As a kid, I tried to make sure that I was always wearing clean underwear. I didn’t do this out of some innate sense of cleanliness; I did it because I was sure I was going to be whisked away by a Jedi Knight or a wizard from Lord of the Rings at any moment.

As a kid, as I say, I had a very clear sense of my destiny, and my destiny did not involve elementary school, where I was mercilessly teased for being a glasses-wearing geekazoid with a wussy name. …No, I was sure that at any moment, things would change. The Jedi or the wizard would arrive on the school playground during recess and scan eagerly around, until he located me — me out of all the kids. “Are you Oliver?” the Jedi would say. “Oliver Miller? Mm; I thought so, just checking. Well, come along then. …The galaxy needs you.” And then I would be whisked away in a spaceship, while the bullies and the popular kids stared and gaped with envious awe. I could visualize it all so clearly.

…So, and the point of the clean underwear was that it might be days or weeks before I got my new Jedi/ wizard uniform (the journey to the distant land might take a while), and I wanted to be as clean and neatly-pressed as I could be when I began my new life.

Anyway, all of this is why I have always identified with Superman.

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Yeah, there are more interesting superheroes than Superman. As an acne-scarred geek, I have always identified with Spider-Man, who is definitely more accessible and approachable-seeming than the Man of Steel. And I have always secretly longed to be tough and cool like Wolverine or Batman. But as a symbol and as a metaphor, Superman is the most important hero of all to me.

I’m a half-hearted Jew, so Superman has always made sense to me on an instinctive level, since he was created by two Jews. The latest Superman movie tried to make him into a kind of Christ-like figure, but no, he’s a Jew. It’s a Jewish story. A child from a distant land arrives in America, and is taught to hide his true identity. He moves to New York, of all places, gets a job working in the media, and lusts after an unattainable shiska. That’s the story of a million Jewish immigrants; but Superman means much more than all of that.

“…Your name is Kal-El. You are the only survivor of the planet Krypton. Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. You have great powers, only some of which you have as yet discovered.” Those are Jor-El’s first words to his son; his speech to Kal-El/ Superman, years after his son has arrived on planet Earth. He’s been raised by a kindly couple from Kansas — Jonathan and Martha Kent. They have given him the name Clark Kent, but that is not Kal-El’s real name.

Even though you have been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. Could there be a more universal statement of otherness? As humans, we are unique in feeling apart from things. Dogs accept their… dog-ishness, for lack of a better word. Cats accept their cat-ishness. And so on for every other species on this planet. Humans are unique, because we can stand in the middle of a crowd, and still feel lonely. No other species can feel like that. And as humans, we all feel a sense of terminal uniqueness. We all feel special, and so thus we all feel apart. Paradoxically, this is what unites us, and this is why Superman speaks to me as a metaphor. He symbolizes the feeling of apartness, and also our secret belief in our own awesomeness — the belief that I experienced as a child, as I waited on the playground for wizards to whisk me away, and to teach me my true destiny. It never happened, but I never stopped believing in it.

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Superman is unique among superheroes because he is the reverse of other superheroes. This has been pointed out many times before. Batman’s true identity is Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy. Spider-Man’s true identity is Peter Parker, geeky teenager. But Superman’s true identity is Superman. The “costume” that he wears is not a costume — the red cape, the chest medallion, the boots, the belt; those are his normal clothes. When Superman dresses up and pretends, he pretends to be a normal human being; but he is not one.

We all feel like this. Every day, when we schlep off to work, wearing our foolish work clothes — we all feel this way. We feel as though we are wearing a disguise in our jobs, our relationships, even in our interactions with, say, a barista at Starbucks. We jealously hide our true, secret nature, because the world cannot know who we truly are. And why? Because the world couldn’t handle the truth.

And Superman enacts the same ritual as we do, each and every day. He could be living in a crystal palace on the North Pole. He could fly to Jupiter, or burrow through the Earth’s core to China. Instead, he plays his role as a schlubby human. He enacts the role of “Clark Kent.” He puts on the tired work suit, the busted wingtip shoes, the boring tie and the ugly glasses, and gets on the subway and rides off to his fake job as a reporter.

But inside, Superman has secret powers, because we all do. He is separate and special and different — because we all are. Even though he has been raised as a human being, he is not one of them. We are all Not One of Them. We are all Uniquely Us —  just like Superman. And that’s what Superman means; and that’s why Superman matters. 

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image – Superman Returns (Widescreen Edition)

Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2′s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.