A Kryptonian Raised by Humans
Superman for All Seasons Book One - Spring (July 1998)
Writer: Jeph Loeb
Artist: Tim Sale
Artist: Tim Sale
Colorist: Bjarne Hansen
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Where we last left Superman he had died and returned to life. This had the effect of reminding most of the world how much they cared about the archetypical superhero, with a resulting jump in sales of his four monthly books. Five years later, the Superman books still had largely the same creative teams and were in a bit of a wilderness. The infamous Superman Red and Superman Blue storyline came along again as a periodic reminder to fans not to take Superman for granted.
As I wrote last time, this is a ongoing problem creators have with Clark Kent's alter ego. His pure goodness is his defining characteristic and also what makes him difficult to tell interesting stories about. In the early 1990s this problem was compounded by the rise of the grim anti-hero. In the late 1990s there was a larger appetite for traditionalism, but the problem with Superman remained.
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From age 5 to 22 I regularly attended a Lutheran church with my mom and stepdad. For a large stretch of that I believed what I heard in sermons, in Sunday School, and from my parents. I didn't know anything else. The church was the center of our family life. Most of my friends and extracurricular activities were church-based.
The only thing I didn't like about church was attending services. At first it was the natural childhood rebellion against exercise an hour's worth of self-control, then an adolescent resentment of giving up a fourth of my weekend. As I got into my teen years - sometime after my confirmation - I realized that my anathema toward worship wasn't just immaturity. I had serious concerns about what I was hearing every week.
As I began to meet people from other religions (or those with no religion at all) it just didn't make sense to me that by luck of geography and family circumstance that I had happened upon the one true explantion of the cosmology of our universe and the design of our lives. And it struck me then that my Christianity had always been based in fear; I believed and prayed and worshiped because I was afraid; afraid of punishment both heavenly and earthly, afraid of disappointing those I loved.
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But what does this have to do with Superman?
By the summer before my senior year of college, I had fully decided I was no longer a Christian, though I didn't have the courage to tell my mom and stepdad. So I continued to attend services each Sunday with them, though with minimal enthusiasm.
And I struggled with the idea of what it meant to be a good person when my whole life part of that defitnition had included being a Christian. The previous school year I took a class in Buddhism, and while a lot of its philosophies made sense to me, I realized then that I wasn't going to be the type to jump wholesale into any particular religion. I realized I was going to have to find a path that made sense to me.
That summer saw the release of the miniseries Superman for All Seasons by the team of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. It was the third major collaboration for the duo, following 1991's Challengers of the Unknown and 1996's Batman: The Long Halloween. Loeb, originally from Connecticut, had arrived in comics via Hollywood; he co-wrote the screenplays for video rental staples Teen Wolf (1985), Commando (1985), and Burgler (1987). Seattle native Sale, meanwhile, had been kicking around in comics since the mid-1980s, and had developed a distinctive style minimalist style heavy on the shadows. Sale's art on Superman for All Seasons was something different for him. His line was more delicate and his shadowwork minimal to make space for the gorgeous painted colors of Bjarne Hansen.
Superman for All Seasons explores Superman's motivation and character. Each issue takes place in a different season and time period, and each has a different narrator: Pa Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and Lana Lang. And though each one of them experiences Clark / Superman in very different ways, they all come to similar conclusions about his awe-inspiring sense of responsiblity, empathy, decency, and morality.
It was that last descriptor that was a revelation for me. While I know going to church taught me a thing or two about what it meant to be a good person, it also gave me quite a bit of confusion about the boundaries of morality. I had a hard time seeing how the things I heard the pastor and my parents rail against - suggestive song lyrics or Martin Scorcese movies or t-shirts with skulls on them or even premarital cohabitation - had anything to do with being kind or compassionate or generous or grateful.
That's why I needed somewhere to start, a model for what it looked like to live a life devoted to doing the right thing without it being tied to religious dogma. Loeb and Sale - via Superman - gave me that. Sale revealed in a 2008 interview with The Comics Journal that he and Loeb took inspiration from "Ex-Machina" a Superman story by writer/artist Paul Chadwick that was published in Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2 (1989). In the story, Superman talks a suicidal man out of killing himself. "It was about the goodness and the humanity of who Superman is," Sale said. "And I loved it."
I'm sure many Christians would like to claim Superman as one of their own. And they'd have a case; it's very likely that two middle-aged rural Kansas farmers would be Christians who would raise Clark in the chruch. But metatextually, Superman's creators were two Jewish misfits who, likely unconsciously, created the character as a fantasy in which the immigrant outcast becomes admired and revered because of his exceptionality. It's worth noting, too, that Jeph Loeb is also Jewish.
There's a scene in the first issue of Superman for All Seasons in which Clark - at this point a high school senior - consults a local pastor following a devastating tornado. He's struggling with guilt over not being able to help more people during the storm, and he's looking for answers. Curiously, rather than take this as an opening to minister to Clark's spiritual needs, Pastor Linquist tells him he should look to his parents for comfort. Clark isn't satisfied with this answer, and the following exchange ensues:
"Pastor, what if one man - just one man - could have stopped all this destruction? And he didn't..."
"We each do what we're able to, Clark. Some more, some less. But when the almighty sets a course there's nothing any man can do about it."
"But what if there was one?"
The Pastor leaves this question unanswered, and Clark is left to figutre things out on his own. He goes on to decide that he has to leave Smallville for the big city and become Superman, in the hope that he can use his gifts to help as many people as possible.
I connected to this deeply in many ways: The limitations of religion, the desire to be a good person, and the need to leave home (I had one more year left of college, and I was determined not to end up back in my hometown). But unlike Clark I at least had a model to look to.
I also connected to the way Superman for All Seasons portrayed Superman as grappling with loneliness and confusion and self-doubt. It's kind of amazing that out of the hundreds of thousands of Superman stories told, there are very few that focus on his inner life or emotions, or the weight of being one of the most powerful beings in the universe. No one wants an emo Superman, but the character has to have a sense of relatability. Superman for All Seasons demonstrated that that was true key to keeping the Man of Steel relevant. And while it didn't solve the problem of Superman, it did provide a model for future writers - specifically Grant Morrison, Kurt Busiek, Geoff Johns, and Tom King - to write a Superman that was just as much man as super.
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Loeb and Sale would go on to collaborate several more times, most notably on the "color" series at Marvel (Spider-Man: Blue, Daredevil: Yellow, etc.) and on the 2006 NBC series Heroes (Loeb was a producer and writer; Sale did artwork for the credits sequence and his work stood in for that of comic artist character Issac). Collectively, their collaborations put them in the company of some of the greatest writer / artist teams in comics history. Sale, sadly, passed away in June 2022 at the age of 66.
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