I fell in love with Superman the first time I ever came across him, when I was twelve. During parts of my childhood I had been scared witless by some of my relatives, who firmly believed that you would go to hell if you sewed a button on a blouse on a Sunday or if you allowed the very thought of a forbidden word to slip into your mind. Things didn't get better when my grandfather told me that Jesus would very soon come back to Earth to bring his faithful ones to heaven. For months, I expected to wake up in the morning to find that all my relatives were gone, while I was left behind with Sunday-attached buttons on my blouses and four-letter words in my mind.
When I was twelve, I was sort of resigned to the fact that I was doomed to go hell no matter what I did. I might as well stop trying to be so good, so I actually enunciated the word h-e-c-k (well, the Swedish equivalent of it), and then I borrowed a bunch of comic books from my cousins. (They were boys, so they could read comics without going to hell.) And when I came across Superman... Well, it was like finding the god I had been wanting for myself all throughout my childhood. He was powerful, totally amazing, and altogether superhuman. And he was kind! Kind!!! He was smiling, tolerant, understanding. He kept helping people, getting them out of burning houses, catching cars about to fall off bridges, saving people being attacked by thugs, getting down cats that were stuck in trees... And he never killed anyone. He rarely used any violence at all. He just wasn't into punishing people. He was friendly, amazing and exhilarating, and for about a year, I sort of drank in Superman the way a person dying of thirst might drink herself senseless when she comes across a spring in the desert.
Then, when I had stuffed myself and sort of had enough, I read this Lois Lane comic where Superman proposed to Lois and made me totally believe that he was completely in love with her. And for the second time, Superman totally, totally overwhelmed me. The fact that I could see him as a man in love changed him for me, so that he wasn't any longer that detached, perfect god. And the idea of Superman, amazingly powerful, truly good but fallible, anxious to use his powers in the best possible way, and truly, truly in love with this one woman... Tell me, people, how can any fictional hero possibly compete with that?
Back when I discovered Superman, I also came across Batman. He was fun back then. Dressed in his bat-suit, he would be out at night, playing coppers and robbers with his little buddy Robin and the badguys of Gotham City. I really liked it, but it was the situations that appealed to me more than the hero himself. Still, the sheer rollercoaster weightlessness of the best Batman adventures from the late sixties was a heady experience. I still remember a story which made me fantasize that I, too, was out dressed up in a fancy costume, dangling from a batrope and playing giddy games of the night.
But then, at about the same time that I started seeing Superman as a man in love, old Bats changed too, and definitely for the worse. He became this moody, brooding bat-shaped silhouette, sitting perched on the highest roofs, feeling immensely sorry for himself, contemplating the unfairness of life. Occasionally he would explode in a burst of energy and brutality, violently attacking some hapless criminals. I was so disappointed in him; no, worse, I was disgusted. So I gave up on him about thirty-five years ago, but over the years I have nevertheless picked up the odd Batman comic book just to see what is going on in the world of Bats. (I haven't bothered with the Batman movies.) And guess what? The man seems to alternate between long spells of celibacy and intense periods of womanizing. Perhaps ten years ago, he had a son by a woman named Talia al-Ghul or something. Not that he himself knew about it, since he had already left her by that time. So, I just thought, maybe that will be the legacy of Batman. An army of little Batboys and Batgirls, sitting perched on roofs and howling at the moon, venting their frustration at having grown up without ever meeting their father? Ahh, people. Give me Superman any time!!!!
Ann
