| You might think an immigrant kid like me — who loved comic books and studied them for clues as to how I should conduct myself in this new world, an immigrant kid who was as bedeviled by his lost home world as Clark Kent is bedeviled by his spectral connection to Krypton, an immigrant kid who also thought of his island as a Krypton of sorts (though mine was destroyed not by cosmic apocalypse but by the banal logistics of immigration), who also labored under three identities (I was someone in English-speaking America, someone else in my family’s Spanish-only apartment and someone else in my memories of the Dominican Republic) — would have fallen hard for Superman.
I didn’t, though. In fact, I was something of the neighborhood anti-Superman. Always ready to inveigh against the Last Son of Krypton, always ready with long arguments laying out why he was dumb. What can I say? From Day 1, dude just rubbed me the wrong way. There was the obvious stuff, like how goofy Superman was as a hero, how ridiculously dated his star-spangled patriotism was — Supes loved a country I’d never seen. My landfill America was way more supervillain territory.
You would think Superman’s immigrant/refugee background would have represented a point of connection, but even that rankled me. Sure we both came from other worlds, but Clark Kent’s complete assimilation, his passing, seemed to me as impossible as flying fast to reverse time. |
