No, James Gunn, Superman Is NOT An Immigrant! (but I’ll tell you who is)

There are so many things about Superman I get tired of hearing because it’s wrong. He’s not boring. He’s not a “boy scout”. He’s not too powerful (in the right hands). He’s not “Supergod”, he’s SuperMAN. He can be defeated without getting beat up or killed. He is doing more than wearing glasses as Clark Kent. He and Lois have a fine…love life. The list goes on forever of stupid takes on Superman. Not personal tastes, mind you. That too powerful thing…if superpowered superheroes aren’t your thing, that’s fine. He is not the most powerful being in the universe, and he doesn’t have to be, though his powers can lead to good stories if you understand the characters and the world he lives in.

The one we’re talking about just got spit out by James Gunn, of James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn fame. I hear he’s directing a movie with “Superman” in the title.

Because Kal-El comes from a little piece of space debris that used to be a planet called Krypton, there’s this annoying opinion, usually among activists easier to claim the most famous superhero as “one of us” but not limited to that, treating Superman as some immigrant allegory. They even try to say it goes back to the very beginning, except that Jerry Siegel was born in the US and Joe Shuster was born in Canada, which is still North America and rarely is anyone from Canada treated as an “immigrant” the same way other countries are. Possibly because our cultures are similar enough, but this is a storytelling site. Treating Clark Kent like he’s South American or something is a storytelling issue, though, because these people try to cast Superman’s story as that of an immigrant. Except that was never the case. “Krypton” was just an excuse to explain his superhuman abilities before the Silver Age leaned heavily on sci-fi and started showing us more of the place pre-explosion.

That didn’t stop James Gunn from going to UK news site The Times and trying to convince everyone that Superman has “always been political” and that it’s the story of an immigrant. Gunn didn’t want to do a Superman movie initially because he said he didn’t know what to do with the character. Days away from James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn hitting theaters, and we have more evidence he still doesn’t.

Superman is back and has this divided, destructive world ever needed him more? The superhero was created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel — American sons of Jewish immigrants who first mentioned the character in a 1933 story about a villain who uses a mind-controlling drug to make money and mischief. Fast-forward 92 years and we have social media doing just that for us, and a Superman film has rarely felt more timely. The new movie comes to a planet that feels like it could do with a man who has the ability to turn back time.

Actually, the “superman” of that story, a character closer to pre-Crisis Lex Luthor than Clark “Sir Not Appearing In This Story” Kent, is not the same character. I admit I haven’t read Reign Of The Superman, a title homaged during the death and return storyline and the crossover with the Tangent imprint, but I probably should at some point.

I [article writer Jonathan Dean] meet Gunn before the gargantuan global push for a film that Warner Bros needs to make hefty millions, maybe a billion. Gunn, who directed Guardians of the Galaxy, is the franchise overlord charged with creating an elaborate interconnecting world for DC Comics that will be able to challenge the Marvel Cinematic Universe. DC’s kingpins are Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman, and Gunn is a director who knows we have superhero fatigue and wants to wake us up again.

{*sigh*} There’s that other thing I’m tired of seeing. “Superhero fatigue”. It’s bad movie fatigue, and if it wasn’t superheroes some other genre would get blamed. Even I couldn’t watch exclusively superhero stuff (though you can bet that if there was a 24/7 livestreaming channel it would be in my favorites and watched a lot) but there’s more to Hollywood’s current failings that hating superheroes as much as the Hollywood system does. The studios wouldn’t keep trying to make them if there was.

“There are three things I don’t ever need to see again in a superhero movie,” says Gunn, an amicable, booming, bullish 58-year-old who gets to the point. “I don’t need to see pearls in a back alley when Batman’s parents are killed. I don’t need to see the radioactive spider biting Spider-Man. And I don’t need to see baby Kal coming from Krypton in a little baby rocket. We have watched a million movies with characters who don’t have their upbringing explained, like when we see Good Night, and Good Luck we don’t need to know the early life of Edward R Murrow to explain how he became a journalist. Who cares?”

