2025 is looking to be the year of Superman and that’s alright with me. The recent release of the trailer for James Gunn’s Superman as gotten not just comic book fans but moviegoers more hyped than ever for the upcoming film, reigniting an interesting in and a love for it’s titular character. I am one of those fans. While I’ve long been a fan of Superman, it’s a love that has waned over time, but that trailer has reminded me of exactly why I am such a fan of the character and it all comes down to how much Gunn’s movie reminds me of a particular story: All-Star Superman.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Mark Waid Boiled Superman Down to His Essence for Me
All-Star Superman is one of the greatest Superman stories ever told. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the greatest superhero comics ever, if not the greatest. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely teamed together to create a story that took everything great about Superman and put it on display. It showed how cool all the things that the post-Crisis DC tried to convince us were lame really were. It’s beautiful. In the second volume of the hardcover reprints, Mark Waid wrote the introduction and it shows an understanding of the character of Superman that few have. Waid wrote, “Gods achieve their power by encouraging us to believe in them. Superman achieves his by believing in us.”
That quote took All-Star Superman and brought it to the next level for me. That’s when I truly realized why I loved Superman. Superman represented something that humanity needs. He’s the hero that humans have created over and over again. He’s Sinbad. He’s Hercules. He’s Arthur. He’s something that we feel the need to constantly create.
While Waid showed me the way, it was Morrison who again drew the throughline for me when I was reading SuperGods. Grant Morrison is all about the reality of fiction. To paraphrase what Morrison said at one point in the book: Superman will outlive us all. How are we more real than that? We create the things that we want to see in the world and Superman is just that. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created a character that represented the things that all humans want in the world. We want someone who cares about us. We want someone who will save us from ourselves long enough for us to reach the next stage. Just like Jor-El says in Superman: The Movie, “They will join you in the sun.”
Superman‘s trailer was a massive success because it hits that button that makes me, you, everyone love Superman. James Gunn captures the super and he captures the man. He captures the bombast and he captures the hope. There’s a feeling throughout the trailer, a sense of who Superman is and what he means that is always there. I watched it and I got the same feeling that I got when I read Mark Waid’s introduction to All-Star Superman Volume Two. That feeling, that sense of wonder, that sense of awe, that sense of love is right there in the trailer. Watch it again. It just feels like Superman, doesn’t it? It feels like Superman in a way that nothing else has in a while, right? That’s why we love it.
Superman has a lot riding on it. The failure of Superman in the DCEU – and yes, Snyder failed with Superman – is a big reason why that cinematic universe never really worked. Superman is such a huge part of DC, of pop culture, that when he’s not right, it’s obvious. Gunn is making Superman right, just like Morrison did, just like Waid and Siegel and Shuster and Donner and Magin and Binder and so many others have. We need Superman right now. Hope is short order, the world is falling apart. We need someone to believe in us. We need someone to believe in us.
If Loving Superman Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right
The world can be a cold place. We all watch it all the time, on our phones, and we make jokes about the terror that infects every second of our lives. Regardless of what you’re political beliefs are, you feel it. Hope is far off at times – more often than not, really – but we have Superman. Over the last eighty-six and some change years, thousands of people – writers, artists, editors, directors, actors, film crews, special effects crew, and more I’m forgetting – have banded together to create stories of this god who loves us. We have thousands of hours of this strange visitor from another planet, this Titan that could easily lord over us, just loving us. Fighting for us. Trying to be like us.
Maybe if Superman wants to be like us, we aren’t that bad. Maybe the darkness, the cold isn’t total. Maybe it won’t win. Superman – who is really us in every way that counts – can be better, so we can, too. And there’s something about that feeling. If we can make Superman, we can make the world better.
James Gunn’s Superman opens in theaters July 11th.
