#233 The Importance of Legacy: Max Landis’ Superman: American Alien

When a new blockbuster superhero film is released, the sometimes several comics series that it is based on tend to get revamped in order to capitalize on the film’s predicted success – we can see this in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War (with Marvel now releasing the summer crossover event Civil War II), but we’ve seen it again and again in origin stories that are revisited and reworked in order to potentially capture a new generation of readers. The newly released Batman v Superman is no exception to this rule, and while I was expecting an excellent movie I was a little more reluctant to believe that the accompanying, inevitable Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman origin redux could be anything more than a predictable rehashing of old dusty tropes given both characters’ already rich histories.

This is why Max Landis’ seven issue mini-series Superman: American Alien, which is still being serialized at the time of this posting, caught me so off guard. Max Landis, son of celebrated screenwriter John Landis, typically writes for film though he admits he has always been a Superman comics’ fan at heart – the seven vignettes that comprise American Alien had been germinating since he was a boy, and though he’s had the opportunity to work on the character in his short film The Death and Return of Superman and the absolutely stellar Adventures of Superman #14, in which Superman meets the Joker for the first time (read it if you can find it), in American Alien he’s been allowed to cut loose and rework the character, outside of continuity, in ways that are touching, innovative, and which interestingly bear particular hallmarks of writers who work across different media – mainly by breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the medium itself.

That he reworks Superman’s past isn’t really new, as every writer wants to put his or her stamp on Beyond poignant events in Clark Kent’s life that span his boyhood to his adulthood – it’s that he does so while providing a metacommentary on what the writer’s process is when given this kind of task and the impact that it can have. In issue #1, young Clark Kent, speaking to his father about breaking a mirror in a movie theatre out of frustration, reflects:

Somebody had to make [the mirror], like, somebody at the factory took time to make it. Then somebody had to sell it to the movie theater and then other people had to fit it to the wall… which somebody else built before them… When you break something, you’re not just breaking the thing, you’re like… hurting everyone who ever made it the way it was. (19)

While this is a significant moment for Clark in learning to respect all life and property in a nigh Buddhist insight, it doubles as a reflection of how important it is for a writer to handle a character respectfully, particularly when so many people have had their hands on him over the decades. This is a theme that Landis repeats throughout the series in dialogue that is so subtle it’s sometimes hard to catch – the second issue opens with Lana Lang, Clark’s first Smallville girlfriend, studying French with Clark and asking him “pouvez-vous me montrer le chemin du retour?” which is glossed in the issue as “can you show me the way home?” With no context to set the scene (it’s the first line of dialogue for the issue) and Clark being unable to understand the basic sentence, it’s clear that this is meant solely for the benefit of the reader to have some insight into the process of reworking an important origin – Landis’ own invoking of the muse, so to speak, to make sure that he gets it right by asking the character outright for guidance. This may seem a stretch, but interviews with Landis point to the fact that there’s more at work here than your typical superhero story, saying of the series that it’s meant more as a “tone poem” than a straightforward narrative, focusing in on Clark’s story because “Superman has been written by some of the greatest minds in comics” (Landis). Where does the individual author fit into this paradigm? How does one assert one’s own voice, and should he?

This motif reaches a crescendo on the final page of issue #3 with another aside for the reader, here a single page story that has nothing to do with the preceding narrative and that is just dropped in, apropos nothing. Landis has Mr. Mxyzptlk, an absurdist comedic villain from Superman’s rogues’ gallery, address the reader directly by asking us “who’s more real? You or me? … I was created as a character in 1944. Think about that. Millions of people have known my name … Oh, I suppose I don’t have a physical body in the same way you do. But does that make me any less real?” (24). Similar themes have been explored by Grant Morrison when he repeatedly broke the fourth wall in Animal Man and the more recent Multiversity, and Gaiman touches on the topic in Sandman as well though in a subtler way – Landis, given a mini-series, simply doesn’t have the page count for that kind of nuance and so is throwing some often heavy punches in showing us the importance of handling rich histories and of creating something that can outlast ourselves. Just as Landis has Clark fret over his role and legacy in every issue, so should we in writing our own stories and participating in ways that stretch beyond our selves, perhaps making sure that we also get it right the first – and only – time around.

Origin stories are important, and Landis clearly respects the process to the point of baring his anxieties to his readers – where he moves beyond the traditional retelling is in showing us that what at first appears as a mosaic in a multi-authored character is actually a continuum, regardless of which medium one is writing in and what motivations caused a particular story to be told at that specific cultural moment. I’m anxiously awaiting the final issues, as American Alien is a probing insight into process rather than content, one that comes as a highly welcome surprise from the unlikely place of the compulsory reboot.

Works Cited

Landis, Max. Alienating a Hero: Max Landis Talks Superman: American Alien.” DCComics.com. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2016. Web. http://www.dccomics.com/blog/2016/01/13/alienating-a-hero-max-landis-talks-superman-american-alien.