It should be noted before I go off on my rant that I am a bit of a Superman fanatic – There is no other superhero that can ever come close to bettering him in my eyes. It always  surprises me a little though, the attitudes to the different heros and their various personas.

Take for example Batman – a hero certainly, but a dark and moody, broody type of a chap. Most people I know consider Batman to be cooler than Superman, and this tends to follow through for most of the mainline heros out there – The darker, cooler, crankier, etc… that they are, the more popular they tend to be. It seems to be a case of we want our heros, much like our celebrities and so on, to misbehave and be “bad boys” in order to be worthy of our adulation.

But why? What is it about the bad boy mystique that attracts us over the simple messages espoused by others like good old Clark? Its something thats fascinated me for a long time, and has (it seems to me anyway..) strong ties into people’s morbid fascination with fame and celebrity, the need to believe in the supernatural, and all of that other jazz.

A related topic is the way that Superman, being damn near omnipotent, omnisicient, and pretty much omnipresent, is frequently portrayed as a Messiah figure. Think about it – people worship him, pray to him for salvation, curse him when things go wrong; he is the effective manifest saviour of the world, and because of his nature he can never back down from that mile high pedestal which the masses have placed him on. This in itself is a massive research topic, and one deserving of a post all of it’s own. A nice little weekend project I feel