Suppose I have a character that is like a Swiss army knife. A lot of different utilities and abilities for every occasion and addition to this, the ability to fly, being invulnerable, super-fast, and super-strong in ways impossible to measure so that whenever I find it convenient, increase his power. Now we put a red cape, a blue suit and a letter on the chest. What result do I have? A sued for copyright, certainly; however, I would also have an annoying character to develop as a writer.
Honestly I do not have much moral to write about a character that was born in 1933. Let's face it. The guy is a classic among classics. Everyone who has even used a blanket as a cloak knows that the Kryptonian exists. In his time, the superheroes were just being developed. There were heroes like The Zorro and The Shadow, which today by day are less active in comics compared to that time, Superman has remained above all of them. Did you know that initially he couldn’t even fly? He uses his Super jump. I’m being serious. The character was so popular in the comics that the company was unable to fulfill the increasing demand, then hired more writers and artists who worked simultaneously to make more numbers and then, a lot of crazy powers came up, such as super bad breath, shape shift by molding his face with his own hands. Even in the movie “Superman IV” played by Christopher Reeves, they gave him some crazy fixing-vision powers, to rebuild the great Chinese wall with just a look.
Some will think, “Making an entry on how Superman bothers you is not but a way to show how much you admire him?” And they're right. I admire the character. One as enduring as he deserves all respect, what does not deserve respect is the way in which they have conceptualized it over the years. When you have a character like Superman, there is little you can do. You have to invent super powerful enemies to deal with the superiority of your own creation. Thanks to this, they exploit his biggest and greatest weakness as the kryptonite. Through enemies such as Metallo (Robot whose energy source is a fragment of kryptonite) or Lex Luthor (who for a time used an armor that provided kryptonite radiation beams) exploiting in a non-creative way a strategy to difficult the character's life. Then we go with more drastic cases like Bizarro (failed Clone of Superman) and General Zod (Another Kryptonian). This is where we see one of the most important points that I wanted to reach. Is such the power of the character that only an equal is capable of being a challenge?
In my personal opinion the best way to handle such a superiorly powerful character is introspective or indirect. That is, manage the characters around him or relate stories that affect and nurture his emotional spectrum. This does not imply that it is the only way to do it, but it is my favorite. If we take into account the profitability of the character and what it represents, this is complicated, since always look for ways to take advantage of such a classic character to continue stories and produce gains, which is perfectly reasonable, but sometimes it seems not to leave advance the character. This causes the need to generate alternate realities where the character is left to the full freedom of the scriptwriter and the drawer, since these versions would not affect the original. This lack of consequences has allowed stories like 'Red Son' 'All-Stars Super-Man' and 'Whatever Happens With The Man Of Tomorrow' All very significant sagas of the man of steel, but they have something in common.
SPOILER: these end with the 'demise' of the man of steel: SPOILER
My question is the simplest. “If the most amazing way that the character is immortalized in the comic is through his death, why they do not carry it out?” But as we all know, the cause is profitability. I have always said that am of the group that think that Superman should have remained dead in 'Doomsday'. In case you do not know or do not remember, the story arc of his most definitive death was so popular that it came to the news. Reports of the death of A COMIC BOOK CHARACTER arrived at the regular news. Perhaps what was the highest point in his career; but after this happened, his resurrection happened, and just caused the thought that death (in comics) was not something that should be taken seriously. And since this happened until the sun today, the amount of death and resurrection of the comics increased exponentially. Characters such as Captain America, Flash, Spiderman, Jason Todd and others have suffered from this event. Superman changed the game and it has been changing from the beginning, but he is the best of all and it will always be because he has been the first. Their arches usually seek inspiration, their invulnerability gives security and their stories have even reached the news. But my question is, after 85 years of leadership, why did not you retire when you were at the top of your career? Why did not you sacrifice yourself to show us that heroes can also fall? Why they denied your death?
He is a symbol and in popular culture he will always be, just like Coca-Cola. But see how over the years, this character is reinvented, sometimes losing its essence, is something that I cannot enjoy.