Here we go again, kids.
For all the talk of embracing the goofier nature of comic books into James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn, director James Gunn apparently can’t get his head around the idea of how Superman pulls off the “Clark Kent” persona. He joins not only a long list of people who seem to misunderstand how Clark’s trick works but other comic book favorites nobody questioned. James Gunn himself altered Peter Quill’s “Starlord” outfit while Sam Raimi could explain how Peter climbs wall (and a better one than comics actually gave us…some nonsense about gravity control or something if memory serves, while Rami had little “hairs” that worked together to help him stick to wall) but somehow “teenage science geek with a special interest in chemistry and engineering creating an instinctual substitute for a spider’s webbing” was too much for him. This always bugs me.
So James Gunn, working with Tom King (that’s was your first mistake), decided he needed to “fix” how the glasses work. As I’ve said on this site time and again it’s not just the glasses that allows Clark to pull off his dual identity, but of course the guy who admitted that it took him a long time to come up with anything he liked as far as a Superman story in his style has to do it the hard way. The comic cover above shows that what he and King came up with is technically canon in the Bronze Age pre-Crisis version of Superman, but it’s a lame explanation…which explains why they went with it, I guess.
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