Broken Frontier

For the past three weeks, Library of Babble has explored an assortment of questions associated with the myths behind the superheroes, including the problems of being human, morality, and evil.  In this final entry in our four-part series about the myths behind the superheroes, we ask the big question, the one about the meaning of life.  In superhero stories, arguments about life's meaning are tangible and obvious, steeped in the American promise of the right to pursue happiness, and resolutely protective of the lives of average Joes.  In these fantastically impossible stories about absurdly super-powered humans, we find a loving embrace of the ordinary.  We find our own lives reflected back to us as priceless treasures, worthy of painful sacrifice, to be defended even to the death, and envied by the mightiest among the superheroes.

On the very first page of the very first published Superman story, Action Comics #1 (1938), Clark Kent discovers his considerable power and decides to "turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind."  In the rest of the comic book, he prevents an innocent woman from going to the electric chair, intervenes when a man is beating his wife, rescues Lois Lane from a kidnapping, and thwarts corruption in the US Senate.  In this first superhero comic book, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster established the central concept of justice that has fed countless superhero comics since.  A superhero will defend personal freedoms by fighting those who would take them away, whether they be criminals, the state, or those closest to us.

In the seventy years since Action Comics #1, this concept of justice has been interpreted, commented, and even challenged, but only to be renewed.  Fed by the chaos, blood, and revulsion of religious wars and tyrannical kings, the Enlightenment articulated a passionate belief in the dignity of each individual person, and the self-evident truth that humanity's Creator had endowed each of us with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This became the core of the American Dream, and served as a powerful call to the hungry and oppressed of Europe, who immigrated in search of a better life.  In the very first superhero comic book, it rang with unsullied clarity, and captured the imagination of readers who instantly began clamoring for more.  It weathered the storms of domestic unrest and cynicism.  It even weathered DC's unfeeling exploitation of Superman's creators. 

Some superheroes have slightly more complex motivations.  Batman is driven by his anger, his guilt, and his thirst to take revenge on Joe Chill, the two-bit hit man who killed his parents.  But Batman is also sworn to fight crime, extending his vendetta far beyond Joe Chill, or even those who hired Chill.  Batman's crusade to foil the ambitions of Gotham's criminals is an undertaking to protect all the victims of street crime.  And the reason is so clear that it is much more often implied than given.  People are worthy of protecting for the simple reason that they are people.  Superheroes don't prequalify us based on what we do with the life and the liberty that they defend.  We don't have to show evidence that we have done well with that life.  It's enough that we are free to pursue our own happiness.  A superhero will defend that to the death.

Superheroes are our myths in that they are our ideals, asserting their force and appeal through one story after another.  Life, these stories tell us, has meaning because God created it, and imbued it with undeniable freedoms.  Life has meaning because we are free to seek meaning.  We can believe anything we want about the meaning of life.  The concrete manner in which we fill in the blanks really doesn't matter.  What matters is that we can believe anything we want, and fill in the blanks for ourselves, by choosing our pursuits unrestricted by state interference, violence, coercion, imprisonment, or murder.  The meaning of life lies in freedom.

Again and again, stories of superheroes have observed that most people do not choose epic quests in their pursuit of happiness.  In the pages of the comics, most people choose an ordinary existence as the happiest.  Satisfaction comes from the essential rhythms of life, generated by work and family.  This affirmation of the quality of meaning to be found in the ordinary is nowhere more evident than in Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, a speculative story published by DC in 1986.  The time is 1997, and a reporter from the Planet has come to the home of the now-retired Lois Lane to interview her about the last days of Superman.  Lois is married now, to an auto mechanic named Jordan Elliot, and is spending her days peacefully as a housewife and mother.

We learn, through Lois's reminiscence, that Superman ended his own life after breaking his oath and killing a powerful enemy.  He walked into a storage chamber filled with gold kryptonite, and was never seen again.  Lois is a very happy woman, though, and her husband Jordy has every appearance of being the happiest man alive.  What is it about their life that is so satisfying?  In their conversation on the final page, we learn that what they love about their lives is all the "normal" stuff, the ordinary stuff, like work, and friends, and taking out the garbage.  Lois and Jordy, and their friends, are finding joy in their children and grandchildren, and in each other.  Getting up, going to work, raising a child, coming home, eating together, and going to bed (yet not going to sleep!) is the very stuff of happiness. 

As we come to understand, it is also what Superman longed for.  It is what he would have given up all his powers to achieve.  As Jordy tells the young reporter with earthy good humor, "Us ordinary workin' slobs, son…we're the real heroes."