By Steve Baxi — Last week, DC Comics published Superman: Son of Kal-El #2 by Tom Taylor, John Timms, Gabe Eltaeb and Dave Sharpe. As Clark Kent prepares to go off world, Jonathan Kent has to step into the role of Superman. While Jon isn’t lacking in competence or ability, he worries that Superman doesn’t embody everything he ought to. What is Superman’s responsibility in the ongoing refugee crisis? How does Superman address social inequality and unrest? Why doesn’t Superman stop mass shootings? For Jon, the problem of stepping into Superman’s shoes is that he wants to solve real problems, and Clark has yet to do so. He’s flying off to War World in the upcoming Action Comics #1035 while people are dying on Earth, is that really what Superman should be doing?

The impetus for these questions come in the opening pages when Jon is off to his first day of college and before he can even get to his first class, a shooter comes in and tries to kill everyone in sight. Our shooter, Kyle, writes “thoughts and prayers” on his bullets and urges other students that “it’s too soon to politicize this.” Jon stops him but then spends the issue wrestling with Superman’s role in addressing these kinds of challenges.

Tom Taylor raises a similar question in his opening arc of Nightwing, gifting Dick Grayson billions of dollars and asking why Bruce Wayne has not solved the problems of homelessless and corruption that plague his city. The arc concludes with Dick, in front of all manner of cameras and reporters, vowing to use his wealth to end homelessness and provide a social safety net for all, a goal even Superman in this issue approves of.

Reading both of these titles month to month, I can’t help but feel like something is off about Tom Taylor questioning the socio-political responsibility of superheroes. Superman and Batman are not treated here as ideas readers want to believe in, but rather people that need to prove their worth to us. They need to take on real issues in their fictional world in order for their fictional solutions to speak to our real world. This equivalency between their world and ours has a dissonant effect on me because I think it misunderstands the entry point of fiction in the first place.

In thinking about this issue of Son of Kal-El, and the criticism of superheroes more generally, I was reminded of 2019 when I was in my last semester of graduate school and a shooter killed people on our campus. I wouldn’t say I was triggered reading Jon Kent stop an active shooter. I didn’t find its treatment offensive, simply because I think those are specific to the person, and can mean a variety of things for a variety of people. However, I thought a lot about how lucky I was. I was lucky my classes ended early that day. I was lucky I had a friend with me. I was lucky the semester was essentially over. I was lucky I didn’t have to go to work that night. The one thing I didn’t think of in the slightest that day was that I wish Superman was here. Nor did I lose my interest in Superman comics that ignored this issue after going through that experience. In fact, I realized I needed comics more because their picture of moral character in the face of political challenges spoke more to me than political solutions from fictional realities with no bearing on my own.

In contrast to my experience, Jon Kent and Dick Grayson’s criticisms have become commonplace in recent years. Online communities have created increasing pressure for superheroes to address these issues from the perspective of our reality. Superman may not be real, I may not have needed him that day, but the argument Jon Kent is making is that Clark still had a responsibility to be there for the same situations in his reality, or at least the Superman title should take time to address the issue in its own reality. By the same token, If you scroll through Twitter, you’ll encounter no shortage of people blasting Batman for being a billionaire, for brutalizing criminals in the street, for being the real cause of the world’s problems as a rich white man atop his inherited wealth looking down at us all.

These criticisms assume two things: That superheroes are somehow responsible for our world, and that failure to meet that responsibility has disillusioning consequences to our understanding of how the world actually is. “It’s no wonder we can’t do anything about corporations destroying the environment, this is all because we’re reading Batman beating up Poison Ivy!”

In an odd inversion of Plato, the art isn’t bad because it’s merely a mirror of our reality, it’s bad because it’s not enough of a mirror of our reality.

On the other side of this coin, you’ll see people defending Batman using examples from various comics, quoted like biblical chapter-and-verse. “Bruce Wayne isn’t an unethical billionaire, read Batman (1940) #217!,” as if a fictional character is able to hold beliefs in the same sense people in the real world are.

Tom Taylor’s Jon Kent and Dick Grayson represent this latter group, a well-meaning counterargument that wants to add evidence of Superman and Batman’s self-awareness and responses to real issues. In Son of Kal-El #2, Jon saves a group of refugees and stops a school shooter while pushing Superman to answer why he doesn’t unilaterally step in to solve the world’s real problems. Nightwing #79 similarly features a conversation between Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordan saying Bruce could do more with his wealth, planting the seeds for Dick’s charity in Nightwing #83. Tom Taylor is speaking to this dissent, arguing if Batman and Superman are not doing all they can for our real world, then Jon and Dick will do more.

And yet my question is: why?

Why does Superman need to stop school shootings or save refugees? Why does Batman need to end homelessness? I didn’t need Superman that day in 2019, I’m not sure what his responsibility even was in those circumstances. What does it give me to fantasize about Superman stopping a shooting before it could even happen?

