Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  And suddenly everything was quiet, and calm, and I could see the curve of the earth.

  And for the first time in my life, I was weightless.

  And I let go. I let go of all of it, as though a part of my brain said You can take off the boxing gloves now, there’s no one left to fight. Watching the last thin ribbon of sunset fade into a night of unimaginable beauty was like watching one life end and another begin. I was at peace with my past. Finally. At peace.

  I should come back down now, a part of me thought.

  No, it’s okay, you stay up here, on patrol. I’ve got it covered down there.

  You sure?

  Yeah. I’m sure. You’ve earned the right to fly, anywhere you want.

  Thanks. It’s awful pretty up here. Catch you later?

  I’ll be here.

  That sense of calm has stayed with me ever since as a steadying influence on my work and my life. Rather than return from Cannes puffed up like a banjo player after a big meal, full of misplaced self-importance, I came back quieter and more centered than I’d left. No matter what the future may hold, I did what I’d set out to do, and no one can ever take that away.

  I sometimes look up at the night sky in case I might catch a glimpse of a familiar blue-and-red silhouette passing by overhead, and take great joy in the thought that I’m still up there somewhere.

  The night of the Changeling premiere, we boarded limousines and were escorted by police through the crowded streets to the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, where a red carpet as long as an airport runway was lined by hundreds of photographers. Video screens above the theater showed the event as it was being broadcast live to a worldwide audience of twenty million viewers. There’s something very sobering in the knowledge that if you do anything as stupid as adjusting your underwear or picking your nose, you’ll be seen by an audience only slightly smaller than the population of Australia.

  Clint and the other luminaries involved with Changeling lined up at one end of the red carpet, waiting for their names to be announced on loudspeakers so they could begin the long walk. It was glorious, it was exciting . . . and if I needed any further evidence of the place of the writer in the entertainment industry, this was it.

  Clint Eastwood’s name was announced, and he started up the red carpet.

  The photographers went crazy taking pictures of him.

  Angelina and Brad were announced; they clasped hands and started up the red carpet.

  The paparazzi taking photos went even further out of their minds.

  My name was announced; I started up the red carpet—

  —as the photographers kept taking pictures of Clint, Brad, and Angelina.

  I paused. Kind of waved a little. Hi . . . writer here . . . wrote this thing . . .

  Nothing.

  At another time of my life I might’ve been annoyed. But I was so happy just to be there, so calmed from the night before, that I smiled, laughed, and stopped in the middle of the runway to pull out my cell phone and take a photo of Clint, Angelina, and Brad—everyone else was doing it, so why not?—before continuing unnoticed up the red carpet into the Palais and the premiere of Changeling.

  When we returned to Los Angeles, Universal began its Oscar campaign for Changeling, a ritual that involved screenings, press junkets, PR appearances, interviews, and photo sessions. The studio hoped to get me an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and paid for magazine ads and billboards bearing my name and For Your Consideration, but the odds were small given that I was a stranger to the voting members of the Academy and this was my first feature film. So when Changeling was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Actress for Angelina Jolie, but not Best Screenplay, I was absolutely fine with it.

  So I was pleasantly surprised when I was nominated for a BAFTA Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (their equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Screenplay. The night of the awards ceremony, I showed up in a Savile Row tuxedo sufficient to conceal my true identity, and mingled with Penelope Cruz, Mickey Rourke, Kate Winslet, and a hectare of filmmakers infinitely more gifted than myself, who had no idea that there was an alien among them. I didn’t win, nor did I expect to; I was ridiculously happy just to be the beneficiary of an astonishing sequence of events that began on a cold night all alone on the Santa Monica Pier.

  Chapter 32

  Being Superman

  After Changeling I was again working twelve to sixteen hours a day to meet deadlines on the movies I was being asked to write, but where that schedule had previously burned me out, now the reverse was true. I felt revived, renewed. This is what you’ve been working toward for all these years: enjoy it, drive flat out, live on the bleeding edge of what you can write, and never look back.

  Between assignments I wrote another spec screenplay, this one about the friendship between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. When DreamWorks heard about it, they bought the script for a million dollars. As a rule, screenplay fees are broken into separate payments for start-up, outline, first and second drafts. Since this was a finished script, I asked DreamWorks if I could get the full amount in one lump sum because I’d never seen a check for a million dollars before. It was a silly request on every conceivable level, but somewhere deep inside me the impoverished kid who lived in the projects of Newark, who had gone dumpster-diving for Coke bottles to redeem to buy comics, and who lived in unheated houses in the dead of winter, that kid wanted to see that check, goddamnit.

  DreamWorks understood the request and graciously sent along the full amount.

  The day the check arrived I stared at it for what felt like forever. Five years earlier I had come within inches of losing everything, and now here was this amazing gift.

  A copy of that check is framed in my office alongside the first check I ever received: fifteen dollars for the Uri Geller interview in the San Diego Reader, when my family thought I was wasting my time with this whole writing thing.

