The Perennial Death of Supermen: Dying Gods Just Keep Popping Up!

In honor of Superman’s 85th anniversary being celebrated today, and poignantly embedded in the Church’s calendar celebration of Christ’s resurrection, I present a humble meditation on a phenomenon in the world of Superman stories I noticed recently…

Back in 1986, DC was preparing to restart it’s in-comic universe with the seminal Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first in what would prove to be a new tradition of universe reboots (for better or worse) every decade or so. But in 1986, the novelty of the enterprise got DC thinking it might want to commission a swan song or two for certain flagship characters that had carried its company during this half-century long continuity. Thus was Alan Moore asked to craft a final love letter to Superman, which became the extremely well received storyline, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, a story in which Superman “dies” six years before the iconic Death of Superman story would sweep pop-culture in the early nineties.

Outside of comic aficionados, however, this is a less known tale. Perhaps the epilogue reveal that Superman is not truly dead, just hidden away, lessened the impact of his “demise” and the likelihood that it would gain notoriety outside of fandom. Perhaps the Crises reboot that immediately followed stymied its legacy. Perhaps DC was just better at marketing such a cataclysmic idea by the time the nineties rolled around!

The Start of a Trend

Regardless of the lack of recognition in the broader culture, this seemingly innocuous introduction to the idea of killing Superman in the eighties opened a fascination for superhero story creators and consumers that has persisted for decades. Even if we ignore Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow as a cheat, in the last thirty years no less than six major projects across various mediums (comics, animation, and film) have been crafted using the plot of Superman dying.

The most obvious recent example was his death and return in Zach Snyder’s DC Extended Universe trilogy of films, Man of Steel, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice* and Justice League.  Even the final installment in the original Superman film continuity, Superman Returns (2016), is premised on the idea of the world losing Superman to the far reaches of space and having to cope with that loss for five years. His return in that film is basically a return from the dead as far as the denizens of Metropolis are concerned.

Why the prevalence of “death of Superman” stories? Why is it such a popular theme? Is it simple morbidity? Iconoclasm? What does this fascination say about us? While the uptick of its occurrence in recent history is an interesting question we will touch upon, the human proclivity towards stories surrounding the death and resurrection of gods or heroes is a tale as old as time.

Mythological Precedent

Ancient stories of dying gods such as Tammuz in Mesopotamia, or Osiris in Egypt, tell the tale of a god that is killed, ushering in a season of death, (Winter), only to be resurrected or returned from the underworld and thereby manifesting the return of Spring and Summer. The cult of the Greek god Dionysius told of the deity being torn asunder and reconstructed in alignment with the seasons. The life of these gods was the very life of the earth and its resources. In fact, these “Corn Kings,” as C. S. Lewis called them, are found in every era, and area, of the world.

What does the Christian make of these stories, so passingly similar in appearance to our own story of Christ’s death and resurrection? Academics of the modern era have used the prevalence of this trope to attack the Gospel as just a cosmic variation on older fertility myths.  But using this as a critique begs the question… Where’s the problem in that? Can’t we expect as much?**

With Adam’s expulsion from Eden, God decreed that Adam’s redemptive instruction would come by the sweat of his brow, and that he would toil upon the earth for his sustenance, no longer abiding in the eternal ease of Eden. Here we see the beginning of humanity’s tutelage (his dependence on God and his lack of independent sustainment) in his need to cultivate the land. It is God who creates the seasons and gives them to man. Might we not infer the semblance of the resurrection in these seasons anticipates the death and resurrection of Christ because the Father has braided such signs into the very fabric of this fallen world? Indeed, that is the kind of God we worship! Nothing is arbitrary.

When ancient pagan nations identified, basically universally, this agrarian relationship as revealing a transcendent reality, we know that even though they were misled in attributing it to the acts of idols, those intimations pointed to the truth of the Gospel. Christ, the Logos and ground of creation itself, would die and rise again, and in so doing bring about an eternal Summer. The Church, as a new holy nation, is given to participate in His story, the end of which will be the return of Eden itself. “…For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:20-21). The dying god myths of the pagans are shadows of the true form found in Christ.

Something different about the Boy Scout…

But why is it the story of Superman’s death that haunts the modern mind? How come no plethora of Batman death stories? Or even a closer surrogate such as Captain America? It is precisely Superman’s myriad analogies to Christ that gives such weight to this particular character’s death. Superman is all-powerful, yes. Invincible, true. But what really distinguishes Superman is his indefatigable goodness and love for mankind. Some have criticized his singular dimensionality.  Is this a backhanded compliment to the Divine simplicity of the Godhead, perhaps? Indeed, the character has a reputation for being easier to write stories in which other’s react to Superman than it is to write stories in which we empathize with him. He transcends our foibles. He walks among us, but he is not of us. The strength and invincibility of Superman causes us to marvel at his death, that’s true and it’s a major component of our fascination.   But it is his selfless purity even unto death that commands our attention.

In the superficial, ungrounded world of the 21st century, people may not immediately recognize the deep archetype of the dying god in these modern stories of Superman’s death and return, but the popularity and constant retelling of this myth touches something primal inside us. With God ordaining an agrarian relationship between man and the world, it is no wonder that ancient peoples identified an eternal truth in the constant pattern of death followed by life as experienced in the seasons. But just because most of us are no longer farmers does not mean that we don’t have a vestigial sympathy for the stories that animated our ancestors. Moreover, the stories that animated our ancestors and the stories that animate us, what they have in common is their participation in the great story of creation itself, and the God who died and rose again that it might have life. So, fans will likely always find ourselves returning to the tale of Superman’s end.  The power of Superman causes his death to stun us, but it’s the goodness of Superman that causes his death to sting us. And in many versions of this story, it is the justice of his resurrection that thrills us. Sound familiar?

*Really, Warner Bros Marketing? Really? Let’s just politely say one of these movie titles is less… efficient… than the others.
**For Lewis, it was the universal preponderance of Corn King myths throughout time that made the reality of a true Corn King a veritable necessity.