Sounds like an interesting story (I'll have to keep an eye out...), but it's not the one I remember. The story had more to do with natural disasters than food distribution.
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Kingdom Come and Peace on Earth are worth getting for the art alone, and they are pretty good stories if you overlook a few problems. But... they kind of hinge on some questionable premises.
(Premise 1 being that escalation will cause supervillains to not show restraint, when they barely showed any to begin with, and premise 2 being that Superman can fit Zod or Doomsday in the phantom zone, but not a dozen Kim Jong-Ils.)
Anyhoo, the question isn't really whether Superman can or should fix everything, and more whether spending time with Lois or Perry is particularly helpful as a method of world-improvement.
I think regarding issue 2, then it were explained with Superman wishing to try and reform them, not inflict what might be one of the most horrible punishments possible on them.
Attempts at reform are all very laudable, but my point is that there's no reason to leave generic dictators in charge of countries when Supes has no problem imprisoning other genocidal evildoers. He could drop them off at the UN to stand trial if he prefers, but just shrugging his shoulders at the problem doesn't make any sense.
This is one of those issues that goes back to DC and Marvel trying to reflect the real world despite having massive collective universes that contains a lot of elements that should variously prevent them from doing so in certain facets. The real world has dictators that aren't overthrown for various geopolitical reasons, many of which Superman at the middling range of his power should nullify by his very existence. But to prevent the implications of Dr. Manhattan and the like, they either ignore this or invent reasons for why this doesn't occur. If most any not particularly passive Superman existed in real life, the real world wouldn't look anything like DC comics.
Note that this also applies to why super-science hasn't reshaped the world. Also, if mutants are distributed fairly evenly across the population, then the Third World just gained a massive competitive advantage, as have any other numerous minority.
So either the editors nerf the hell out of everything, or the metahuman population rewrites the planet to where it's no longer recognizable. Or you can just start by making a world that isn't ours in the first place.
As to the dictator's thing, I have a (somewhat) relevant quote about this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Amra
From this thread: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t...er=asc&start=0
That's a straw-man though. It's entirely possible for someone like Superman to say "Look, I'm not taking over your government, but the genocides have to stop." Organizations like the U.N. already exist to police things like this. They're just bad at it because they lack the ability to enforce their rules. It doesn't mean he has to step in and micro manage every tiny thing, or become supreme dictator just because he stops some crazy ruler from murdering their own people. He has the power to take over at any time either way, and in either scenario the only thing stopping him is his own moral compass (and Batman).
That comment is pretending that there's no possible middle ground and it just isn't true.
Yeah, that whole spiel reads as a post-hoc rationalization rather than an actual justification.
Not to mention, if we remove the Superhero moniker from the equation, reams of popular stories have been told in which individuals with fantastic to godlike abilities intervene into the politics of their worlds. And it isn't boring. They just inhabit the rest of speculative fiction. Or comics outside the mainstream continuities.
Now, that's not to say the genre such as it is can't maintain it's laundry list of conceits, but pretending that the common premises of the Big Two arose as some kind of inevitable naturalistic evolution of the medium is absurd. It's just that tradition and a popular paradigm has ensconced within Superhero comics various elements. Parts of the speculative fiction story you don't speculate about. And of course, there have been a ton of stories deconstructing or simply ignoring such elements which weren't boring.
While I have no doubt that that's how it might play out, at least initially, at that point, they're only really continuing because he gives his approval.
Also, is this getting too close to politics? I apologize if that's the case.
Right, the question becomes: What does he do when they don't stop?
He would have to stop them himself, and that would mean force. You can't just think "he can remove their military hardware", that doesn't stop genocides, all you need for a genocide is motivated people with machetes.
And even then that doesn't remove the root causes which are usually complicated, murky, and go back centuries so aren't readily unpicked.
So that would require more force, the only solution an individual, even Superman, could come up with is forcible seperation of factions where these conflicts arise, or forcible deposition of governments and power structures where they are involved.
Which is starting to sound a lot like ruling the world (See also: The Authority, Justice Lords).
Really, the reason that superheroes don't address these kind of situations is that they're complicated problems, and superheroes are not good at solving those because they aren't readily addressed by finding the right person and punching them real good. (And when writers try, well, that way lies Frank Miller).
