Man of Steel Should Be a PG Movie, Says Former Superman Writer Rucka

Best-selling novelist and comics writer Greg Rucka, who wrote Action Comics and Adventures of Superman for a number of years, may not be writing mainstream superhero comics anymore, but that doesn't mean he no longer has emotion toward, or an opinion on, the characters who inhabit his former universes. In an op-ed written for The Hollywood Reporter, Rucka criticizes the choice to make Man of Steel a PG-13 movie, questioning whether the spirit of Superman could be lost in the translation to a form that could make more money and properly convey the elusive "cool" that movie studios worry about. "Words like 'realism' and 'dark' and 'gritty' get bandied about Hollywood as if the only merit a story can have is in its verisimilitude, but that's a lie. Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended, and yet what makes a story stay true. When Superman: The Movie was released, Richard Donner promised us we'd believe a man could fly. We did, but it wasn't the wire-work alone," wrote Rucka. "Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best. I haven't seen Man of Steel, haven't read the script, and I've assiduously avoided spoilers. I genuinely don't know if this 'reality' will be present or not. I want it to be brilliant. I want it to be glorious. I want it to be inspiring. I am keeping the faith." It's arguably part of what makes Superman a complicated character to write well, as this question comes up over and over again. Still, Rucka has a point--the best-loved Superman stories of the last fifteen or twenty years have been things like Kingdom Come and What's So Funny 'Bout Truth, Justice and the American Way?, which paint him as an unambiguously good and virtuous man even in the worst of circumstances.