Superman Saves Us Again

James Gunn's new DC epic breaks no new ground, but I wouldn't have wanted it to

I spent a large swath of my childhood reading comic books. I was more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but when I did read DC, I never liked Superman. Batman was the cooler character, especially when Tim Burton’s movie came out. I preferred the Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and some of the more obscure characters like Mr. Miracle, the Elongated Man, and Guy Gardner. Heck, I still want to write the Blue Beetle movie (Ted Kord, not Jamie Reyes), if they’d let me.

Spoiler alert: they probably won’t.

My biggest beef with Supe’ was that he was just too powerful. Capturing Superman’s godlike abilities was probably the best thing about the overblown Zach Snyder movies, and it’s why Homelander in The Boys is such a villain. He is basically unstoppable.

But over the years, I’ve learned that certain things have started to hit me differently as a thinking adult with a child. I first noticed it when scenes in movies involving small children started to affect me differently.

For example, there was one episode of Modern Family when baby Lily chucked a toy into a subway car just as the doors closed. I had a visceral reaction to that moment because around our house, everything revolved around Piggy. My daughter had a favorite stuffed animal, a Piglet toy we got from Target before she was born. We had the whole set of Winnie the Pooh critters, but she only loved Piggy. Piggy was everything to her. She carried him everywhere. God forbid we couldn’t find Piggy at bedtime.

When Lily threw the stuffed giraffe toy on that episode of Modern Family, I couldn’t help myself. I immediately had a loud, involuntary exhalation of noise and air that sounded like “Wharraahghnoooooo!”

I had so many visions of the kid doing the same thing. Once, at the Milwaukee Zoo, she cocked back and tried to throw Piggy into one of the animal displays. Through that infamous Dad-level reaction time, I managed to shoot my arm out and snatch Piggy before he was thrown, but I remember having a panic attack over that moment. We put Piggy away for the rest of the zoo visit.

I bought another Piggy from Target and hid it in a closet to have just in case something were to ever happen to the original Piggy.

My daughter will be 21 this December. Piggy is still on her pillow, and he goes to college with her, too.

Getting older means your perspective changes on certain events, and Superman has become one of those things. I no longer look down on Superman because of his powers. Instead, I’m choosing to admire him for his humanity. That’s the secret element that makes the new Superman movie watchable, and James Gunn delivered that in spades.

Rachel Brosnahan (who I would take a bullet for after her Midge Maisel portrayal) was a brilliant Lois Lane. Skyler Gisondo (the scene-stealer from the criminally underrated series Santa Clarita Diet) was great as Jimmy Olson. Nicholas Hoult was a tremendous Lex Luthor. David Corenswet’s portrayal of the titular icon is also excellent. Corenswet manages to make his version of Clark Kent awkward, nerdy, and pedantic in the best way (although my biggest criticism of the movie is that we didn’t get ENOUGH Clark Kent), and his Superman is heroic, but ultimately human.

This is illustrated by a scene in which Clark allows Lois to interview him in character as Superman, and Lois attacks his decision-making process and rattles him to his core. (Because Lois is far smarter than Superman or Clark will ever be.) She makes him look at the political ramifications. She makes him see that rushing into another country to save lives isn’t automatically “good” because he thinks it is. But Clark fires back with his agenda, the black-and-white stance that human life has value above all else: People were going to die, Lois!

Now, there are plenty of political parallels people have drawn about this movie, and I’m not going to bother rehashing drawing the lines into the real world because others have already done far better and far more articulately than I have.

There were other subtle things done with the movie that illustrate why James Gunn is the best there is at what he does: Guy Gardner being a brash, loud-mouthed egotist; girls—for some unknown reason—always going for Jimmy Olson; Mr. Terrific stealing the movie. But above all else, the thing that I felt Gunn got the most right was the notion of Superman just being a kid from Kansas who is only trying to do his best because his parents raised him to be a good person and gave him the right perspective on who he was and how he could help the world.

That’s the Superman I will get behind every time.

I think, in the end, that’s what most of us are trying to do. We get up in the morning, we try to do what’s right, and we hope for the best. We go to our jobs despite the low pay, or the long hours, or the fact that our jobs are so rarely something we WANT to do, but rather they’re something we HAVE to do to keep food on the table and the rent paid. We try to make our dreams come true, knowing the odds are always against us. If we’re lucky, maybe we get to have some fun here and there, but a lot of people in this world get up, struggle through the day, and go to bed knowing they’re going to struggle through tomorrow, too. But when the alarm goes off, they throw back the covers, meet the day, and do it all over again.

