I had
planned on this being a post about what makes something “Iconic”, in terms of
creativity. What makes one character or building or work of art, iconic while another
is merely famous? But when I plan out in my head what I wanted to say on the
subject, it keeps coming up Superman. I
was going to talk about how diluted and overused the term has become. How it
describes the front of a Mustang and the back of a Porsche. It covers Marilyn’s white dress and Bruce Lee’s
yellow jumpsuit. I was going to talk in
some depth about how an Iconic character had to be the embodiment of a concept
or belief much greater than himself, but after the events in Aurora, Colorado
last week, I’ve really been thinking a lot about Superman.
Superman
is unarguably Iconic in the best sense of the word. His symbol is immediately
recognizable in almost any corner of the earth. In any language or culture the
character embodies the very best of qualities. Courage, Strength, Compassion, Self-sacrifice.
When we talk comics, my friends don’t
really get why I like Superman so much. They say he’s too powerful, that he’s
too much of a boy scout, that his stories lines have become stale. They think he’s become irrelevant to modern
readers. God I hope not.The day Superman becomes irrelevant; we are
well and truly doomed.
You
see, the thing that Superman is the embodiment of, the thing that makes him “iconic”
is us. Superman is us on our very best days, the way we should try to be every day.
He is Brandon Fisher from Pennsylvania
who pounded through 2000 feet of rock with his Pneumatic Quad-hammer drill to rescue
33 Chilean miners. He’s every fireman
who ever ran into a burning building to bring someone out alive. He’s the pilot
who put that passenger jet down on the Potomac with no lives lost. He’s Jon
Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves, who
used their bodies to protect their girlfriends from gunfire in that Colorado movie
theater. They had lives and plans and
families who loved them. They had every reason to say every man for himself and
scramble for the door. A lot of people did. But they had courage, compassion,
and the strength to lay down their lives doing what was right.
I look
at the world around me, and I can no longer believe as I did in my youth that
it is mostly a good place. I think the bad people outnumber the good. I think
the lazy and selfish and apathetic outnumber them both. You have only to connect to the internet to
see that cruelty and bigotry and snide insults have become the natural response
for everything from politics to natural disasters to youtube kittens. It seems like there are so few
people actually trying to do good. They’re
holding the world together with both hands, and the rest of us are just hanging on or actively making it worse.
I know I’ve wandered from my original mission
statement of better writing . It’s just late, and the news coming out of
Colorado has me a little brokenhearted.
I will say only this; As writers you have a forum. You have the opportunity
to influence your readers, even if only a little bit for good or bad. You can show them that qualities like bravery
and self sacrifice and helping one another for no other reason than its right , are
characteristics worth having. Or you can present that sort of thing as outdated,
lame, naive, and no longer relevant to the modern reader. I just think a good story is one that in some
way makes you want to somehow be a better person. And the world needs every Superman it
can get.
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