Don't worry about bleed from the Batman movies from me. Aside from the comics, I've pretty much only seen a few episodes of the BAM, POW live-action TV show, and that one movie with Chris O'Donnell as Robin. And I can't even remember what Batman was like in them, so that won't be an issue. :D


A big part of my with Superman is actually that he seems to be too human. Not always normal--still slightly off--but very much connected to human emotions and attachments and weaknesses. He's naive and overly emotionally connected in some ways & suspicious and cold in other ways, in a fake skin over robotics way. Except that I trust robots. :D He can be petty. He gets angry and frustrated like any guy might. The more I see of him, the less he looks anything like perfect. And, well. He shouldn't be that way. He has too much power for displays of normal human emotions to be anything like comforting. (It reminds me of that story with the little kid who can change the world just by wishing it. Why wouldn't he zap his parents out of existence if they don't give in to his demands?) He just doesn't seem like an exceptional enough guy to handle the powers he has.

It totally freaks me out when he says stuff like "I have felt a chill in my bones before. Every time I try to reason with you" to human beings (that was said to Batman in the first part of Green Arrow: Quiver). If he got angry at Batman, he could totally snap him before Batman even got his kryptonite ring out, what with being faster than a speeding bullet & more powerful than a locomotive.

And yet people trust him! Not just normal people (which, uh. Really? Is this an "in the comfortable arms of our totalitarian father" thing?), but also his peers. Does anyone aside from Batman find him to be totally scary? Are they too powerful themselves to see the scary? And the underlying feeling of the comics seems to me to be that we're supposed to consider Superman to be a good guy, too. Like Dr Shepherd, kinda.

I think that trust on the part of other characters is a big part of it for me, because Cable (from X-Men) doesn't bother me in the same way--even though he's been shown to be able to read the mind of everyone in the world, he can teleport, his telekinesis was at bomb-containment levels & able to keep a small country floating above the ocean without too much obvious strain, and his version of kryptonite (the T-O virus that he had to use most of his powers to keep in check way back when) is now trivially easy for him to control/not an issue. Because very few people trust his motives or his abilities in the text. The best most people give him is "Means well, but..." and so there are always people waiting for him to slip up or to fail or to cross a line--or not waiting for it before opposing him.

And, man, Superman does not doubt himself enough for my comfort.

What it boils down to is: I'm uncomfortable with major super-powers in general; I'm doubly uncomfortable when the problematic, scary elements aren't acknowledged throughout the text.

(Also, um. The idea of Superman or Superboy having sex horrifies me. See also: "Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit? ... with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet." (http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html))

But as I said, I haven't read much Superman. I've probably only read through a couple of dozen individual issues involving him. It's just that while I knew him as an icon through cultural osmosis (or whatever), I considered him kind of the boring element of the DC set; actually seeing him in action... utterly creeps me out on an intellectual and a gut level.