Well, I partly agree with Amra's analysis- there are legitimate difficulties with involving Supes heavily in situations that he can't solve by force, because, yes, people buy his comics with the expectation that laser-vision and sun-punching will be involved.
That's all a 4th wall explanation though, and as such, still a problem with the character, at least as embedded in a given setting.
The scenario Anteros and Legato have mentioned probably would amount to World Domination by the UN, with either Supes in particular or the Justice League in general giving the administration teeth (even if they didn't assume a formal position of power.) Sure, there are sociopolitical problems associated with that idea that superheroes can't easily solve, but there might be a couple good stories you could wring out of rising (or not) to the challenge. Particularly if those sociopolitical problems can manifest in the form, say of red-sun deathtraps.
Which reminds me- what recurring supervillain better embodies white-collar crime than the modern Lex Luthor? He's a corporate plutocrat typically elbow-deep in both the banking sector and the military-industrial complex, who effectively owns one of the largest US cities, supplies armies across the globe and can buy and sell a third of Congress before lunch, such that he can viably run for President but usually considers the office a distraction. Everything that makes Lex interesting relies on shifting Supes outside of his comfort zone. (Well, that and the color scheme on his power suit.)
He disarms them, separates them, and takes whoever instigated the event to the U.N. to stand trial. All of this takes him about 13 seconds, and then he goes back to not interfering with their affairs whenever they aren't trying to actively murder people.
There seems to be this fallacy with comic book logic that if he stops them from mass murder he suddenly has to take complete control and rule over everything. This isn't the case at all and it's a little silly to even propose it.
It doesn't make for a very good story, so writers will stick with these weak rationalizations, but let's not pretend they hold up to real world scrutiny.
Ah, but that's true no matter what if the Superman exists in a world that lacks adequate counter measures.
Which is the real reason this isn't marketable despite it's ubiquity in other genres. People expect the issue to be solved, done, over. The idea of the long struggle, of it being a something he can't forcefully overcome, or pitched in a murky morass of unknowns and unknowables isn't to the tastes of the buyers. They don't want something like that. Here at least, they get their punch out problem with moon beasts and mad scientists, to paraphrase Jayngfet from other thread.
It's a medium where so many heroes wear spandex to ape Superman's strongman costume because that's how these things are done, damn it. And it's why they simply aren't on the forefront anymore. They aren't water cooler talk. Because they lack applicability by mandate, while implicitly pretending otherwise. That's not uncommon literary hypocrisy, or even a sin, but it's oh so tediously heavy handed here. When the Big Two approach issues of contemporary consequence, they're very much more often Driving Miss Daisy than Do the Right Thing.
Even Captain America 2, the most thematically ambitious of the MCU in modern commentary, isn't really above the maligned Star Trek: Into Darkness in terms of the content of it's actual message on their subject matter, though it was integrated far better into a much superior film.
Y'see, you've fallen into the Mark Millar trap. There isn't a single "whoever instigated the event", there's anywhere from century to a thousand years of tribal bad feeling, political repression or favour, external upset from colonialism arbitrarily redrawing borders a century and a half ago, and so on.
Complicated problems like Rwanda don't have single causes, they have massively complicated long term causes that literally cannot be fixed in simple ways.
In order to "seperate" these people Superman would have to literally arbitrarily redraw the borders of almost every nation in most of Africa and the Middle East, displace all of the populations of those nations and then enforce that seperation by main force.
He'd have to take over the world and run it as a superpowered despot, repressing people far more harshly than the existing problems that have caused these conflicts, because that's the only way you can have a "simple" fix.
I wrote up a detailed reply to this, but it definitely veers too far into real world politics, and I've gotten in trouble for that on this forum before. So instead I'll just say I respectfully disagree. Punishing those in power, and destroying the infrastructure they use to commit their atrocities might not end violence completely, but it would certainly curb it substantially.
Eh, that's not really how problems narratively work in superhero worlds. There's always a person behind the problem. A person who can be punched, generally. That's...the point of the whole fantasy. It's nice to envision whoever is responsible for whatever taking it on the chin.
It only doesn't actually fix things because, well, you need the environment to stay the same, narratively. You CAN'T have gotham become crime free. You can't really have the x-men live happily ever after. Either of those sort of ends a popular, profitable money train, and thus, will not actually stay fixed.
But they are invariably potrayed as right to fight for those things, and as their actions helping to fix those things.
