Superman: a radical (I assume) brainstormed idea

[Admiral_Young]

I've always thought of Clark Kent as being the dominant personality. He was raised as a human who later discovers that he's actually an alien being from a planet that was destroyed in a natural catalyslism and struggles to embrace that ideal. Through the building of the Fortress of Solitude and his father's computer simulation Clark is able to finally embrace both parts of his idenity and forges a costume to reflect that. Red and blue symbolizing the United States where he was raised with the Kryptonian family crest obviously symobolizing Krypton and his legacy. Unlike Batman which seems to be the consensus dominant personality for the fragile pysche of Bruce Wayne, Superman is not who Clark Kent is neither is Kal-El of Krypton, he's Clark Kent because that is who he was raised as.

I've never been a big fan of Lois falling in love with Superman but only accepting Clark business from the Donner films, that even happened in Superman Doomsday but Lois figured out in that film as well and just wanted Clark to admit who he was. Superman is Clark Kent not the other way around.

As for the idea of a device that disguises him...an interesting thought...sort of like a holo-imager or something like that. I'm curious as how Smallville is planning on doing the secret identity thing because I have a funny feeling that we're not going to see Clark in full costume attire.

 

[CYOTI]

[

Not really - the reversion to the bumbler was a Geoff "look I''ve read a lot of old comics and I worked with Richard Donner" Johns thing and quite recent.

That wasn't just Johns, Morrison used the same trope in All Star.

 

[CYOTI]

I liked it when some villain was saying that Clark the Bumbling fool is exactly what he really thinking of Humanity, that it's not a disguise but an attempt to blend in with the rest of the bumbling fools.

No thats just stupid and just says more about the pervading cynicism in Tarantino and his work than Superman or his motivation for disguising himself.

 

[Norrin Radd]

IMO, the best way to disguise him to the identical Superman robots who can pretend to be him while he remains the mild-mannered Clark Kent.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I saw Kal do the Picard Maneuver in the 70s when he interviewed himself.

You might be forgetting that all his robots went insane a few years back and tried to take over the world. I don't think that kal has much more faith in AI anymore.

 

[Norrin Radd]

The only modern Supes I follow is All-Star. Actually, in that series he is able to disguise by making himself look kind of dumpy and out of shape.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

It wasn't exactly the full "S-curl" on his Clark as much as it was errant locks in his face. Here's an interesting publicity shot.

^That's how Byrne drew the S-curl when he did the books in the late 80s.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The only modern Supes I follow is All-Star. Actually, in that series he is able to disguise by making himself look kind of dumpy and out of shape.

AllStar isn't modern. It's a jerk off tot he 60s and 70s.

It's very very very very good, but the ideals and motifs are rooted in the history of the supermanic ideal and also completely out of continuity with every other book being sold today.

Wow. Supermanic as a new word I just invented, has some interesting overtones.

 

[CYOTI]

AllStar isn't modern. It's a jerk off tot he 60s and 70s.

It's very very very very good, but the ideals and motifs are rooted in the history of the supermanic ideal and also completely out of continuity with every other book being sold today.

Those ideals and motifs in All Star have held true throughout Superman's written history. Yelling that it's not in continuity isn't going to cut it.

 

[Christopher]

I've always thought of Clark Kent as being the dominant personality. He was raised as a human who later discovers that he's actually an alien being from a planet that was destroyed in a natural catalyslism and struggles to embrace that ideal. Through the building of the Fortress of Solitude and his father's computer simulation Clark is able to finally embrace both parts of his idenity and forges a costume to reflect that.

Again, it depends on the era and incarnation you're looking at. You seem to be basing it on the Donner movie, where Clark didn't learn the full story of his origins until he was 18 or thereabouts. In the Byrne reboot, he only gradually developed his powers and didn't learn about Krypton until he'd already been Superman for a few years.

But in the Silver and Bronze Age comics, he had superpowers from infancy. He was Superbaby and Superboy before he was Superman. What's more, he had total recall and so he had actual firsthand memories of his origins on Krypton. So in that incarnation, he never thought of himself as just an ordinary human. He was always a superbeing apart from everyone else. Even from childhood, he was Kal-El, who went by the name Clark Kent and put on an act of being a mere mortal.

Red and blue symbolizing the United States where he was raised with the Kryptonian family crest obviously symobolizing Krypton and his legacy.

Unless you go by the pre-Crisis version where infant Kal-El was swaddled in indestructible red, yellow, and blue cloth which he used to make his costume. In that iteration, they were more Kryptonian colors than American. (And red, yellow, and blue isn't the same as red, white, and blue.)