Have we ever seen the radioactive spider in the movies? I haven’t seen the Matt Webb movies, but Rami opted for the genetically engineered spider of the original Ultimate universe. The TV shows have all used radioactive spiders (yes, except Japan). I do get and sort of agree with his point. By now we know Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man’s origins, and have seen enough variants that we already know the story. If you’re going to do the origin story, but you can’t do anything new with it, just start us with the career. The 1966 Batman series gave us a throwaway line about Bruce’s parents in the first episode and that was good. The first time we saw their deaths was Super Powers Team, the rebranded Superfriends in its final season. You can reference the origin if necessary for the story, and show it too us if it matters to the story, but we don’t have to see it every time. We don’t see the atomic bomb test everytime Godzilla appears on screen.

And how can Gunn make sure his Superman does not go the way of the recent superhero films that bombed at the box office? “Well, it’s different to how it used to be,” he says. “Up until Iron Man the only superheroes that made money were the big three: Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, plus X-Men. But then visual effects improved, so even though people thought Iron Man was a C-tier superhero, the film looked real. It changed everything and there were a few glory years when Marvel could put out anything and it would make $650 million. But those days are gone. Now it has to be something that really grabs an audience.”

It’s gone because producers told the directors, screenwriters, and actors to ignore the comics and just make something new out of the base concept, or sometimes just the branding. That “something new” tends to be weak, unheroic, and pushing some social goal rather than a good storytelling everyone who likes superhero stories can enjoy regardless of social division. Also, so many stories can’t just have interesting stakes. It needs to have “all the stakes”. Now the multiverse itself has to be the goal, and once that gets boring you can’t go back to saving a small town or city, and there’s nowhere else to go after all of existence.

One way to do that is with a ten-minute scene that just features Clark and Lois talking about geopolitics and whether Superman should have stopped a war. It’s exactly how to make a superhero movie to engage adults. “It is definitely the most unusual thing that we put in the movie,” Gunn says. This is a Superman film for the age of endless discourse, with the difference being that the people — Clark and Lois — who disagree with each other here are willing to discuss and even, perhaps, learn.

This actually has been done, Gunn, in the comics. Superman tells the kid that he can stop a battle and take away the weapons (also tried in Superman IV: The Quest For A Franchise Killer…I mean Peace), but he can’t stop the root cause of war. In “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, & The American Way”, the story that Superman Vs The Elite came from, he does stop genetically engineered monsters from killing people in a war, but this seems to otherwise be soldiers with guns killing each other. Maybe he’d go in to protect citizens in a particular area, but he knows he can’t just end all wars just because he’s Superman. Injustice Superman had to take over the planet to do that.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” Gunn says. “But on another level it’s about morality. Do you never kill no matter what — which is what Superman believes — or do you have some balance, as Lois believes? It’s really about their relationship and the way different opinions on basic moral beliefs can tear two people apart.

Wait, when did Lois not share Superman’s respect for life? I don’t remember her ever being about “some balance” or trying to get Superman to kill someone who “deserved it” in any Superman story I have ever read or watched in my life. What story was Gunn reading besides his own?

“But,” Gunn says, laughing and keen to remind me that we are not on Newsnight, “there is also a flying dog in the film who wears a cape.” He is called Krypto. “And come on, Clark has glasses and people don’t know who he is. He can hold up a building. He’s wearing a costume. If I flew around saving people I wouldn’t make myself a costume I had to change into every time. There’s something peculiar about a person who makes a costume. Clark is a peculiar guy.”

We’ve already talked about the glasses, though Gunn doesn’t read this site. If he did, he’d see himself gets knocked cold by Scrappy-Doo, but that’s another discussion. See, this is what bothers me more than whatever “campaign” is out to get Gunn: the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand this character at all. Krypto now resembles Gunn’s dog. He doesn’t buy traditional superhero tropes, so it’s hard to believe he could ever just enjoy the superhero genre for what it is. He has to explain everything to make sense in OUR world, rather than accept and tell stories in THEIR world. That’s not how you tell superhero stories. Or any fiction that isn’t set in the real world, and even that takes liberties with life for the sake of drama or comedy.

From there we get the usual bit about immigrants and Trump (and he brings up Gunn’s comments about Trump later in the article) and “summer of protests” and nobody cares. We aren’t talking about our world, remember? They don’t.

And before you say, “Superman has gone woke!” this is all in Superman’s lengthy history. Superman was written by men from immigrant families and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees once released a book in Italy titled Superman Was a Refugee Too. Less than ten years ago DC Comics backed World Refugee Day: “The Man of Steel’s story is the ultimate example of a refugee who makes his new home better.” In the edition of Action Comics No 987, Superman saves a group of undocumented workers from a violent racist.

