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Superman has a better shot at cool in comic books than he does on the big screen. The new Superman movie--bogged down for years, partly because the studio can't get an actor to don the tights--is on its fourth director, McG (Charlie's Angels), but the lead role is still uncast. Jude Law, Brendan Fraser and Ashton Kutcher have been mentioned; Josh Hartnett has already turned it down. "We have to find Superman," says Dawn Taubin, president of domestic marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures. "That's a big, important piece of the puzzle."
Smallville, featuring a teenage Clark Kent, is the No. 1 show on the WB, but the best onscreen version may be the deadpan, dead-on American Express ads on TV and the Internet featuring and in part written by Jerry Seinfeld. Does the comedian think Superman needs refurbishing? "I do," Seinfeld says. "I thought that they kind of botched it up. The last series of films really lost the whole essence of the appeal of the character." Seinfeld's Superman, who gets too much mayonnaise on his sandwich and can't figure out a DVD player, may be the most credibly human version yet.
You can watch writers turning Superman over and over until they find a way to fit him into a contemporary context. The top-selling comic book in March was Superman/Batman, a series that plays the dialectical duo of the DC universe off each other like Vladimir and Estragon. It's a Bird ... is a graphic novel about a comic-book writer who can't write a Superman story: he's blocked. "There's no access point to the character for me," he complains. "Too much about him makes no sense." A limited-run comic called Secret Identity tells the story of a Superman who lives in the real world, our world, and who plays a lifelong chess game with the government and the media to keep his true nature hidden. What could be more modern than a hero with an obsessive need for privacy?
So does Superman really have a dark side? An identity even more secret than Clark Kent? A graphic novel called Red Son, written by Mark Millar, answers the question with another question: What if Superman had landed not in the wholesome bosom of Kansas but in the cold heart of Stalin's Soviet Union? Wearing a hammer and sickle on his chest instead of an S, Superman befriends Stalin and succeeds him when the Soviet leader dies. (Stalin, Millar notes astutely, is Russian for "man of steel.") With his rigid notions of right and wrong, telescopic sight and super-hearing that can pick up a counter-revolutionary conversation half a world away, Superman becomes a terrifying global dictator, a nightmare fusion of Nietzsche's Ubermensch and Orwell's Big Brother. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, superpower corrupts--well, even more.