Fundamentally, the problem with these kinds of stories is that superhero comics in general, and these Tom Taylor books in particular, rarely have the space or even attempt to unpack these real world issues they want so hard for superheroes to address. The landscape of mainstream, big two comics makes it hard to dive into the complexities of these issues and their causes because the IP has to have broad appeal. Additionally the criticism itself, the idea that Superman and Batman don’t do enough for the real issues in our world, is one that is fundamentally in bad faith. Thus, it’s very hard to construct a response, as Jon and Dick do, in good faith. With that said, I want to unpack Son of Kal-El and Nightwing from these three major points: their inability to add clarity to the issues in question, their inability to prescribe an answer, and how they are doomed to fail in these attempts due to the bad faith nature of the superhero-social-responsibility critique itself.

In its opening scene, Son of Kal-El #2 spends two-pages having Jon stop a school shooter as an impetus for his questioning Superman about real issues. Our core problem begins with this scene itself which I found to be egregiously unclear. The shooter wrote “thoughts and prayers'' on the bullets, and upon opening fire said “it’s too soon to politicize this.” Both are right wing talking points made in response to mass shootings. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families.” “We shouldn’t politicize this tragedy.” So, ostensibly, the shooter saying this recognizes the absurdity of those statements being made as rhetoric that avoids addressing the issue of mass shootings itself. Thoughts and prayers are substitutes for a solution. We push not to politicize a tragedy in order to deny political investigations into its cause. Thus the shooter takes these irresponsible rationalizations for mass shootings as a reason to commit a mass shooting. To put it mildly, this seems rather absurd on the shooter’s part. If you recognize “thoughts and prayers” and “it’s too soon to politicize things” as soundbites created to prevent meaningful solutions to mass shootings, then you likely care about the tragedy of mass shootings. But somehow not enough to not attempt a mass shooting in the first place.

The real issue Tom Taylor is attempting to depict here, the epidemic of mass shootings, is an attempt to highlight the failure of Superman in Jon’s eyes. Namely, Clark’s unwillingness to regularly prevent such tragedy. And yet, the tragedy in question is not presented clearly. It’s not presented true to the perspective of someone who’s been through a shooting. But more than that it’s nothing more than a plot device to talk about Superman’s lack of relevance rather than demonstrating this through a thorough look at the issue. This scene is 2 pages, as part of the 4 page preview for the issue released before publication. This entire event is an inciting incident but not the plot itself. It wants Superman to give a meaningful answer to something it does not meaningfully develop in the first place.

This same style of storytelling appears in Nightwing #79, where Dick Grayson goes around town with Barbara Gordan to decide how to spend his new wealth. Dick runs into a homeless family, and invites them, along with all their friends, to eat for free on his dime. Dick then realizes one of the children in the crowd has stolen his wallet and starts a chase through the city for it, only to decide against retribution upon seeing the homeless neighborhood the thief is from.

Much like Son of Kal-El, this story is unclear about the real world issues it’s attempting to address. The actual causes, experiences, or solutions to homelessness are never discussed. However, the most bizarre choice is having Dick start a chase through town for his wallet. While Dick is clearly not concerned about his wallet’s contents, and is ostensibly aware of the desperation of the impoverished people he assumes stole it, he for some reason still begins a full speed rooftop chase for it. This choice is a plot device to get Dick to the homeless community that becomes a battleground in the next issue, but it ends up just making Dick look oblivious to his surroundings. If your goal here is to say that superheroes shouldn’t ignore the real world, then perhaps the real world issue should not be ignored in order to move the plot along either.

Son of Kal-El and Nightwing demonstrate a pattern in Tom Taylor’s writing where social issues are used as plot devices, but there is a performative contradiction this ends up creating. Jon and Dick are exposed to social issues as a gateway to criticize their mentors. However, their lack of understanding about the issues they’re exposed to means their own criticisms can be thrown back at them. Jon’s relationship to the issue of school shootings is just as unclear as the motivation of the shooter. Dick Grayson's knowledge of the people, experiences and reality of the homeless in his city is equally unclear. Superman may not understand school shootings, and Batman may not understand poverty, but it’s not clear that Jon and Dick do either. Jon doesn’t mention gun ownership laws, he doesn’t mention conspiracy theories to gaslight survivors of shootings, in fact Jon doesn’t even stick around campus to investigate the issue after he’s ensured the shooter is in custody. And while Dick starts a charity to help the homeless he never actually explains how that will be done, what causes homelessness, or what the homeless are asking for in support. When Jon berates Superman to do more, I’m genuinely curious what, specifically and actionably, he means. Otherwise, he is just as oblivious as he is accusing Superman of being.

If we want comics to engage social issues, they are more than capable of doing so. For example, in James Tynion IV’s brillant Image Comics series, The Department of Truth, an issue is devoted to the crisis actor theory of school shooters, and engages thoroughly with the emotional realities of surviving that experience and the dangerous grounds of online conspiracies. In the big two superhero realm, Ram V’s Swamp Thing spends an issue discussing the idea of generational trauma, using magic and the green as ideas that infect and live inside a community.

