Jesus Christ: Superstar or Superman?
For at least the last 30 or 40 years, there’s been attempts by many to try and read a Christian message into the myth of Superman. You can take it back to Action Comics #1 and the story of a baby being sent into the world of men to protect and lead it. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s (two Jewish kids, by the way) hero was the best of us. He was a child without sin or compromise showing up in a time of great turmoil in America to inspire us. That’s probably one of many ways to read a story about the ultimate man, imposing myths and stories on him that put him in a greater context but it’s also one that sort of works. There are even ways to view 1978’s Superman: The Movie as a mystery play where Superman is quite literally Christ in skin tight blue spandex.
Grant Morrison even intentionally or unintentionally played with this during All Star Superman, where the ending is basically Superman as Christ on the Cross, dying to save the world. My own reading of that story is here and here. You can draw some really interesting connections between the story of Jesus and the story of Kal-El, sons of their fathers who sent them into our world.
While those connections are often inferred by the readers, I don’t remember them ever being explicitly implied by DC. Sure, there’s the whole death and resurrection thing of the 90s but Superman’s was much more comic booky and no one ever accuses Superman of being a zombie either. There was that Church of Superboy back during DC’s 52 and there’s probably been more focused Superman-like-character-as-Christ stories done but when has it ever been done in a continuity driven Superman book?
The answer is now in 2012 and Action Comics #5.
The back up story written by Sholly Fisch and drawn by Chriscross shows us the young Jonathan and Martha Kent’s troubles with having children. Like so many, they’re just not biologically capable of it, even after over a year of hormone treatments. Feeling like God is punishing them, they go to their pastor and Martha asks “Why is God punishing us this way? What did we do wrong?” The pastor quotes Bible stories to them, telling them how Sarah couldn’t bear a child to Abraham until she was 90 years old and he was 100.
The story of Isaac is one that’s always fascinated me. When Isaac is a boy, Abraham is told by God that he has to go up the mountain and sacrifice Isaac as an offering to god. Being a godly man, Abraham listened and obeyed believing that there was a purpose to his Lord’s command. Before he could plunge the knife into the boy’s body, an angel appeared to them and seeing Abraham’s faith in the Lord’s word, knew that Abraham loved his Lord. A ram was substituted in place of Isaac for the sacrifice. Isaac was a proto-Christ, a sign of the function that Jesus would fulfill centuries later.
The story of Isaac is held as a sign for the coming of Jesus, showing how Jesus would be sacrificed by the world to atone for its sins. And here, in 2012, a preacher is telling the story of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac, using it to illustrate the patience that the Kents need to have. You have to wonder though if they have to have the patience of Sarah and Abraham, is their son going to be the next sacrifice for the world? Is their son going to be Isaac or Jesus? Again, see the ending of All Star Superman #12.
If that’s the case, you could almost read the opening of the recent Action Comics #1 as Jesus in the temple kicking out the money changers.
I can’t help but think since first reading Action Comics #5 that Grant Morrison’s punkish Superman is his Christ story and honestly, I can see Morrison worshiping Superman in a religious kind of way. This is the beginning of his Superman gospel while All Star Superman was the conclusion of it, even if they’re written in the opposite order. It’s not that Morrison (and Fisch in the backups) are writing the story of Jesus Christ but they’re setting their Superman up to be something more than human or alien.