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Allegretto said on May 2nd, 2011 at 8:23 pm

Thank you for this. I have been trying to convince everyone on the internet of the third and seventh paragraph for days. I don’t really care all that much about Supes pretend citizenship, but the OMG SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET reflex is strong in me.

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Given the fact that he spends the bulk of his time specifically protecting Metropolis, it seems likely that the U.S government would come to the logical conclusion that Kal-El is, in fact, a U.S resident. Prior to him making certain details of his personal life and history public (I don’t know what the timeline on that is in current continuity), it is likely that they assumed he was just an extraordinarily powerful metahuman rather than a refugee.

Given Superman’s intelligence, introspection, and general attitude, I quite agree with you that he would logically be aware of the limits of brute force and be extremely reluctant to involve himself in complex sociopolitical and economic problems, or wars and atrocities taking place half a world away in situations he has neither the time nor the understanding to fully control.

And that’s just the Watsonian reasons for why this is kinda stupid. The Doylist reasons are that Superman and his cadre of buddies fight SUPERVILLAINS and/or universal calamities. There’s seventy years worth of tradition and narrative arcs built around that. There’s a tradition for telling stories about taking the idea of a Superman-equivalent and applying as much of a real world filter on it as possible, but not using the Man Himself.

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I haven’t ever read Superman on a regular basis. The closest i’ve come to being near his stories is picking up volume 6 of a run by some author. But you may have, in those last 2 paragraphs, hit on why i haven’t even tried to read Superman recently. Thank you for the well written article.

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Kid Kyoto said on May 3rd, 2011 at 9:42 am

Y’know the recent GI Joe movie bent over backwards to make the team (‘A Real American Hero’) international including British and Moroccan members and putting their base in Egypt. Largely this was because the studio was afraid of losing the international market if the film was too American.

I wonder if that’s the subtext of this story?

That being said having Superman spend a year outside the US would be a lot more interesting than him walking across America.

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Clark Kent spent several years travelling the world experiencing other cultures and in his reports building up the portfolio that got him the job at the Daily Planet. He’s then spent years as Superman since his debut. These days he knows that jumping in and grabbing Hitler and Stalin wouldn’t work and they even had a story with him learning this. He disarmed two opposing forces and they picked up rocks and sticks to fight. Another place he carried in tons of relief supplies and the local dictator said thank you, and they would handle the distribution, and take their cut as his men would be watching so no refugee would dare take any without permission.

But my main problem is more that leaving aside whether Superman would try to solve the complex sociopolitical problems or not is that by the nature of comics he CAN’T. They have a very fragile structure of being the real world “except” with superheroes and aliens and magic. The problem is that even small things can change a lot and some of the things Superman could solve even within his traditional purview of stopping crimes and disasters are not small things. I am sure you can think of your own examples.

Though the fact I am reluctant to give examples is another problem. One thing to think to yourself that it is a shame there is no real Superman when you see something nasty on the news and another thing to use him solving that trouble as the basis of a story. It seems disrespectful to those that died and those with only the powers and abilities of mortal men who have done their best to help.

So Superman gets more freedom of action as he has given the US government (not very) plausible deniability. But this freedom is to do things that he knows will not work, that would be disrespectful as a story to the real problems, and which, to whatever degree his efforts succeed or fail, would alter his world and further strain the suspension of disbelief that it can still be “ours…except with”.

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John 2.0 said on May 3rd, 2011 at 2:32 pm

I remember reading in my youth (in some superman trivia book or something like that) that Superman was given US citizenship by an act of Congress. Of course, that was pre-CoIE, so I guess that doesn’t count (or the Superman Annual tie-in with Armageddon 2000 where Superman runs for President and STAR Labs determines that he was placed in his rocket from Krypton as a fetus, so the Supreme Court rules his landing in Kansas constitutes his ‘birth’ for purposes of Presidential eligability. That story is a good deal more amusing in retrospect).

Still, Superman’s ‘home’ as far as the public is concerned is the Fortress in Anartica (or maybe the Watchtower in orbit). And the “Justice League” does have Wonder Woman, who’s not American, so who knows.

It is funny to see the media reaction to all of this.

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Die Macher said on May 3rd, 2011 at 3:13 pm

Although the Wonder Woman with the eagle top and the star-spangled tights sure seemed pretty American.

I remember an old issue of Action Comics where Superman was going around doing everyone’s job, and some magical being had to force him to stand by and let firefighters, cops, etc., take care of things. I recall the being explaining that “sometimes a MAN is needed… NOT a Superman”.

This was before we had women being cops and fighting fires and such, clearly.

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John 2.0 said on May 3rd, 2011 at 4:11 pm

Yeah, but Wonder Woman’s stars-and-stripes outfit is an amazonian tradition, right (taking the colors of the host nation as a sign of respect, I think).

I remember Superman being tried by the Guardians for ‘retarding the development’ of the human race by doing too much for them and his sentence was that he couldn’t help people or face exile. It didn’t stick.

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Zifnab said on May 3rd, 2011 at 5:13 pm

Isn’t this why Lex Luthor remains Superman’s biggest nemesis? Superman can run around the world battling baddies and saving the planet for decades, and people still have trouble accepting him.

Luthor runs for President and wins, no problem.

Read the alternate history “Red Son” and you get to see Luthor run off, save capitalism, and roll back the Red Tide purely to spite his Commie alien rival.

Luthor has the social and political expertise that Superman lacks. It’s not unreasonable to believe rogue political leaders don’t have a more limited, but at least comparable, type of skills. The kind of villains you can’t punch your way to victory against.

Although, in all fairness, I can’t help but think that a fair number of third world countries would be ruled by meta-humans as either direct dictators or from behind the scenes.

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Kaisius said on May 4th, 2011 at 3:35 pm

Wait, what? There was media coverage on this?!? Superman declared himself a “citizen of the world” back in the 50’s/60’s. It was like two panels long. Each member of the U.N. made him an “honorary citizen”, so he could operate in their country as needed. that’s why “The Incident” struck me as kind of silly, stretching two panels into eight pages.

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Rather than just two, I’ve always divided Superman’s identity, like Gaul, into three parts:
Kal-El of Krypton
Clark Kent of Metropolis
Superman of Earth

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[…] complained about this last year when Superman renounced his citizenship (which led to exactly zero stories before being retconned […]

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