ worked because Favreau brought in all the best Iron Man creators and had them read the script and asked them, ‘Tell me what we did wrong?’ — and it worked because it had all the best things about Iron Man boiled down into the best movie they could make. ‘The Dark Knight’ was really good because it had all the best things about ‘Batman’ boiled down into the best movie they could make. Making a dark and gritty Superman movie because Dark Knight made a ton of money is incredibly stupid.”

While he wasn’t as direct as Golden, fan-favorite writer/director Kevin Smith also had reservations on a newer, darker Man of Steel. “You always have to always keep Superman very distinct from Batman,” he related. “Batman can be brooding and bleak and dark but Superman — if you want to take a realistic approach to him that’s fine, but I don’t think you can turn him into an angry character. Superman is about the hope in people, the good in people, whereas Batman is about the more driven, hungry for justice angry side of us. [So] I don’t know if doing a dark Superman is the approach, but I’m all for a reboot.”

“Superman, the character, inspires hope, as opposed to Batman, who inspires fear,” elaborated Jeph Loeb, who added that his “Superman for All Seasons” (which he created with frequent collaborator Tim Sale) could be a proper approach for a possible revamp of the franchise. “‘Superman For All Seasons’ is about Clark Kent trying to deal with the fact that he has this incredible power and responsibility, and that was an interesting concept to me. And one of the other things that I find interesting is that he’s set out to perform a job that will never finish, a never-ending battle. Is that dark? I don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Steven T. Seagle — who’s groundbreaking graphic novel “It’s a Bird…” took a unique look at Superman through the eyes of a comic book writer — feels that Superman has been a “dark” character all along. “Heroic struggles are basically all dark in tone. The idea of ‘villains’ implies something bad happening to good people most of the time, and that’s dark. Heroes look brighter emerging from dire consequence successfully,” said Seagle.

Longtime DC Comics scribe Mark Waid tended to agree with that assessment. “I [focused] on the part where they’ll make the films as dark as the characters allow us to go,” he said. “Hopefully they realize that Superman is not a dark character, but that doesn’t mean the story can’t be darker or more threatening. What makes Superman hard to write in the 21st century is that he’s a creature of hope and he lives in a brighter, more optimistic world than, say, Batman.”