Recent history, you mean. This is the dude in question. Yes, he has an American flag bandanna. You know what the writer and artist were going for. The next page is him shooting, and Superman rightfully standing in his way and just as rightfully telling him off. On the other hand, he lost his job to cheaper labor (the boss would be the racist for tossing out a good worker in favor of near-slave labor) and that seems to be his complaint more than their being foreigners. I’m not defending his actions because they’re not defendable, and he may well be a racist, but we don’t know the full story. All we know is that he’s nuts, put the anger on the wrong target in the worst way possible, and Superman stopped him and properly told he’s the baddie. I also don’t care about what the United Nations wrote, or any writer who was drawn in by this “Superman is a refugee” stuff.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn says. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” I ask if he has considered how differently the film might play in say, blue state New York — aka Metropolis — and Kansas, where Kent grew up? “Yes, it plays differently,” Gunn admits. “But it’s about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”

Funny, from what I’m told Clark should be MORE racist because he came from the midwest. By the way, do you know why he doesn’t share the “immigrant experience”? Take a guess.

Oh right, because he looks caucasian! He doesn’t even really look Jewish. He looks like your average white guy who could be Jewish. The Kents were never depicted as Jewish simply because his creators were, though admittedly the Kents’ full history didn’t come until DC/National Comics has completely screwed them over. Clark was never seen as anything more than another human, even by the parents who knew the truth, or the love interest who learned it later on. Clark had to hide his growing powers because the world would panic or stick him in some lab for testing and never allow him to become the man he is in either identity, but he never had to hide his appearance or be looked down upon as a foreigner. He didn’t even know he wasn’t from Earth until after high school in many versions and around high school in others. As a matter of fact…

In a timeline that never was thanks to the events of Armageddon: 2001, we learn that based on how the post-Crisis DC Kal-El came to Earth in a “birthing matrix” rather than as a baby in a rocket, Superman was legally declared born on Earth, a native born American, and qualified to run for President. The only difference is that after these events were stopped thanks to Waverider’s unintentional interference nobody checked the birthing matrix. A baby adopted by American parents becomes American and his or her life only knows being an American even if the child’s adoptive parents teach that child about their homeland. Joe and Jerry were 1st generation Americans (Joe by way of Canada before his family moved down south to the States). Superman was never an immigrant or had the experience of an immigrant. All he even knew about Krypton came from resource material he had in the ship or a “super memory” from the Silver Age where he remembered everything of his few months on Krypton before being stuffed in a rocket and sent to a non-exploding planet.

By the way, you know who IS an immigrant and may understand the experience? SuperGIRL! Kara always comes to Earth as a teenager, the specifics of which change between continuities and not counting the whole “Matrix Supergirl” stuff when post-Crisis DC decided only Kal-El escaped Krypton. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In The Eight Grade shows us a Kara that is out of touch with the world that took her in because she was raised on Krypton. It’s still my favorite miniseries. So I don’t have a problem with a story focusing on a Kryptonian trying to deal with being in a new culture and society. I like Supergirl done right. As in “not by Tom King, whose story Gunn is using for his Supergirl movie”. So you can’t even get that right, James! I guess the girl isn’t important unless she takes over Superman, which apparently would have happened in the DCU under the Snyderverse timeline according to Midnight’s Edge.

I could go on, but this article is running long. Jamison Ashley at Bleeding Fool has a good take on this, and more could be said about the war in the story and parallels to the current Middle Eastern situation, but a movie that’s afraid to use “The American Way” in marketing a Superman movie is not giving me high hopes of getting Superman right, along with everything else I’ve seen coming out. This movie failing doesn’t justify the “Snyder Bros”, because Snyder’s Superman is worse; a hopeless, scared man forced to save the world, never called Superman, and actually has no issue with revenge. (No, I don’t like that scene in Superman II, either.) It also doesn’t justify the antisuperhero crowd in Hollywood because this is a symptom of them making superhero movies instead of people who understand why people go to superhero movies and maybe even share some of those values. That exists in fanfilms but not Hollywood. When the best Superman they’ve put out lately is some isekai Superman in a race swapping anime style reimagine of his world (why is Deathstroke a PRETTY BOY!) you can see why people are begging for the public domain period to come fast. Maybe then we’ll get Superman written by people who like and understand Superman. And the obligatory slasher but hopefully that will be forgotten along with this “modern” nonsense in favor of real Superman returning.