Yes, he’s a moral absolutist for HIMSELF, he won’t kill, he won’t torture, but he can’t punch cancer or hunger (the nineteen-eightysomething special “Heroes Against Hunger” was something that brought tears to my eyes, Superman not able to fix things). And really, he holds himself to a higher standard than any normal person could hope to maintain, although he shows a degree of flexibility in holding others to that code (otherwise, the cops would have told him long ago to lay the hell off, after he’d busted…oh…half the college students in the world in one night)

He never EARNED the powers, that actually makes him MORE heroic. He was given the whole world wrapped in a bow, and instead of using that for fame, fortune and power, he eschews that utterly, working a real job for a paycheck.

As far as the “We don’t need Superman”/”He causes all this”, umm, same with any city with a Superhero. “Batman vs. the Street Thug” lacks some, I don’t know, gravitas. You need the costumed freak to make the hero seem heroic. And yeah,

And don’t say Batman is a better hero, he’s so relentlessly driven that he seems to have become a caricature driven as much by vengeance as justice. Yes, he’s DEFINITELY smarter, more driven, but he has nothing outside his crimefighting (his Bruce Wayne persona is no more real than Matches Malone, just something he wears for convenience), while Clark has not only a career, but friendships, and love.

(I like both characters as characters, but as far as the best HERO, it’s no contest)

He’s certainly not my favorite superhero, but a good writer can write a good story about just about anyone.

All the fascist rightwing nonsense aside, Superman is boring because he’s just too much. Too strong, too fast, too heat-visiony, super-breathy. They just stapled on so many powers that no one stands a chance. Batman has to become Iron Man every time he tangles with the guy, and even then it’s a close call.

trite, anti-hero stereotypes of the 80’s that pretty much ruined superhero comics.

The tragedy of Alan Moore. He destroyed comics in order to save them.

Anthony Burch isn’t completely wrong, but I do get the impression reading his article that his sense of the Superman character is based a little too much on the post-John Byrne era. The idea that Superman has no values of his own and simply upholds the right-wing values of the ruling class describes the post-modern, post-Frank Miller Kal-El that, as far as I can tell, was written by authors who didn’t like him anyway.

I’m not completely denying that Clark Kent is a conservative, but he is so in the old sense: he learned his values from his small-town upbringing, and he sticks by a moral code that he genuinely believes in. He may often be a defender of the status quo, but he isn’t a tool.

On that note, Superboy rocked kind of hardcore for a good long while there. He had some of the issues you mention above, gaining more of them as he grew - more power, more friends, more responsibility, and all from a younger, fresh-eyed perspective. He also embodied a lot of the echo-boom generation’s fears and worries. Is the science that gave us life, that furnished us with better lives before we were even born, eventually going to doom us without our ever getting a say-so? How do we deal with the boomer generation, which we were always taught to think of as warriors for truth and open justice, when we discover some of them are downright evil?

Where do half-immigrant and half-native weirdos with no extended family and no good attachment to either parent really belong? How do they find their place? Do they ever really get a home?