--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The number one movie in the country is Superman. It might be the number one movie in the world. Are you being serious right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But not everybody is loving it. Recently, you've come under a lot of fire for what some might... I don't know, it's a lot of fire. It's a lot.
--:-- Noel King: Kellyanne Conway is mad about it. The guy who stars as Superman had the audacity to say, instead of fighting for truth, liberty, and great values in America, he refused to say the last part.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ben Shapiro is mad about it. The reality that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it's about America.
--:-- Noel King: Even TV Superman Dean Cain is concerned. Look, don't try and make it all woke and crazy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What, if anything, is woke and crazy about the new Superman movie? Coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from ServiceNow]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know?
--:-- Noel King: That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that.
--:-- Noel King: While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from Strawberry.me]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Noel King: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying. But are they actually just excuses for not leaving?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let a career coach from Strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner.
--:-- Noel King: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, up in the sky, it's a bird. It's a plane. Today Explained, Sean Rameswaram's firm. I'm here with Siddhant Adlaka, who's a film critic who recently wrote about the new Superman movie for Vulture.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I went and saw the Superman movie last night, And it was a totally nice summer blockbuster about doing the right thing and caring about other people.
--:-- Noel King: And it's going to heal our country, right? Obviously, there's nothing controversial about it whatsoever.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: Oh, perfect. I don't know what we're even going to talk about then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What should we talk about?
--:-- Noel King: Great. Thank you for having me.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: I'll see you folks next time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, as with everything nowadays, it has become a flashpoint in a nonsensical, divisive culture war.
--:-- Noel King: And if I'm not mistaken, the series of events that led to what we're going to talk about is the director of Superman, James Gunn, simply stating, you know, yeah, Superman is an immigrant, which is a thing we've known since 1938.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: You said it's an immigrant story. It's a political movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: MAGA today is going nuts.
--:-- Noel King: What do you have to say to MAGA?
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: I don't have anything. I think this movie's for everybody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't have anything to say to anybody.
--:-- Noel King: Like, I'm not here to judge people, you know.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: You know, I think this is a movie about kindness, and I think that's something everyone can relate to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you're even remotely familiar with Superman, none of that should be surprising to you.
--:-- Noel King: Dude's an alien, right? He's an alien.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: He was born on Krypton, which is very, very, very far away. very far away from the US border.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like even farther than Venezuela?
--:-- Noel King: Slightly farther than Venezuela.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: I'd have to check my maps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But regardless of that, I think speaking of it in this technical way, is sort of ceding ground to the ridiculousness of the conversation in the first place.
--:-- Noel King: Because in response to James Gunn saying, you know, he's an immigrant, which is to say Superman, not James Gunn.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: In response to James Gunn saying that Superman is an immigrant, you had all these right-wing talking heads, and not just like podcasters, you have people on Fox News, bringing up how this movie was going to be, you know, politically divisive and shoving this, that and the other down our throats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hollywood just needs to figure out that people don't want woke movies or woke directors.
--:-- Noel King: They just want entertainment. We don't go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: So he's now trying to make the case effectively that Superman is kind of an illegal immigrant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.
--:-- Noel King: Mmm. Wow.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: And it just speaks to how charged even a phrase like immigrant has become.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do any of these pundits making noise on Fox News or various podcasts have specific gripes with this movie?
--:-- Noel King: Or is it just all, oh, he likes immigrants?
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: I think a lot of them just haven't seen it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a lot of what we do see in the movie does speak to our current political moment in more interesting ways.
--:-- Noel King: Like, you know, the idea of dropping people into legal limbo and stripping them of their rights.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: So there's a scene where superman is captured by lex luthor and his cronies and there's a brief exchange about uh how due process and the expectation of basic civil rights does not apply to him because he is an alien you know used in the very literal way of him being not from earth but also at the same time in this charged metaphorical sense in that you know he is an alien immigrant and uh and then he is subsequently placed in this sort of interdimensional prison where not only there are literal aliens being held but also uh political opponents of lex luthor um so there is a lot in there that is distinctly political and i think you know ironically that's not what the right wing seems to be glomming on to they're just mad about a statement a guy made an interview yeah and um some of what people are upset at is uh the perception that the film has um an anti-israel or pro-palestine bend and i think it can certainly be read that way some subplots of it um i don't think the film has a distinct or coherent ideology when it comes to actual, concrete, real-world geopolitical events.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at the same time it is you know Superman is a fable for children and it going to break down anything complex into something simple
--:-- Noel King: And if the simplest version of that idea is hey the big militaristic country is bullying the small defenseless country, and that's wrong, and you should help people.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: And if you're offended by the simplest version of that idea that a five-year-old can understand, that's more of a personal problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has anyone involved with this movie come out and talked about the intention of the politics of this movie?
--:-- Noel King: I guess we can't say this movie is apolitical because it does feel like it is trying to say something.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: I think that thing is don't kill people, be nice, but I can't be sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I believe James Gunn has said in an interview that when he was writing the geopolitical aspect of this movie, the conflict in Gaza was not on his mind.
--:-- Noel King: But I think regardless of the intent, what seems to be a much more interesting conversation is the fact that so many people are reading into it a parallel to Israel and Palestine.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: Without a doubt, that is genuinely the most pro-Palestine I have seen a mainstream film ever be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, that was good.
--:-- Noel King: Superman truly was for the people.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: Even if James Gunn came out and swore on his mother's life, that this was not an analog to Israel-Palestine, they're just, it's lying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that speaks to the way this particular issue has taken over our mainstream consciousness.