Unlike Batman which seems to be the consensus dominant personality for the fragile pysche of Bruce Wayne, Superman is not who Clark Kent is neither is Kal-El of Krypton, he's Clark Kent because that is who he was raised as.

I've never been a big fan of Lois falling in love with Superman but only accepting Clark business from the Donner films, that even happened in Superman Doomsday but Lois figured out in that film as well and just wanted Clark to admit who he was. Superman is Clark Kent not the other way around.

As for the idea of a device that disguises him...an interesting thought...sort of like a holo-imager or something like that. I'm curious as how Smallville is planning on doing the secret identity thing because I have a funny feeling that we're not going to see Clark in full costume attire.[/QUOTE]

 

[Gaith]

No one's yet vociferously objected to the OP idea. Interesting, I'd thought there would have been more resistance, largely unprecedented to the canon as the concept seems to be (though that linked comic about the hypnotizing glasses is an interesting tidbit I hadn't heard of). Then again, maybe people aren't taking it too seriously.

I mean, when was the last time two actors played the same character, without one being mainly CG? The live-action Hulk TV show is the only other instance I can think of; even the LXG movie used the same actor for Jekyll/Hyde. There's Lyra and Pan from The Golden Compass (man, I love that picture ), but that's different, and of course Pan was CG besides.

It'd certainly be interesting to see two "Superman" actors side by side on the magazines and such...

 

[Guy Gardener]

I liked it when some villain was saying that Clark the Bumbling fool is exactly what he really thinking of Humanity, that it's not a disguise but an attempt to blend in with the rest of the bumbling fools.

No thats just stupid and just says more about the pervading cynicism in Tarantino and his work than Superman or his motivation for disguising himself.

Um this was a bad guy talking, who was quickly told how wrong he was by good guys.

Bad guys are dead on the inside.

 

[JoeZhang]

As for the idea of a device that disguises him...an interesting thought...sort of like a holo-imager or something like that.

That's pretty much how they explained it pre-crisis - he was constantly broadcasting a low level hypnosis field which was amplified by his glasses.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

As for the idea of a device that disguises him...an interesting thought...sort of like a holo-imager or something like that.

That's pretty much how they explained it pre-crisis - he was constantly broadcasting a low level hypnosis field which was amplified by his glasses.

I find it hilarious that it was amplified by his glasses.

 

[Ol Scratch]

I find it hilarious how modest he is. "...and not terribly handsome!"

 

[Gaith]

^^ That was already referred to by middyseafort on the third or fourth post. But as the review he linked to noted, what about photographs?

The notion of Supes constantly messing with people's minds, IMO, is also a little creepy. If we're going to acknowledge that the glasses alone don't cut it, might as well do a literal face-morph.

 

[Christopher]

What I was thinking was that in Smallville, the Legion ring might have a hypnotic effect like those glasses in reverse -- if Clark wore it as Superman, it would make people imagine he looked different, even though he had the same face. So there'd be no need to hire a different actor, just maybe do a couple of POV shots in the first Superman-era episode to establish the principle. Kind of like what they did in the lame final season of Charmed, after the sisters had faked their own deaths in the finale of the previous season, which was meant to be the end of the series. To get around that, they had the sisters use magic to make others see them differently, and they pretended to be distant cousins or something until the writers found a way to justify returning the sisters from the "dead." So we saw the actresses as themselves, but it was understood that the people around them were seeing something else.

Of course, my idea has the same problem as the hypno-glasses idea: what about photos and video? So I haven't got all the bugs worked out. It's just a tentative thought.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

^^ That was already referred to by middyseafort on the third or fourth post. But as the review he linked to noted, what about photographs?

Thanks. Guess some people passed it by. In any case, the Super-Hypnosis was quickly forgotten after that issue and never really mentioned again. It was an attempt to explain the glasses but no one bought it. Once again, I prefer the simpler explanation that Clark Kent is a highly-skilled actor that can become another person by changing his posture, the tone of his voice, his hair, wearing a suit that's slightly larger than his frame, and wearing glasses. The more complicated you attempt to make the glasses/secret identity, the more that it takes to sustain that illusion.

 

[Norrin Radd]

It's very very very very good, but the ideals and motifs are rooted in the history of the supermanic ideal and also completely out of continuity with every other book being sold today.

Continuity? We're talking about DC, here.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Emphasis mine

AllStar isn't modern. It's a jerk off tot he 60s and 70s.

It's very very very very good, but the ideals and motifs are rooted in the history of the supermanic ideal and also completely out of continuity with every other book being sold today.

The All-Star series of books were designed to be out of continuity with the main books so that writers/artists could craft stories that would be very much their own and allow them to take the characters into whatever direction they wanted, including their demise if they so chose (as Morrison did), and not be beholden to anything before or after it.