The Week The Superman Trailer Took Over the World

The new Superman trailer confidently asserts we are most assuredly in comic-book land.

This is the main vanguard of the NEW DC invasion, headed by James Gunn and Peter Safran.

 This is not Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, where the fear of even saying the words “Super” and “Man” was palpable, despite Michael Shannon in a Dune cast-off outfit and Kevin Costner saying goodbye inside of a tornado.

But really, Gunn’s DC means a shitload of superbeings, including this deliriously cute but, they’ve warned us, complicated very-good dog, Krypto the Super Pup.

Krypto here is a terrier, and responds with super speed to a broken and battered Superman, hauling him cape-first across the wintry landscape to, we assume, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude where he can heal and watch old videos of his parents on his ice-crystal Betamax.

That score, the original Superman fanfare from Richard Donner’s film, played on electric guitar, swells into orchestral music so we can get our chills on as Lois Lane (looking very accurately independent, hot and smart) and Superman hold hands and look out over a presumably safe Metropolis.

Gunn knows this stuff, and the grand air and blood on the snow and super dog in a cape all belong in the same frame to him

Who else could have built a franchise around a talking raccoon voiced by Bradley fucking Cooper and we all loved the damn thing.

The Superman suit is smartly colorful this time, and a recent piece in Variety confirms that the choice involves Superman trying to be kid-friendly, given that he is in actuality an alien who shoots red beams from his eyes and has ice breath.

David Corenswet has actually figured out how to make Clark Kent different from Superman, which mostly involves a perm and lots of pomade.

Krypto does appear that he will dominate the movie, and that’s fine with me, as long as Gunn can control his impulse to introduce super cute animals and then torture the shit out of them.

There’s Nathan Fillion, in comic-accurate, hideous bowl cut, as angry anti-hero Green Lantern Guy Gardner, who has made a comic book career out of being a super dick but occasionally having a heart of the comic book version of gold.

Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor looks somewhere between a mad genius and a tech bro, fitting given the wide swing from the franchise’s Gene Hackman stunt casting to cancelled Kevin Spacey’s perfectly fitted Luthor, to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Luthorberg.

There’s Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, CGI-ing in as Austin, Texas-born Kendra Saunders, the Latina granddaughter of original Hawkgirl’s cousin Speed Saunders.

I hope you are keeping up with me.

Hawkgirl is sorta from the Hawkworld of Thanagar but will probably have her origin knitted up a bit more nicely here. Or, being this is a James Gunn movie, she’ll just show up with no backstory and a bad attitude, like so many Guardians of the Galaxy and their attendant throngs of mohawked alien pirate smugglers.

There’s more. How long is the trailer again?

The audience for comic books in paper pamphlet form is dying.

The audience for comic book characters, however, is insatiable. Unless Sony is trying to sell them their endless–and finally, thankfully, aborted–unused Spider-Man cast-offs.

The last time I looked at sales figures for most comic books, the niche titles hovered around the 10,000 a month club if they were lucky. These are successful, ongoing niche comic books.

But the audience for big screen super hero fare is massive, and that audience can smell fakery a mile away. There is a reason the original stories worked, more or less, and there is a reason the myths persist.

If anything, the most telling thing about the Superman trailer is the DC logo at the end of the trailer. The four stars in a circle around DC. THE logo for a generation of kids. A generation now, mostly, in their late 40s,  50s, and 60s.

The industry estimates that the median age of the average comic-book reader–readers of physical comic book pamphlets, or “floppies,” in the industry parlance–is in the mid ‘30s.

But the people who make comic-book movies, the people who are now in charge of the comic-book mythos, are generally slightly older. They grew up in the 70s and 80s, and remember the golden age (not the Golden Age of comics, that’s actually the 30s and 40s, the 70s and 80s are the “Bronze Age”, or the “Copper Age”) of stories that feed the movies and television shows.

Those four-color paper comics have a simple power, and folks like James Gunn understand that, and with a little grounding, a sense of self-awareness, great casting and a good sense of humor, they can make a lot of money and, relatively speaking, also make some art.