Messianic Superman 2.0

As Geoff Johns' regular tenure on Action Comics comes to a close this week, there seems to be little doubt that the run will be remembered fondly for many years to come. No shortage of contributions to continuity originated in these 20+ issues, many of them successful integrations of elements of Superman movies and TV shows into the comics. General Zod, a back-to-basics scientist Luthor, the retooled Brainiac, and the death of Jonathan Kent are the ones that first come to mind.

But, for me, the most impressive feat accomplished in Action Comics over the past two years has nothing to do with the writer's ability to make the Superman of comics more like the Superman of film. No, the truly remarkable moment came during the "Superman and the Legion of Superheroes" arc, where Mr. Johns actually took the now-cliched Superman-Christ metaphor and gave it a new spin.

Superman as indicative of Jesus Christ. You've heard it before, right? Sent to Earth from the heavens by his father to serve as a savior to mankind while living among them? If it were once considered novel to draw this parallel between the Man of Steel and Son of Man, those days are long gone. Once Hollywood starts appropriating the portrayal of a pop culture icon like Superman as a Christ figure (going back as far as the first movie in 1978), you know the idea has become mainstream. Typing in the terms "Superman as" into Google leads the search engine to suggest that "Jesus" might be the word you mean to use next.

Which is why it came as such as surprise when Geoff Johns delved into Superman-as-Christ territory and gave us something we hadn't seen before. Since the Silver Age, it had been established that the Legion of Superheroes had been inspired to heroism by the historical accounts of Superman. But this story took us to a dark version of that future where the legend of Superman had been twisted. Said to have been born as a human, not of Kryptonian origin, Superman was corrupted into a symbol of xenophobia and hatred by earthlings of the alien races that made up the majority of the Legion.

In our world, the truth of Christ's nature is also often distorted. Many want to view Christ as a pretty good man or an insightful teacher, not the fully incarnate God that the New Testament says him to be. And when the attributes of Christ can be picked and chosen at will, the resultant muddle of a Jesus can be used to stand for all sorts of things--just as the distorted Superman was in the 30th Century.

As far as I know, Geoff Johns isn't a professing Christian. And it seems that his primary intent in the Legion story was to write a message of tolerance and multiculturalism. But it doesn't always take a Christian to tell a hero story that taps into underlying spiritual truth. After all, Siegel and Shuster themselves were Jewish. And it wouldn't come as too much of a shock to learn that Johns has some sort of Christian background, as he has a knack for writing this kind of stuff (the prime example being his and Alex Ross's JSA epic...more on that later!).