Gene Luen Yang: My Superman Will Explore What It Means To Be The "Man of Tomorrow"
It's a new day dawning for the Man of Steel, and American Born Chinese author Gene Luen Yang is [...]
It's a new day dawning for the Man of Steel, and American Born Chinese author Gene Luen Yang is one of those guiding Superman into an unfamiliar status quo.
How did it all come together? Whose idea was it to give away his secret identity and most of his powers? And just how will all these various Superman titles interlock?
Well, Yang joined ComicBook.com earlier in the week to discuss just those very issues...
Did you pitch the power loss and secret identity loss, or was that something you walked into and you had to break story around that concept?
The first thing we did was we got together as a Superman team. Superman is part of three other books, they're all under the same editor, Eddie Berganza. The creative teams of all these books got together and we were asked to come up a big change -- something that would shake Superman's reality. We were also asked to come up with a premise that would work in all four books that would not be a crossover but that would be interlocking stories so that each series could be read independently but they could also be read in conjunction with one another. This is kind of what we came up with, was exposing his secret identity and taking away some of his powers. So he still has power, he just doesn't have as much.
The power thing was a natural outgrowth of something that occurred in Geoff Johns and JohnRomita, Jr.'s run, when they introduced the idea of the solar flare, where he could expel all the energy out of his body and become human for about a day.
Did you look back at the '80s and '90s Superman material to get a sense for how this kind of thing works and doesn't work? Back then they had a lot of status quo-altering events that were dealt with kind of collectively but not necessarily in a crossover kind of way?
I looked at that. I was around for Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen, and I did look at that. I even looked at the documentary online where they talked to all the creators involved in that particular era. I read a book by Glenn Welden called Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, and he gives a great overview of the Man of Steel's history from beginning to end.
His book in particularly convinced me that Superman is such an old character with a long legacy that aspects of him that will continue to fluctuate. They're almost like pendulums that are constantly swinging.
One of the things is that his power set has gone up and down throughout his history. Another thing is whether he identifies more as Superman or more as Clark Kent. That goes back and forth.
Because he does change so much, I would argue that more than most characters, he has some very distinct kind of schisms in his fan base. Is it difficult writing for a character who there isn't really an agreed set of criteria for what makes him "work?"
I think he's a really flexible character and that's part of the reason why he's lasted so long. There are definitely different incarnations, but I think the core of him never changes. He's always a guy who sticks up for other people, who puts his life on the line for other people, and he's always the guy who just who does not give up, but everything else kind of shifts.
It makes sense to me that different people will latch on to different expressions of the character. It comes with having a character who's this old and this broad.
In the course of this story, do you and John have a particular element of Superman that you're exploring in this title, versus what Greg is tackling in Action Comics, for instance?
I think as a team, what we want to do is to strip Superman down to his core. We're taking away a lot of the things that people associate with the character: We took away the spitcurl, we took away the cape, most of his costume so that all he has is the shield on a t-shirt, and within the context of that I think each of us is exploring a different aspect.
For me, Superman's always been called the Man of Tomorrow and when he was created, he did embody a lot of what we thought of as the future: Back then Americans thought of the future in terms of physical power so we thought of things getting faster and things getting stronger, and Superman was that. Superman was this really fast, really strong guy.
Nowadays, in terms of the future, we think in terms of information. The way human beings interact with information now and how we expect to interact with it in the future is really different. I read somewhere that the idea of privacy doesn't really resonate with teenagers these days because they kind of just assume that they're always going to be recorded and there's going to be no privacy.
How does Superman, who embodies an older idea of the future, interact with a newer embodiment of the future? That's kind of what I wanted to play with in #42 and #43.
It plays into the idea of his being able to hold on to a secret identity. Is that even viable in the modern era?
In an era of facial recognition software, any number of organizations should be able to spot him fairly quickly. Do you think part of this story is attacking that notion head-on? This is like a Saturday Night Live joke, but there's something to it.
Yeah, I mean I think that was always part of it. Anytime you approach a fantasy character, there's a certain level of suspension of disbelief that you are asked to participate in.
Maybe you could argue that Superman's bar for suspension of disbelief is a little bit higher than some other characters, but that's always just been a part of who he is.
I think it does point to a larger theme, though, that for so long he was able to hide behind just a pair of glasses. It points to the theme of secrets and of what makes a good secret and what makes a controllable secret.
I think him being exposed is a larger part of that. I also think that the fact that his disguise was so simple was a visual representation of the trust that he has with those around him, and that will be a theme that we will tap in this current storyline.
Superman has often been criticized as not having a great rogues gallery relative to other popular superheroes. Obviously in the New 52, we've seen a lot of new mythology being added. Can you talk about adding to that toy box?
That's kind of the fun of working on a legacy character like this is that you get to add things in.
Both things are fun, right? Playing with toys that exist are fun and making your own toys is fun, and throwing them into the box.
For this storyline, we did talk about pushing him in new directions or bringing facets of him that have not been at the forefront of who he is for a long time and taking those facets and bringing them out again. It seems like introducing new characters or new versions of older characters is a good way to push him in new directions.
Obviously this is your first big Super-storyline. Do you have plans beyond this to deal with this status quo beyond the initial bombshell?
I'm working with a team. I'm personally signed on to do 12 issues. I don't know what the other guys are signed on for and I don't know what happens after 12 issues. But we definitely have an endgame in mind for where we want to push him. We have a broader plan.
