Top 5 Superman Songs of All Time

The word “superman” premiered in a play about a modern Don Juan. So it’s fitting that most Superman songs are love songs. Despite all of its anti-marriage ubermensch rhetoric (marriage is an obstacle to ideal breeding blah blah blah), George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 Man and Superman ends when the girl lassos her Clark in the final act. Since then, lovedumb Supermen have been crooning through the decades.

Here are their…

Batman and The Ethics of Deception

This month’s post is based on this month’s Batman: The Dark Knight.  Needless to say, spoilers follow.

We’re still working on the latest post on vigilante ethics, but in the meantime, we’re going to weigh in on the May issue of Batman:The Dark Knight.  If you haven’t read it, we highly recommend it.

(Spoilers to follow)

The comic starts one Halloween when The Mad Hatter, The Penguin, and The Scarecrow meet up…

The Hollywood Superhero’s Never-Ending War on 9/11

The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we…

Star Trek Into Thirty Darkness Zero

J. J. Abrams is not bashful about 9/11. He blew up the Vulcan home world in his 2009 Star Trek reboot and said afterwards he was aiming for the World Trade Center. The sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, literally spells it out with a 9/11 dedication in the ending credits. Not that anyone was…

Time-Traveling Supervillain Gatsby the Great

Jimmie Gatz, AKA Jay Gatsby, debuted in dual-identity crime fiction long before the prototypal Bruce Wayne slipped on his Bat tights.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rolled off the press in 1925, Detective Comics No. 27 in 1939. When Bob Kane and his writers (probably Bill Finger, possibly Gardner Fox) tacked on an origin story six issues later, they set the…

Iron Man vs. the Iron Giant

Who stuck an adaptation of the 1999 cartoon The Iron Giant into the middle of Iron Man 3? Not that I’m complaining. Even The New Yorker loved it (as opposed to the formulaic explosions that bookend the movie). Robert Downey Jr.’s abrasive bromance with 11-year-old Ty Simpkins is the film’s brightest and most unexpected…

What the experts say about Iron Man 3

I’m teaching my Superheroes seminar again this Spring, and Marvel very kindly scheduled Iron Man 3 to fit our syllabus. So my students and I abandoned our classroom and strolled downtown to our smallville theater. Here’s their verdict.

Alejandro Paniagua: “Iron Man 3 was a movie filled with action, violence, and the right amount of comic relief. Eccentric billionaire Tony Stark is portrayed…

Superman, General Zod, and Just War Theory

Hello Superheroes!

Up to this point, most trailers of the Superman movie have been pseudo-religious, contemplative  and soul searching.  Which is all well and good, but a movie about Superman finding out all about himself in a touchy feely way has been done (Hello, Man of Steel?  This is Smallville calling.  It wants its teen angst back).

Which is why we were thrilled to see this:

(hmm, we can’t seem to get the…

Soon YOU Will Be Invincible

About five years ago, a group of honors students were trolling campus for a professor willing to create and teach a course on superheroes. They found me. The syllabus I submitted to C&D for approval included a predictable roster of comic books, interspersed with a few influential pulp novels and even a smattering of Nietzsche and Shaw. But then a friend handed me a novel I’d never heard of,…

Super-Blogger Clark Kent Saves the World One Sentence at a Time

I can restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in three words.

But first a lesson in grammar.

Passive voice. Ever heard of it?

Super-grammarian Geoffrey Pullum has. Daily Planet editor Perry White has too. But White, according to Pullum, has no idea what it is.

In J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis’ Superman: Earth One, Mr. White explains to cub reporter Clark Kent: “Active sentence structure versus passive structure. A good reporter always goes…