  Sweartagod: it’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.

  During the course of six years, I wrote five produced movies that collectively earned $1.5 billion at the box office: Changeling, Ninja Assassin, Underworld: Awakening, World War Z, and Thor, the last of which was based on both my run on the book and an outline I’d written for the film. When Kenneth Branagh came on to direct Thor, he thought it would be fun to have me do a cameo in the movie. I explained to Sir Kenneth that my face on-screen would only send audiences fleeing, but he persisted, and soon I was in wardrobe at a desert location east of Los Angeles. I thought I’d just be standing in a line with a bunch of other guys as the camera drifted past, but Sir Kenneth decided against all evidence to the contrary that I could act.

  The scene takes place after Thor’s hammer is thrown out of Asgard and craters into Earth. “I want you to be the one who discovers the hammer,” Sir Kenneth said, pointing to a red pickup truck. “You’re going to drive up, get out, and react to seeing the crater where the hammer has landed. Then you clamber down to the hammer and try to pick it up.”

  Swell.

  As I did the scene, I hearkened back to the days spent reading Thor comics in my aunt’s house. Now here I was, years later, acting in a Thor movie based on my own material.

  I had disappeared into my own narrative.

  Could my life get any weirder?

  Why, yes, it could.

  In 2009 I was appearing at New York Comic Con when Dan DiDio, editor in chief of DC Comics, invited me up to their booth for a private chat. It was common knowledge that my exclusive contract with Marvel was at an end, so the invitation was not unexpected. But I could never have guessed what he had in mind.

  “We want to give you Superman,” he said.

  It took about ten seconds for my brain to stop Robby-the-Robot-flashing before I could ask what the hell he was talking about.

  “A lot of college-age comic book fans have never read a Superman title,” he began. “They read Batman, they read X-Men, they read your runs on Spidey
and Thor, but there’s no point of entry for them on Superman. They think he’s old-fashioned. They call him the Big Blue Boy Scout, and they’re not wrong. He’s the one character in our roster who writers have the hardest time figuring out how to write. We’ve published good books by good writers, and we’re proud of them, but that doesn’t help if new readers aren’t coming around to read those stories.

  “So we’re going to launch a series of prestige, hardcover graphic novels that will let us redefine our core characters for a new audience. We’re packaging it as a publishing event for mainstream bookstores around the world. Superman will be the first one out the door.

  “We want you to reinvent Superman for the twenty-first century, make him fresh and dynamic: modern, smart, and emotionally accessible, someone who can bring in a whole new audience. If this first volume does well, we’ll do two more for a three-book arc.

  “So . . . you want it or not?”

  Superman had always been a beacon of hope, someone I strove my entire life to emulate. Like Clark, I had always been a “strange visitor from a distant world” who had to fit in with people who felt alien to me. Taking this job would bring me full circle. I’d based my moral code, my values, and much of my personality on Superman. Now I would be creating Superman based on my values and beliefs.

  Joe Straczynski had spent his entire life becoming Superman.

  Now, in a way, Superman would become Joe Straczynski.*

  Did I want the job?

  Hell, yes.

  I started work at once, filling out the rest of my time with limited runs on Wonder Woman, The Brave and the Bold, and the monthly Superman title. One of the most personal stories in the regular Superman run was about a young boy who keeps waiting for Superman to save him from his abusive father. The cover featured a boy in a Superman suit looking silently out at the reader, his face bruised, one eye blackened. There are no words to describe how I felt looking at a young version of myself looking out at the older me from the cover of a Superman comic book.

  In writing the graphic novel, I thought back to the years I spent in Vancouver working on Jeremiah. Every Wednesday I went downtown to the comics store on Granville Street, an area known for a heavy presence of runaways in their teens and twenties. Many of them had come to the city in search of opportunities that never appeared, while others were simply lost. Sometimes they wandered into the comics store, desperate for something to ease the burden of life on the streets. They would pull back their rain-soaked hoodies and walk down the rows of garishly colored comics, searching for anything that spoke about the world they lived in. But when they reached the end of the display, and found nothing they could relate to, disappointment settled into their faces and they left the store empty-handed.

  I wanted to write something for those kids: a Clark Kent who comes to Metropolis with dreams and extraordinary abilities, but without knowing how best to use them: a young man who was infinitely powerful but also infinitely lost. Rather than one more story about what he can do, I wanted to write about his attempts to figure out who he is, where he fits in, and what he wants to become.

  My background as a reporter helped make the Daily Planet feel more authentic, and I put the words of Norman Corwin into the mouth of Perry White as he helped his reporters perfect their craft. I wrote Lois as a no-nonsense professional who doesn’t simply fall into Superman’s arms because she’s supposed to, and made Jim Olsen the badass that most newspaper photographers have to be in order to get the right shot at the right moment. I worked harder on that book than anything I’d written since Changeling. It deserved no less. He deserved no less. A few months later, when the script was paired with the artwork of Shane Davis, bound, and prepped for shipping, I could only hope that I’d done it right.

