5x5 inch square; outline free motion quilting; colour added with Inktense Pencils
I’m trying to remember when I first stumbled upon The Man of
Steel. Probably, some older cousin
forgot one of his Superman comics at our house. Initial contact isn’t that important. It’s the outcome that counts.
While I don’t know how the affair started, I do know that it
has never really ended. I still have
that same fluttery feeling when I see that muscled blue unitard with the red
cape flying defiantly behind it. Surely
this is the ultimate pinnacle of society’s ethics. Surely it is a sign that one day we will seek
to do only good. And be able to
fly. My nine-year-old concept of
Superman remains my adult version of him.
My childhood was littered with criminals, all of them
fictional. In this particular sphere, crime,
in all its myriad ugliness, existed only so that Superman would have something
to do - immerse himself in vigilantism. It mattered not that he completely lacked any
policing credentials whatsoever, and had never spent even one minute at any law
enforcement academy. He was an innate
crime fighter, proving that you didn’t really need special training if you have
enough passion. Without Superman, Lex Luther, the embodiment of badness,
could easily take over the world in a single afternoon, subverting all that is nice
and replacing it with all that is un-nice. Bad without its corollary, good, is, well,
just bad. It’s the contrast that
makes it salient. And if you can add an
amazing flying physique to that contrast it makes for some great escapist
fiction, with a side order of morality.
But, despite all his prowess, Superman still had his foible.
Notice that there is no ‘s’ on that word. Superman was assigned but one foible
– susceptibility to kryptonite. This substance
is so synonymous with the concept of fatal weakness that things that cause us
to fall prey to our flaws are now referred to “our kryptonite”. Superman made that possible.
I always worried that I would find a chunk of kryptonite in
the back yard. It seemed possible, as
other stuff showed up there inexplicably – bits of glass in brown, green, or
blue (never clear), unidentified car parts, evidence of dogs we didn’t own, rocks
that weren’t there yesterday. Landscaping wasn’t much of a priority back then, nor was there much guidance about where to throw your junk. In the post WWII neighbourhood, you had a house,
maybe a driveway, and likely a picket fence to enclose your kingdom. Planting stuff was left up to God or Nature,
depending on your leanings, and a mingling of grass and weeds was a more than suitable
lawn. The peony bush that crept over
from the neighbour’s yard was dually claimed without further thought. It was enough.
The on-going and seemingly insurmountable issue of the
kryptonite threat kind of bothered me. I
felt like it shouldn’t exist, him being “invulnerable” and all. But I could not deny the role kryptonite had
to play in demonstrating how elusive and unreachable excellence could be.
The kryptonite thing got started when Superman’s planet spontaneously
blew up, in what Wikipedia lists as a “cataclysmic event”. There are no additional details. In my ever-growing list of apocalyptic events
to worry about, cataclysm doesn’t even make the first eighteen. That kind of bothered me – if planetary
annihilation happened to Superman, maybe it could crop up here too. Thankfully, Jor-El, Superman’s dad, saw it
coming. He built some kind of space cradle and jettisoned baby Superman into
space at the last possible second, aiming it at the ever-reliable Planet
Earth. Baby Superman didn’t need food or
diaper changes, so he was fresh as a rose and quite appealing when he and his
space cradle plopped down at the Kent’s farm somewhere in fictional
Iowa. They took him in and raised him like a single-bodied twin, with the Clark
Kent/Superman alter-ego thing known only to them.
The ultimate downside of Superman's planet going kablooey (other
than losing a whole planet full of very technically advanced people) is that it
generated a whole lot of kryptonite, as is common with exploding planets. And some of that foul mineral followed the super
cradle to Earth. Some of this kryptonite
arrived sooner, some later, and most of it fell preferentially into the back
yards of super villains, many of them babies themselves at the time. This did not bode well for Superman’s future.
Kryptonite introduced me to a whole new term: invulnerable. What? I had to look that up in the dictionary
at school, the internet still being at least thirty years out from being invented,
and Mom being too preoccupied with apple pie baking to stand in as a dictionary. I discovered that things were either
‘vulnerable’ or ‘invulnerable’, but mostly the former. Kryptonite, in all its
gleaming green glory, not to mention its alternatively coloured forms, could
jolt Superman out of his never-going-to-need-a-gym state of health. He could be
killed, or just be injured, or get sick. Superman could throw up.
Was nothing in life perfect?
Despite the kryptonite affliction, Superman had a few lessons
up his Spandex sleeve. Don’t be a criminal was probably the most memorable one,
although I kind of liked the idea of crime, since it gave Superman and
Nancy Drew a raison d’etre. Other than
that, it was all just the white bread world of Winnie the Pooh.
Superman also motivated me towards independence. Each Friday I was given my allowance, a
quarter. It was never two dimes and a nickel, always a quarter. Out of that twenty-five cents I had to come
up with a sound financial plan each week.
Would I squander it on a sickeningly huge bag of candy, or maybe a
modest bag of candy with an ice cream cone on the side? A five-cent popsicle could also be good value
for my money, leaving twenty cents for discretionary spending. But there was
always that twelve cent Superman comic to consider. Issues of the comic didn’t
necessarily come out every week, but the odd time two issues would come out in
the same week, leaving only enough change for the purchase of a wad of
gum drops. Comics, however, could
certainly be read numerous times, an excellent and lasting investment. Foregoing the candy was a no-brainer. I bought and read those Superman comics like
a dying man reads the Afterlife Manual.
Each Saturday I would take that twenty-five cents in my fist
(never once losing it) and venture six block to the magazine store downtown. I would bypass the local “corner store” in
case they lacked the newest comic and induced me to waste my money on sponge
toffee. It was a solo journey that I undertook with all the solemnity of a
first climb of Everest. If no new
Superman issues waited in the display case, I would ponder other purchases,
perhaps Richie Rich, or Donald Duck, or even Archie – but
only if I thought this might be the week where Betty would triumph over that
b----- , Veronica. It was imperative to
buy the Superman comic, lest he be stuck in kryptonite up to his neck. If so, I would need to rescue him by grimly
turning the pages until he out-witted his evil opponent. After that, we would both need to retreat to
our Fortresses of Solitude in complete exhaustion.
While Sunday school, regular school, and “the look” from Mom
were all valuable in tweaking my moral compass, I could not deny that Superman
played a more than a minimal role in the crafting of my ethics framework.
Lessons Learned
Invulnerability: Good
Crime: Bad
Kryptonite: Really Bad
Financial Management: Forego the candy
Walking to the Store Solo: Stellar
