All the celebrations of Superman as an icon of the immigrant experience as peak Americanness breeze too easily over the part where he replaces his heritage and relatives with native-born Americans who raise and acculturate him to the American way
I was looking up this comic just for the amazing cover, but it turns out the story inside actually more than lives up to it!
So people agree that the character of Superman is kind of worn, the movies aren’t working bcuz not enough internal conflict in Blue Boy Scout mode and attempts to bring it back (Superman kills people!) run too against the character
What he needs is a reinvention that draws from the core of his character, like how in the ‘80s Frank Miller distilled Batman to “emotionally damaged vigilante” in a way that had clearly been there all along, eclipsing all the “Biff! Pow!” and Bat-Mite stuff
So here’s a thought:
take his commitment to doing the super-savior thing, ducking out on social obligations for the greater obligation of saving a crashing plane on the other side of the country; the “Superman is a dick!” of the old Lois Lane & Jimmy Olsen titles, where he subjects his friends to great annoyance in the name of obscure and persnickety codes of living; take the whole Clark Kent pretending to be human and looking like an awkward dork bit and:
Superman is a high-functioning autist
Like, the core of his character is he looks human but he isn’t like other people but he’s consciously trying to be a good paragon anyway, and even where he succeeds at this he’s still distanced from others, and only achieves any human intimacy w/Lois with his constructed perfect-man persona and w/Jimmy over the fact they’re both awkward dorks
There’s potential there
DNA - Superman Of Steel
This is one of the first happycore songs I remember to come out after I started following the genre, going up on Badtz’s server about the same time as Mentasmission. Honestly I liked Mentasmission better, but this is a pretty fun song to open a set with.