Joe Thorn

NOTE: Chris Keenon is a teacher at Grace, has recently finished his first novel, and is one of our cultural exegetes. He is also one of the first people to share the Gospel with me when I was a teenager. Chris literally has thousands of comics in his collection, and I recently asked him to write a short post on the topic of super heroes.

I recently saw Superman Returns. I sat in wonder, the way I did when I saw Christopher Reeve sport the tights for the first time. The movie both dropped my jaw and brought tears to my eyes. I was flooded with memories from my childhood like waking at an ungodly hour on Saturday mornings to watch The Super-Friends and listen to an LP record containing four Superman stories that someone bought for me when I was five, and the recent past like crying over the Death of Superman comic in my dorm room (not as recent as I’d like to think), enjoying Smallville and the more thoughtful Superman stories that have explored what it really means to be a superhero with real life responsibilities of having a job and being a husband and a roll-model.

For the past decade or so I would have emphatically said Batman was my favorite superhero, but I realized leaving the theater that Superman might be a more accurate answer, considering my whole life and my emotional attachments. Comic lovers are some of the most emotionally attached people I’ve ever met. We take great enjoyment from our favorites and become livid if they are misrepresented or maligned - Superman most of all. He’s the one comic character who makes news when certain events happen within his story. Many hated that Superman told Lois his secret identity in Superman II, people were up in arms over a brief costume and power change in the late nineties and Superman’s death was practically front page news.

So why do we care so much about superheroes? Why is accuracy in a comic book movie as important to some as it is in a historical film? Why does a science fiction character in blue tights, created by two young men in the 1930s, matter so much to so many people now? Even in our culture, which values bettering one’s position by whatever means necessary at the expense of honesty, fairness and family, not to mention God, people still, on some level, want something better. We want to think that there’s someone who uses all his resources to help people in need. We want a defender who fights for what is true and just. Our consciences know that to protect those who can’t protect themselves, to show mercy and give hope are the right things to do. And we all hope that when we need it, there will be somebody to save us.

By now many, if not all, who are reading this can see where I’m going, and I don’t want to trivialize the point or my Savior by writing something like “You know who my ‘Superman’ is? Jesus!” But I’d challenge everyone who reads this to think about the fact that a silly comic character from before World War II still excites and amazes us and has such value to us as a culture while his values, now more than ever, seem so opposed to the way we live our lives and the values we espouse. And while you’re at it consider that Superman isn’t the only Christ figure in popular entertainment and literature. A few that come immediately to mind are Andy Dufresne (The Shawshank Redemption), Cool Hand Luke, Randle McMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Shane, V (V for Vendetta) and even the Terminator (Terminator 2). These aren’t pieces of fiction written by Christians trying to convince readers that they need Jesus. Most, if not all, are created by people who don’t know Christ, but see that the world and maybe even their own lives need someone from outside to come in and save them.

Some may object and say that Superman and other heroes and Christ figures of fiction, do not point to our need for a savior. Some may say that they represent what we aspire to be, what we really want from ourselves or an unattainable ideal. To them I say, “We’ll never live up without the life changing salvation that Christ brings,” and end with a direct quote from Superman Returns. “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior, but every day I hear people crying for one.”