Middle age meets Superman

Press, 9 July 1986, Page 13

Middle age meets Superman

From the “Economist” London

The Reagan Administration ("Standing tall,” “Make my day,” “You can run but you can’t hide”) has brought an insatiable appetite for heroes. Rocky and Rambo fill the cinema screens. Clint Eastwood is made a mayor. Lee lacocca of Chrysler, Victor Kiam of Remington and T. Boone Pickens, the Wall Street raider, mere businessmen all, become celebrities for the way they hack about the competition. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are hooked out of their mischievous adventures and made modern models of free enterprise.

Presidents send in the cavalry hither and yon, and all’s right with the world.

These times should be sweet for “Superman,” the nonpareil of American strong men. And there he is indeed, on the lunchboxes and the T-shirts and the peanut-butter jars, still leaping buildings with a single bound and beating back meteors bare-fisted.

But the importance, and übiquity, of heroes today is such that poor old “Superman” will not quite do.

He, or his comic books, are now going to take a leave of absence and come back re-evaluated for the late 1980 s. The outline of the story will remain unchanged. Superman still falls to earth, is raised by Mr and Mrs Kent and enrols, as the reporter Clark Kent, on the “Daily Planet.” Lois Lane remains his femme fatale, and he will still pop into telephone kiosks to put on the same old cape and tights. But his publishers, DC Commies, insist that his character will be different. As Clark Kent, he will be tougher, with more intimations of his true powers (probably necessary if he wants to snare the new Lois Lane, who is to be “a terrific reporter, focused on her career” and juggling with “hostility and more primal emo-

tions” whenever Mr Kent appears). He will be an exercise buff; he will write novels, and will be put in charge of features at the “Planet.” As “Superman,” however, he will be slightly less super, sweating more freely over his feats of endurance; as his publishers say, if he is holding back a Boeing 747, in future he is going to notice it. The new look has come about because Superman seemed to be languishing a bit, and on his health (as on that of "Batman,” "Spiderman,” “The Hulk,” and “Wonder Woman”) rests the health of the whole comic-book business in America.

America is no longer the comics paradise it was in the 19405, just after Superman was bom, when nearly a billion comic books were sold every year and they could be found in every corner store. Now the annual sales are 175 m and comic books are not, generally,

found in the supermarkets, because their covers are violent and too many people loiter about reading them.

Comics have still not recovered from the reappraisal of the 1960 s that blamed them for vandalism, delinquency and stupidity, much as television is blamed in the 1980 s. But they are creeping back. The president of DC Comics, who on her election ten years ago was the only woman in a fiercely male industry, seems to have brought in a feminine preoccupation with what characters are thinking and why they act as they do. Hence, perhaps the new complications in "Superman’s” life. But then, of course, he is middle-aged too, two years older than the 46-year-old “Wonder Woman;” it is no wonder that the spring in his step has to be preserved with a Nautilus machine. Copyright — The Economist.