July '06 Far Sector Column Posted!

My July '06 media column at the web zine Far Sector is now live. My subject this month is - appropriately enough - Superman and his legacy. I'll be offering my review here of Superman Returns in the next few days, but before doing so, I wanted to pause and remember the Superman of the 1950s, and in particular, a B-movie production starring George Reeves called Superman and The Mole People.

Here's a sample of the piece ("Superman Returns...but from where?"):

"...the low-budget effort parted ways with character lore and comic-book tradition by taking reporters Clark Kent and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) out of Metropolis and into the American heartland; to a small Western town called Silsby. There, the reporters attempted to solve the mystery of two diminutive “mole men,” creatures that inhabited an advanced civilization beneath Earth’s surface.

These two “explorers” had found their way topside when an oil company drilled deeply and recklessly into their terrain. Radioactive and therefore dangerous to humans, these aliens from “inner space” had no idea that their very presence was fatal to the good townsfolk of Silsby. The film’s villain was not a super-powered freak, not a madman bent on global domination, but rather an ordinary man named Benson (Jeff Corey) who reacted with prejudice and hatred towards the Mole Men and sought to incite a mob to destroy them.

A native of another world himself, Superman attempted to broker a peace between the two distrustful races, and Clark Kent alone saw the dangers of the mob mentality unleashed. Thus, this Superman film concerned not elaborate special effects, nor an operatic attempt to be “true” to a long-established character continuity, but rather human nature: man’s propensity to fear that which is different. Thus it serves as a revelation (and make no mistake—a statement) about the conformist 1950s; the age of Senator McCarthy and the Red Scare.

“It’s men like you that make it difficult for men to understand one another,” Superman tells Corey’s Benson late in the film, and a cogent point is forged. Bent on stopping hysteria and intolerance instead of a colorful, cartoony villain, Superman proved in this early cinematic outing that he could be a hero of great dignity and even objectivity…an important quality absent from even our supposedly “fair and balanced” news media in today’s world.

Steady, smart and strong, Reeves portrayed the Kryptonian immigrant as an evolved man, a decent man, a wise men —hence, a super man. It wasn’t his strength that made him a hero; it wasn’t that he could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Instead, it was his morality that made Kal-El above the norm..."

Check out the rest of my column at Far Sector, as well the other offerings at the zine, including short stories, editorial commentary and interviews.