While I wouldn’t want my Superman comics to read like The Department of Truth, or even Swamp Thing, the reality is that if we are going to assume these criticisms of Superman are in good faith, if we’re assuming people are really concerned about issues of mass shootings and our moral responsibility to address it, then engaging with the issue requires thorough examination from the creatives behind the stories. If we really believe Superman needs to stop school shootings, then the story needs to be about the issue in question, not merely used as a plot device. Otherwise, the attempt becomes shallow.

However, I think the treatment of these real issues inevitably becomes shallow because it's responding to a shallow criticism, a criticism in bad faith. The argument that Superman ignores real social issues or that Batman is worse than the crime he fights does not assume the best intentions of the characters, creators or nature of fiction. They engage with these stories from a perspective that is intentionally distant from the unique reality of the story being told. If Batman being a billionaire is bad, then we should probably be happy that he’s simply a fictional character and not actually a corrupt billionaire harming people. If you care about these issues, then there are real things we can do to address them. However, those solutions depend very little on whether Batman and Superman solve these problems first. The simple truth of why Batman is unlike other billionaires ruining the planet is that Batman isn’t real, and that his wealth is a conceit to get to the real stories we want to tell with his world. If we can’t accept the premise, how on earth are we going to get to the point of the story?

In The Aesthetic Dimension, philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse argues that the ideology of capitalism has created a flattened, one-dimensional experience of reality. Our imaginations are limited to simply the way reality is right now. The Aesthetic Dimension, and the importance of art, is then to help us imagine new realities. Art is important because it shows us that the configuration of the world we are in right now is not the only world that is possible, regardless of how much the world wants to make us believe otherwise. This doesn’t mean that fiction is inherently escapist or can’t address social issues. Instead it means the way social issues are engaged by fiction can paint a path towards something better.

One could argue that Dick Grayson attempting to end homelessness and Jon Kent stopping a school shooter are doing precisely this. However, I think for that to be the case both instances would have to paint a clear picture of the reality they are rejecting, and the alternative they are proposing. It would only be inspiring of another world if we had a sense of what that other world is, and we can only have that if we first understand the world we’re in right now. To be clear, I don’t think this aesthetic dimension is channeled when you’re asking why a fictional half-alien with the powers of a God isn’t solving all our problems. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. It’s imposing the one-dimensional rules of our current reality onto the alternatives depicted in the fiction. Instead of seeing how Superman shapes our world beyond its limits, we want to shape Superman to the limits of our world as it is.

The truth of these fictional characters is not that they are designed to solve our problems for us. Even in the best case scenario of Superman engaging in the mass shooting issue, what more could the story be than a discussion of our political realities? This is not the power of fiction, at least not how I see it. Fiction is not about conforming to the one-dimensional perspective of our reality. Rather, fiction is about creating a sense of empathy and concern for us to do something. According to philosopher, John Dewey, art is a disequilibrium with our environment, it is a calling out, a sign that something here is not right and a plea to address it. It is not our reality, it is revealing of what our reality lacks, and asks us to cultivate empathy and affect in order to address that lacking. In JLA, Grant Morrison illustrates this very clearly by saying the point of these heroes is not to save us from ourselves but to simply catch us when we fall. While Superman has engaged issues that matter, like racism in Superman Smashes the Klan, the point isn’t to interrogate what he believes about racism but rather to foster a strength and moral character in the face of racism. Superman inspires us, gives us courage. The fiction is a fiction we tell ourselves to help change our world. It’s not a prescriptive account of what must be done. It’s not Superman’s place to speak to me about mass shootings. Rather, it’s Superman’s place to give me the personal will to process what happened, and to care about the issue at large.

On that day in 2019, I don’t ever recall wishing Superman was here. What I do remember, however, is Batman (2016) #3, when Batman says everyone gets scared, but that just means we have an opportunity to fight that fear, we have an opportunity to be brave. Or Batman (2016) #20, when Batman says “I’m still here.” That’s the truth of fiction, that’s how we build a base to engage social issues with superheroes. Not by giving into shallow criticisms that the fiction isn’t reality. But by giving us the strength to process our reality as it presents itself. I care about school shootings, not simply because I witnessed one, but because I have a deep-seeded sense of concern for gun violence, I have empathy for the people and issues at stake cultivated by art that elicits empathy. And Batman’s wealth has never stopped me from criticizing the issues of wealth inequality, regardless of what stray issues I can cite to prove he donates money or not.

I don’t need Superman to stop shootings. I don’t need Batman to end homelessness. I need Batman and Superman to provide moral and spiritual guidance to show us a better world is possible. I read Batman to transform trauma into will power. I read Superman to remind myself it’s never as bad as it seems when we’re at the end of the world. Ultimately, the problem here is not merely Jon Kent and Dick Grayson lacking a coherent understanding of the social issues in question. Rather, the deeper problem is writing genuine stories to address a disingenuous concern.

Steve Baxi has a Masters in Ethics and Applied Philosophy, with focuses in 20th Century Aesthetics and Politics. He creates video essays on pop culture through a philosophy lens and frequently tweets through @SteveSBaxi.