How Growing Up With Depression Made Me Fall In Love With Superman

Everybody has this idea that Superman is boring because he’s kind, and I don’t think people realize how hard it is to be truly kind and how that makes Superman more interesting than he gets credit for.

I grew up in the age of the Tim Burton Batman movies. I was literally three years old when “Batman ‘89” came out. Consequently, I grew up a fervent Batman fan. I still love Batman.

I mean, he’s basically Detective Hamlet. This lost orphan kid who’s returned home to his father’s kingdom to become literally “the world’s best detective.” What’s not to love about that character? He has some of the best villains in all of comics, some of the most iconic storylines, and a great cast of extraneous characters and it helps that almost all of the Batman movies are genuinely great films.

It’s sincerely easy to be a Batman fan. And I still would consider him to be my favorite superhero. That being said, Batman is kind of a depressing and cynical character. I mean, there are multiple storylines revolving around how he has a plan to take out each member of the Justice League should he need to. The guy is considerably cynical, and so was I in my teens and early twenties.

But here’s the thing about cynicism. It’s really easy.

Growing up, I was always into comic book characters. My dad had a room full of comic books and I would always go to him and ask him about characters from the most recent episodes of Spider-Man, Batman, The X-Men, heck, even Iron Man — which is how I became a fan of Hawkeye — and The Fantastic Four. His love of comics led to me enjoying comics.

That being said, I didn’t really read comics, and though I obviously would watch the animated Superman show that played on WB back in the ’90s, I wasn’t that interested in the boy scout, nice guy image that Superman was selling. He was just too nice and nice was, well, lame. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

So then, what changed?

Well, like most people out there, life happened. I grew up, experienced heartache, lost people, battled my childhood trauma — mine in the form of a congenital heart defect and a surgery that was supposed to last “10 years” but finds me still kicking — and accepted the reality that adulthood is…well, incredibly hard, and life is filled with a ton of things that’ll make you cry for no reason.

In other words, I got depressed. It’s pretty common, I’d say. Whether people want to see a therapist about it or not — or whether or not they can afford to. That’s a big thing to remember there.

So, what does Superman have to do with this?

Well, Superman, as you probably already know, is an alien from a planet that doesn’t exist anymore. His parents died when he was just a baby. In recent versions of his backstory, his “step-dad” Pa Kent died when he was very young. Beyond that, he’s been nearly murdered by rich billionaire Jeff Bezo-types, cyborg aliens, weird aliens that look like him, and just a ton of people have tried to hurt him for being a pretty decent guy…but through all of that, the thing that’s hurt him the most, is the loss of his dad.

My dad is still alive, don’t worry. I wasn’t gearing up for that. But, I do understand, even though my dad is alive, how hard it would be to lose him or either of my parents for that matter.

But it’s in that fact and in the fact that for anybody who’s actually read a well-written Superman comic, they know that the heart of Superman is Clark Kent. Batman is Bruce’s real identity. But deep down, Superman is a mild-mannered good guy from rural Kansas who has a lot on his shoulders and is trying his best.

I don’t think I can explain it better than Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale did with the following page from “Superman For All Seasons”.

It’s perfect. And it’s perfect because Superman’s greatest villains have never been powerful, world-ending foes. I mean, yes, he obviously has fought those and you would be right in correcting me, but I think you’d be missing my point.

Superman…excuse me, Clark’s greatest foes have always been being a good person. You might think that’s cheesy. Maybe you think it’s mopey or silly, but I would argue that being a decent human being, especially when you really don’t want to be is just about the hardest thing somebody can do.

Don’t believe me? Ask David Foster Wallace, writer of Infinite Jest, a book about depression, drug addiction, and finding a way to be decent underneath the weight of everything. To quote him.

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

These are the words of a man who committed suicide at age 46. A man who went through a hell of a lot of mental health issues, some of which he should obviously NOT be celebrated for, but also somebody who made mistakes and who suffered. And through it, I think, he tried to be decent.

He certainly wrote a lot about being kind. Perhaps you’ve seen his speech, which is also a book, “This is Water.” In it, he spoke to the idea of forcing yourself off “your default setting”, to him, cynicism, self-centeredness, etc. The idea being and I can attest to this, that more often than not we assume the worst about people because it’s easy. We don’t empathize with them because it’s easy.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ — the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

So then, back to Superman. A man who has all of the power in the world, has lost his home, his parents, and the only dad he ever knew. The man who wakes up everyday and has had to face the idea that he is different, which I can tell ya ain’t no walk in the park, and still, he chooses kindness again and again and again.

Take all the physical strength in the world, Superman’s real strength is optimism. Because he knows that bad things will happen. He knows that he’s lost so much. He knows he’s different. And, in perhaps one of his greatest stories, Grant Morrison’s “All-Star Superman” a story that sees him face death, he still chooses kindness.

That takes actual day-in and day-out strength and discipline and an ability to fight through intrusive thoughts. Honestly, it’s hard and after I figured that out for myself, while ironically reading “Infinite Jest” and a bevy of Superman comics at the same time, I realized that.

So, the next time somebody says Superman is lame, think about how hard it is to NOT be cynical and realize that you’re definitely wrong about Superman being lame.