At certain points during the movie, I got a little choked up (verklempt, shall we say) because I needed that dose of humanity, of goodness. Too often, I let the cynicism of the world at large and my pessimistic nature get the better of me, and it puts me in a darker place. You see it in how I write Abe & Duff—the loneliness, the solitude, the fact that they are never the center of the story, just outsiders thrown into the narrative. Their lives rarely change. They just go through the motions. They struggle with being human.

That’s where Superman is great: he doesn’t struggle with being human, because he IS human (despite his Kryptonian blood). The humanity lies in how we all choose to process the struggle. Abe and Duff sort of go through the motions, as do I. Superman confronts them head-on, unsure of whether or not he’s doing the right thing, but going forward because he’s doing the good thing.

Be more like Superman. Do good.

When the movie finished, I turned to my daughter next to me. The kid had come along because, hey—free movie. She had not watched any of the Reeve Superman movies, and she was only marginally familiar with the Henry Cavill Superman. But after this one, she said, “I’d sit through that again right now.”

Me, too.

James Gunn has earned a ton of trust from me over the years. The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, Brightburn, Peacemaker, Creature Commandos, Slither—all great. Heck, I even like the two live-action Scooby-Doo movies he wrote.

I’m glad to say he has not lost an ounce of that trust after seeing Superman. I’m looking forward to what he does with the DC Universe. He’s made an old comic book nerd proud.

I also hope someday I can write something that makes someone else feel the way that movie made me feel.

Maybe if JG gives me a shot at that Ted Kord movie…

Books I’ve Been Reading

I’ve been rereading Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries because the Apple TV series was absolutely brilliant (best show I’ve watched in 2025!) and since I only read the first four novellas, I wanted to catch up and read more of them in preparation for season 2 of the show.

I’ve also read Robert Swartwood’s Enemy of the State. I got to meet Robert at Bouchercon last August, and he was a good dude. Bought that book from the book sale, and I’ve been meaning to get to it. Great stuff. High-energy, Robert Ludlum-esque action-packed quasi-political adventure in the same veins as Vince Flynn and the aforementioned Ludlum. Robert also does a nice YouTube podcast where he interviews other writers that’s worth a watch.

What I’m Working On

As always, things progress on the writing front. More slowly than I’d like them to, but that’s what happens when you have a job that takes priority over your writing. I think that’s the toughest part about being a solo artist—no one understands the time sacrifices you have to make to make words happen.

So often, when I go to writing conventions, the majority of the writers are retired after a military career or a teaching career, or they are lucky enough to be married to a spouse who can afford to support their writing. They have the time to do it. I’m out here working two part-time jobs, taking in freelance writing and editing work whenever I can get it, and applying for career-level jobs to replace the job I lost last summer, and it’s grueling work. Plus, I have a house to keep up, laundry to do, dishes to wash—the usual grind. There are only so many hours in a day, and writing often takes a back seat to everything else that’s pressing.

That’s the way it’s always been, though. I’m used to it, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

First things first: I finally took the time to fix a lot of the issues with my Survivor Journals trilogy. When I wrote those, Amazon had its own typesetting program, and you uploaded MS Word files to be set in a .mobi format, so you had little control over them. Now, there are far better layout options out there, so I took the time to revamp all three books. They are live on Amazon, updated for the tenth anniversary of the first book’s release. Even made new covers!

I will not be putting these updated versions into print, though. The hard copies just don’t sell for me on this series anymore, so it’s just not worth doing. I love having the paperbacks of my work, but I probably sell fewer than ten physical copies per year of anything I do, so it just makes more sense to concentrate on the eBooks.

And I’m always working on something new. Here’s the list of everything that’s in some stage of development:

• Abe & Duff 6

• Shelby Ree 2

• Strange Angels 2

• A fantasy novel that is 30K words deep at the moment

• A traditional adventure thriller (with Sasquatch in it!)

• A superhero-based thriller

• A literary fiction book that's currently 60K words.

• And a few other odds and ends that get dragged out and flogged from time to time.

So, I’m always working.

Someone tell James Gunn.

Thanks for reading.