Patrick, I want to thank you for defending and believing in a morally good Superman, who, among other things, doesn't kill. After all, it was this sheer goodness in Superman that attracted me to him, when I started borrowing my cousins' comics back in 1968. My cousins preferred the Phantom and Agent X-9, but they also liked Batman and Tarzan better than Superman. But to me, it was Superman's amazing powers as well as his wonderful way of using those powers that made him the most fascinating comic book character to me. A year later I became convinced that he truly loved Lois Lane, and then he became a life-long obsession with me.

However, over the years, I became disappointed in Clark/Superman so many times. He often treated Lois badly and occasionally horribly (amnesia kiss and dead-beat dad anyone?). And in the comics in the late eighties he officially killed the three Kryptonian criminals from Superman II. He trapped them someplace and then he executed them, because he deemed them to be too dangerous to exist. I found it unbelievably depressing, and I thought it was a horrible blot on Superman's character. And this, mind you, is comic book canon.

The fact that I have been disappointed in Superman so many times has made me interested in stories about "flawed" Superman/Clark Kent. However, I'm never going to like Superman as a killer. And I think you need a very good reason to cast Superman as a killer in a fanfic.

As I said, comic book canon turned Superman into a killer. But there were other Superman comic stories that were not canon, but elseworlds. These stories put Superman/Clark in non-canonical situations and made things unfold from there to see what would happen. I have read many of those, and I have liked several of them. One of the best of these Elseworld stories cast Superman as Batman, raised as Bruce Wayne by Martha and Thomas Wayne. Martha and Thomas were killed when their adopted foundling son was eight, just as the Batman canon requires, and "Super-Bruce" grew up to be a multi-millionaire and an angry nocturnal super-vigilante. But this Bruce met Lois, found happiness, and became the good and optimistic Superman that most of us love to love.

There was also the story of how Kal-El from Krypton became Tarzan, son of the apes, and how Lois became his Jane. Another Elseworld cast Clark/Superman as a hero in Fritz Lang's classic black and white silent movie "Metropolis" from circa 1920.

In short, I have read a sufficient number of Elseworlds stories to be relatively tolerant of different ways of portraying Clark/Superman. One thing I can never accept is that Clark falls in love with another woman than Lois, or that Lois dies. I also absolutely can't accept that Superman is unnecessarily or gratuitously evil.

I am prepared to accept the idea that there may exist an Elseworld where Clark Kent is a vampire. That means I have to accept that vampire Clark feels a need to drink human blood, killing people in the process. I want him and need him to fight the urge to kill humans. I accept that this Clark has nevertheless killed three humans, but I would have liked it even better if he had been able to successfully fight his urge to kill every time.

But, Patrick, I think we need people like you who remind us that Superman is supposed to be about truth and justice and also about compassion, because that is what attracted me so much about him when I embraced him so fiercely as a twelve-year-old. So thanks.

Ann