  Superman: Earth One debuted in 2010 at the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover graphic novels and stayed on the list for thirty-two weeks. The next two volumes also hit the bestseller list. But the best part since then has been the steady flow of readers coming to my signings year after year, a copy of that book in hand. “I never read a Superman book until Earth One,” they say, “and it’s like I finally have a Superman who belongs to me. He gives me somebody to aspire to, someone to be like, you know?”

  Someone to aspire to. Someone to be like. Yeah, I know.

  I had spent most of my life trying to become Superman even though a part of me knew that this goal was fundamentally unattainable. I would never actually fly or deflect bullets, would never be faster than a locomotive, bend steel in my bare hands, or leap tall buildings in a single bound. My ambition was always doomed to failure.

  But after spending three novels in Clark Kent’s head, each of us mirroring the other in a which came first, the chicken or the egg? kind of way, I finally realized that becoming Superman isn’t the point; the trick is being Superman on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day, choice-by-choice basis.

  Being kind, making hard decisions, helping those in need, standing up for what’s right, pointing toward hope and truth, and embracing the power of persistence . . . those were the qualities of Superman that mattered to me far more than his ability to see through walls. Because all of us can do those other things, can be those things; we can be Superman whenever we choose.

  We just have to be willing to choose.

  That’s all. That’s it. That’s the secret.

  And it only took me a lifetime to figure that out.

  Chapter 33

  The Truth Unearthed

  For ten years, the dark undercurrent of my family had continued to bubble in the background, punctuated by the long, rambling letters my father dictated for my mother to transcribe, making elaborate excuses for his behavior. Quoting one such letter, thirteen handwritten pages long:

  “—your father (is) of Russian heritage, which is a dark, violent and mostly unhappy heritage . . . this is probably because in over 2000 years White Russia was always ruled by some other country and there was nothing but war there most of the time and that made the people there the way they were.”

  Later: “He can’t help how he is for he is a product of his heritage for where he came from the way he behaves is perfectly normal.”

  Translation: don’t blame him, blame two thousand years of wars that happened before he was born, in a country he didn’t live in until he got stuck there as a teenager for seven years, with the rest of his life being spent in the United States.

  “He does drink, yes, but that is the way of the part of the world he came from. Over there they drink with their food and drink some after dinner to deaden a little of their lives for they work from morning to sundown but get very little of any of what they make, their lives are very dead. They just got in electricity a couple of years ago, maybe two or three people of the village will have refrigerators or ice boxes or even telephones. Very few even have cars.”

  What did my father’s drinking have to do with electricity or cars in villages thousands of miles away? The answer, obviously, was nothing and everything. Addicts and abusers always try to rationalize away their behavior.

  It’s not my fault, I had no choice.

  Yes, you did, and yes you do, I had always wanted to shout at him, but held back to avoid collateral damage to the rest of my family. You didn’t have to become what you experienced. You could have chosen another way. To say “I have no choice” is the worst kind of cowardice because you think it gives you license to hurt other people then hide behind your past where you think nobody can touch you. If our past determines our present, then I should be the biggest asshole on the face of the planet, a monster, because I had you as a father for twenty-plus years of my life. But I chose to go a different way, so if your argument is that we’re trapped in the prison of the past, that we must do unto others what was done unto us in all its cruelty and violence, forever and ever amen, then my choice just disproved your entire thesis, you racist, misogynist, drunken, wife-beating piece of shit.

  The letters stopped wh
en my mother finally decided she’d had enough of his abuse and filed for divorce. It was one of the last decisions she made before Alzheimer’s began to rip out the neural connections in her brain.

  “Charles kept up his regular beating schedule all the way to the end,” my sister Theresa said later. “Even in the last three or four years she was with him, they’re both old, but that wouldn’t stop him. In fact, the schedule seemed to have accelerated. She’s hunched over from the arthritis in her back, and that made him very angry. (Of course it never occurred to him that the kicking he gave her in the back the day she got out of the hospital after back surgery might have something to do with it.) She was slowing down, and could never do the work in the shop to his satisfaction. He had slowed down too and couldn’t chase her as well, so he improvised and started using chains and belts to whip her from a distance. Even when he was mostly getting around by wheelchair, he found ways, usually by waiting until she was in a room where he could block her in with his chair.”

  My father was relentless in fighting the divorce, determined not to relinquish his control over her. He didn’t want her free to tell the world what she knew about his past, or to allow her access to the $3 million he had accumulated over the years from his plastics company. He even refused to pay for Evelyn’s hospitalization when she was conveyed to a constant-care facility for long-term support. Instead he escaped to Las Vegas, bought a house for cash, then hid the rest of his money in bank accounts in the United States, Canada, and the Cayman Islands. He vowed that not a penny of “his money” would go to her, oblivious to the fact that he’d only acquired “his money” by pressing her and the rest of us into working for him without pay.