The discourse regarding contemporary comic book studies has become
increasingly concerned with the apocalyptic potential of the power of comic book
superbeings. While many consider Superman to be a morally upright and
hopeful figure worth emulating, the idea of a creature as powerful and uncannily
similar to human beings as Superman is produces a type of paranoia, distrust,
and unease. This type of disruptivity is a result of the combination of two
foundational aspects of the character's being namely, its power, and its uncanny
Otherness. Recent trends in the discourse concerning the cinematic depictions
of the unavoidably destructive aspects of Superman's power indicate that the
disruptive aspects of the character's being cannot be ameliorated by
conventional appeals to dialectical arrangements of moral categories including
good and evil. This also applies to nostalgic interpretations of the character that
seek to dissolve the inextricable connection between the utopian and dystopian
potential inherent in its power and Otherness in an idealized history. Situating
itself between the aesthetic and historical comic book theory of Thomas Inge,
Peter Coogan, Danny Fingeroth, Christopher Knowles, Clive Bloom, and Greg
McCue and the philosophies/xenologies and critical approaches of Robert
Freitas Jr., Michel Foucault, and Fredric Jameson, this project uses the
concepts of the character's power, body, and Otherness to examine the
existential and socio-political consequences of Superman's disruptivity on a
diegetic earth