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A review by helpfulsnowman
Superman: Son of Kal-El, Vol. 1: The Truth by Tom Taylor
3.0
The marketing for this is weird, because it feels like it’s playing at “What if SUPERMAN tried to solve society’s ills?” kind of thing, but it’s really not overly political.
I’m not a big fan of the stories of superheroes trying to solve our real world problems like income inequality and so on, mostly because they cannot solve those problems.
See, in the world of comics, superheroes exist. In our world, they don’t. In the world of comics, there is a HUGE X factor (see what I did there?) that would certainly throw off social and economic forces in pretty significant ways, but those are not things that happen in our world.
When an evil dictator from another dimension tries to destroy our existence every few months, wouldn’t this change the economy?
If alien species existed, wouldn’t this change our society somewhat?
But the real problem is the flip side: superman isn’t real, therefore superman cannot solve real world problems.
Because superman can attempt to address the problems of our world using methods that aren’t available. There is no human who can stop a natural disaster like superman can. There is no human who could pick up a sinking ship and bring it to shore.
Any suggestion of a way superman could solve a problem, related to the real world, is like wishing or magic or shit like that. It’s not really applicable.
But while the covers and back copy would have you think this book is going to be superman feeding the hungry or whatever, it’s not so much. He does some of that stuff, but it’s not obnoxious, it’s not like anyone is pretending they’ve got the answers.
Which is good, because I DO have the answers, and I plan to deploy my robot man with a kryptonite heart any day now to get those answers in place!
I’m not a big fan of the stories of superheroes trying to solve our real world problems like income inequality and so on, mostly because they cannot solve those problems.
See, in the world of comics, superheroes exist. In our world, they don’t. In the world of comics, there is a HUGE X factor (see what I did there?) that would certainly throw off social and economic forces in pretty significant ways, but those are not things that happen in our world.
When an evil dictator from another dimension tries to destroy our existence every few months, wouldn’t this change the economy?
If alien species existed, wouldn’t this change our society somewhat?
But the real problem is the flip side: superman isn’t real, therefore superman cannot solve real world problems.
Because superman can attempt to address the problems of our world using methods that aren’t available. There is no human who can stop a natural disaster like superman can. There is no human who could pick up a sinking ship and bring it to shore.
Any suggestion of a way superman could solve a problem, related to the real world, is like wishing or magic or shit like that. It’s not really applicable.
But while the covers and back copy would have you think this book is going to be superman feeding the hungry or whatever, it’s not so much. He does some of that stuff, but it’s not obnoxious, it’s not like anyone is pretending they’ve got the answers.
Which is good, because I DO have the answers, and I plan to deploy my robot man with a kryptonite heart any day now to get those answers in place!