We have just about enough superhero movies right now. The sale of the Marvel catalogue to Disney for $4 billion a few years ago — and the subsequent realization that even minor figures from long-dead franchises who were never really that good in the first place can be spun into vastly profitable series of sequels — has led to summer after summer wallpapered with superhero movies. The genre seems inexhaustible, even as the characters get more and more minor. In 2009's Wolverine, for instance, the character of "The Blob" showed up. He's barely even mentioned in the completist Marvel catalogue.

Which is why on its face this weekend is notable. On Friday, Man of Steel comes out, marking the return of the A List. The studio's hope is that it does for DC what The Avengers did for Marvel and what The Dark Knight did for Batman: reboot a classic in the hopes of milking out sequels forever after. My hope is to be spared such a dismal fate. Why? Because Superman is the dumbest of all superhero franchises, and the one with the crudest vision of power.

Superman wasn't the first caped crusader, of course, but he was the first superhero who contained the idea of a hero being more than merely human. The first draft of Superman was a short story written in 1933 by a couple Jewish kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who had been reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. They immediately saw the dark side of Nietzsche's idea. In the first story, "The Reign of the Superman," a man with superhuman powers proceeds to conquer all of humanity.

This idea survives into the comic book and all its subsequent iterations — the vision of power has just been inverted. And because he is such a terrifying figure, Superman's creators have always had to make him supremely boring as a character. His morality is as inhuman as he is: He saves cats out of trees, he never kills criminals, he informs citizens of the appropriate safety precautions, he warns women against smoking. The only villains who are any contest are ones who are similarly alien. Otherwise, he'd just walk over them. And even if he loses, he just turns back time.

So let's just call Superman what he is: a fascist. He's a fascist who fights for the good guys, but a fascist nonetheless. In 1938, only a few months after the release of issue number one of Superman, a professor named Halford Luccock bemoaned the advent of "disguised fascism" in The New York Times: "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course 'Americanism.'"

Superman is the extreme example of Americanism. He literally fights for "truth and justice and the American way," the definitions of which he himself gets to determine and enforce. In real life, absolute power mixed with simplistic morality is always a dangerous combination. America currently has people with superpowers. They know what anybody is doing on their phone or their computer at any time. And they use this power, we are assured, solely for good. How sure are you?

But I wouldn't mind any of this if Superman's purity didn't make the stories so very, very dull. The moments of crisis are routine. Kryptonite equals losing. No kryptonite equals winning. Superman sometimes needs to retreat into his fortress of solitude, like a battery into a charger. But then he always comes back. It has about as much narrative tension as throwing a ball against a wall and having it come back to you.

Other superheroes in DC land are allowed to have moral complexity. Batman, for instance, always had a relatively complex question at his core: What is the difference between what he does and straight-up vengeance? Spider-Man is allowed a sense of humor and an unsteady sense of self. Iron Man forces us to confront the problems of amoral technology intersected with vanity in an unstable, capitalistic world.

Superman, on the other hand, just wins. Wins and wins and wins. He's the vodka of superheroes, both the purest and the blandest expression of the type. If you met him in a bar, you might buy him a drink, but you'd soon get bored and inevitably wander off in the hopes of talking to, say, a human being.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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