And someday I will reach me that valley
And someday it will not hurt no more
I will lie down in them still waters
But tonight it is too cold to run

“No Weather”, Brian Fallon

On Monday, January 13, 2025, my life changed forever. After years of health scares and hospital stays, my father died. In the three months since we buried him, I’ve found myself coping through one of my oldest hobbies; one I wouldn’t have without him – comic books. If it wasn’t for my dad watching Teen Titans with me, or giving me a Batman comic he picked up at the Chicago Auto Show and buying me the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man, I would not love comics the way that I do. It was a love he fostered in his way – mainly through us watching the different animated DC films that aired on Cartoon Network. Eventually he would find his own deep affection for the Batman villain Bane through The Dark Knight Rises and Justice League: Doom, but way back when it was just him and I, when he was only a little older than I am today, it was us and Superman: Doomsday. Doomsday is one of the movies I can remember us watching plain as day on the massive RCA CRT that sat in my grandmother’s living room, in between long sessions of playing Mortal Kombat and NFL 2K5. I can remember the way I watched wide-eyed as Superman fell in the fight and rose again, and the way we laughed at how callously Lex Luthor discarded his assistant Mercy, something we would laugh about until our last conversation. More than all that though, I remember the feeling. I remember the joy that sharing that time with my dad brought me. It’s that joy that has brought me, in my grief, back to Superman.

As I grew into an edgy-for-edgy’s-sake teen on the cusp of the Millennial and Z Generations, I fell into the trap that is thinking Superman was a boring premise with worse execution. A guy with what seemed like every power, with one or two arbitrary weaknesses, who can win every fight seemed one note and lacking in tension to me. I didn’t really engage with the material earnestly, save for when a friend let me borrow his novelization of The Death of Superman, coincidentally the story that Doomsday is based on. Even then, I found myself drawn far more to Superboy, the imperfect teenage clone, struggling to live up to the impossible standard of the one he was made to replace. The walking tragedy whose powers didn’t always work right, stuck at 16 forever, destined to always stand in the shadow of a giant. Maybe it was the obvious: a character that is a perpetual teenager is more appealing to a teenager than a grown man with galaxy sized responsibilities. Maybe it was my own (mostly) self-imposed comparisons to my own dad. Looking so much like him and feeling so different, with different interests and talents, being so much less sure of how I fit in the world than it always seemed like he was. Or maybe it was just that sweet leather jacket Superboy wore in the 90s. It’s hard to say. 

What isn’t hard to say though, is that revisiting Big Blue as an adult, with the fresh eyes of someone with real responsibilities of his own, has made me understand and appreciate the character far more than I did as a kid. Where before I looked at him through the lens of a cynical teenage boy who cared more about how the fights ended than anything else, I can look at him now with the viewfinder fixed far more on the “man” than the “Super”. The thing that makes Superman appealing isn’t just that he has all these superpowers, or that he’s relatable in the same way so many of his contemporaries are. It’s that he’s aspirational in so many human ways, that the values he’s embodied for nearly a century are so universal to the human experience. These values are on full display through the material I’ve read recently, particularly Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s run on Action Comics. Through his celebrated “Warworld Saga” and the conclusion of his tenure, the six-part “Blue Earth” story, Johnson focuses on Superman as a symbol, but Kal-El as a man and a father. Sure, the feats of strength are there; it is a comic book after all. But at the same time, the book’s greatest strength is in the small moments, the times he spends with Lois and Jon, or his new adopted children Otho and Osul. It’s in the way he takes the time out to check in with characters like Glen, a former criminal trying to keep on the straight and narrow while parenting his own teenage son. It’s in the way he believes in redemption for people like Metallo and Livewire. The greatest strength of Superman is that he cares – that he tries time after time to be kind and fair to everyone. It’s that he embraces fatherhood and his responsibilities as both Clark and Superman every day. It’s that he takes the time to encourage nearly everyone he meets, that he uses the symbol of his house to remind himself and others to be brave. 

I could say it’s the ways that Superman reminds me of my dad that have drawn me here, and sure, that’s a factor. My dad was the kind of guy who would give someone the tie that he was wearing just because they said they liked it. He was the kind of dad who packed up everything he could fit in the back of his LeBaron and drove across the country because his eight year old told him he needed him. All that said, I think it’s those reminders to be brave that are what I need, because that’s all that I can do. For the last 90 days, I have woken up every day in a world without my dad, and I will every day for the rest of my life. All I can do for every one of those days is be brave and face that reality. Some days I need that reminder, from someone that reminds me of all the good things my old man was.