This is the third time I've tried and failed to sum up my objections succinctly, so I'll open instead with two questions: Why do you feel that Superman has to provide simple solutions instead of nuanced ones, and why do you feel Superman has to solve the problem entirely in order for the problem to be worth tackling?
To be blunt, no. In the example of Rwanda (which we seem to be using as a case study), it wouldn't even reduce the bloodshed by a quarter. Most of the deaths there was ethnic Hutu killing ethnic Hutu (with machetes, note) over land distribution issues. Something to remember with many conflicts is that when it comes to a choice between watching your children slowly starve or killing your neighbor (and his family) and taking his land, well, that sucker's going down.
More details can be found in Shake Hands With The Devil by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian General who was in command of the UN Peacekeepers in Rwanda during the massacres.
Anyway, the main point is that superheroes are stunningly useless in the real world.
As written by Marvel and DC anyways. A more realistic take is that superhumans would warp and change the political landscape themselves, and would have massive influence on what was happening in their territory. As always, I point to Worm for a good story on what that might look like. (Do note I said more realistic, it is still a story, and the focus is not on providing a model on the political effects of superhumans)
Because if the answers were simple enough that a comic book writer could enumerate them in 38 pages the problems wouldn't exist now, would they?
The problems are too complex to even begin to address in the scope of a comic story except by simplifying them sufficiently massively that they cease to even resemble the actual problems.Quote:
and why do you feel Superman has to solve the problem entirely in order for the problem to be worth tackling?
Y'see, I'm not talking about the diagetic version of Superman, I'm talking about what you can do in a comic book story, the limits of the ability of 38 or so pages of sequential art storytelling to convey meaning.
You couldn't even finish explaining the shia-sunni conflict in the scope of a comic book, not even a reasonable size graphic novel, let alone come up with an easy fix for it involving a man with his underpants on the outside!
I don't think ease of understanding conveys the will to act, but if it were, this is still a 4th-wall-based meta-explanation that doesn't actually justify the character's behaviour.
Besides, as Tyndmyr already pointed out, it's not like the underlying sociological causes of street crime are simple, yet we don't have any apparent difficulty with superheroes grappling with caricatured personifications of the phenomenon.
Even if particular instances of genocide were rooted in (somehow) intractable cultural and demographic problems, after about a century of warped lunatics escaping from Arkham, I think we can handle the disappointment.
What about Goku vs Superman ScrewAttack Death Battle: The first fight and the rematch? Do you think that Superman was overpowered in both fights or do you think it was even?
Short answer:
Yes.
Longer answer:
If you can bench-press the EARTH for HOURS and not break a sweat... Yes.
As of Battle of the Gods Goku is on the level where he has to specifically try to not destroy the universe when he throws a punch. That's canon, and he's actually a whole lot stronger now than he was at that point.
Anything except Silver Age supes gets turned into a fine red mist at this point.
You mean you can't just say "it's like the Hatfields and the McCoys" and call it a day?
...oh right people in the MidEast actually remember history and thus every single offense the other side committed.
Anyway...are there even ATTEMPTS by Superheroes to solve those sorts of real world level conflicts that don't involve becoming a dictator or reducing the conflict to a single, relatively simple, issue?
Well, I can't say much for Superman, but I know in Batman comics (at least before New52) they had a sort of background thread that he is tirelessly going after the root of poverty and crime in Gotham. Investigating corrupt businesses, providing available jobs, specifically targeting former convicts and poor urban areas, as well as other things of that nature.
It never went anywhere, other than just saying it was happening in a few comics. But that's about as close as I can think of to a comic hero actually trying to deal with real world non-personal problems in real world ways.
Oh, wait I do remember a few comics of Superman writing editorials and actually being an investigative reporter to bring attention to problems like the overpopulation of city orphanages. Which, I guess is somewhat close to what you're talking about.
Nothing about directly stopping dictators though. Well, Captain America once punched out the president, heavily implied that he got him impeached and thrown out of office and was going to run for president, but then stopped because he didn't think it would be fair for him to run since he thought he'd win in such a landslide that it would actually stifle democracy, since he'd unintentionally become a demagogue.
Dennis O'Neil's Green Lantern/Green Arrow crossover series was specifically focused on social problems, along with the less prominent Hawkworld. Not sure they arrived at much in the way of permanent solutions, but the theme was there.