--:-- Noel King: A few years ago, if they'd seen this exact movie, they may not have had that same reaction.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: Whereas now, that's one of the first things people think about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't think the film has a, you know, a coherent ideology around Zionism or something like that.
--:-- Noel King: I think it's just, you know, big militaristic bully takes on small, weak country.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: People might be going to see a movie like this to sort of forget for maybe two hours about Israel and Gaza and Russia and Ukraine and I don't know, the president of the United States, whatever it might be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the fact that this movie might not be a complete escape from those news stories, those crises, deterring people from seeing it?
--:-- Noel King: I can't speak to what any one individual might feel about why they might or might not want to see this movie.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: But at the same time, Superman is a character that's been around almost a century, and he has such a distinct place in American pop culture that I have to question, you know, unless you're completely unfamiliar with the character, you've never heard of him, what are you expecting from a Superman movie?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A character whose motto for the longest time has been truth, justice, and the American way.
--:-- Noel King: You know, he comes saddled with political baggage, whether you like it or not.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: So there is going to be escapism, but only to a degree, because the reason a character like Superman exists is to, you know, whether it's for adults or for children, to confront questions about doing what is ostensibly right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the function of Superman, you know, as a character.
--:-- Noel King: His function is to, I suppose, simplify moral questions we might think of as too complex to address in a single sentence.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: You know, this even comes up early on in the movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Recently, you've come under a lot of fire for what some might... I don't know, it's a lot of fire. It's a lot.
--:-- Noel King: Lois Lane is talking about the political complexities of the conflict between the fictional countries, Borrevia and Jaranthpur.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, the Secretary of Defense said he was going to look into your actions.
--:-- Noel King: That's funny. My actions?
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: And Superman's whole outlook on it is, no, I have to save people. I have to, you know, do the right thing and protect people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's all that matters.
--:-- Noel King: I stopped a war.
--:-- Siddhant Adlaka: And whether he's talking about a complex conflict in the Middle East or he's talking about saving a cat from a tree, it is going to make you think about the way you approach the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I don't think it's as simple as, you know, a movie entirely removing you from reality versus confronting it.
--:-- Noel King: I think it's, you know, it's a Superman movie at the end of the day and it will have a certain relationship to reality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sidant Adlaka has written a few pieces about Superman for Vulture, but the one most germane to our conversation today is titled Superman Was Always an Immigrant.
--:-- Noel King: Since it seems like people need a reminder of who this character has always been, we're going to ask the person a lot of Superman superfans say wrote the best Superman comic ever when we return on Today Explained.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from Adio]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Noel King: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Noel King: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Noel King: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Noel King: You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's attio.com slash todayexplained.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from Upwork]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork If you run a business you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time
--:-- Noel King: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there. I would love to know. Please email me, noelle at king.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Upwork, you can find specialized freelancers in IT, web development, AI, design, admin support, marketing, and more.
--:-- Noel King: Experts who they say are ready to help you take your business to the next level.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With more than two decades of experience, Upwork has a simple and ambitious goal to pioneer a better way of working.
--:-- Noel King: Companies at every stage turn to Upwork to get things done and find more flexibility in the way they staff key projects and initiatives by accessing a global marketplace full of top talent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plus, Upwork makes posting your job easy with no cost to join.
--:-- Noel King: You can register, browse freelancer profiles, get help drafting a job post, or even book a consultation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free.
--:-- Noel King: That is Upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talents ready to help your business grow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from Adio]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Noel King: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Noel King: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Noel King: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Noel King: You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's attio.com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today it's flame. I can't believe it. I just, I just.
--:-- Grant Morrison: I grew up on the west coast of Scotland, right next to an American nuclear base.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My parents were anti-nuclear activists.
--:-- Grant Morrison: You know, my father was a World War II soldier who became a peacenik.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so my big fear in the world was the atom bomb, and I kind of associated it with the Americans.
--:-- Grant Morrison: But the Americans also brought the comics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Comic books changed Grant's life.
--:-- Grant Morrison: The whole idea for me was that the atom bomb terrified me then I discovered Superman and I suddenly realized Superman's a better idea than the atom bomb the atom bomb and Superman both started out as ideas and I like this one better and although I knew no real Superman was coming to save me from an actual atom bomb that would metaphorically really solved a lot of problems for my head when I was a little kid so that those are the primal roots for me and they're quite deep.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yeah, getting a chance to do that character, sitting here overlooking that same stretch of water, you know, where we did the protest and associates with my father and with the bomb and so many things and comic books as well, to write All-Star Superman kind of defy the forces of entropy because I feel that if anything survives in my career, it will be that one book.
--:-- Grant Morrison: All-Star Superman is widely regarded by the Superman heads out there as the GOAT, the greatest Superman comic series ever written, ever, in like almost 90 years of Superman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked Grant who the Superman was that he created in that series.
--:-- Grant Morrison: I think while we went for an older Superman, our basic idea was that what if Superman was dying and he had a year to live?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, it's a part of Lex Luthor's scheme.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He sends Superman to the sun and the solar radiation overcharges Superman's cells.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they begin to decay and die.
--:-- Grant Morrison: So it's basically Superman's dying of cancer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No one can repair the sun but me, Lois.
--:-- Grant Morrison: I'm turning into pure energy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the idea of what would this man do in the last 12 months of his life to leave the earth is a better place than he found it.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Were you surprised to find out that James Gunn wanted to relaunch this character and and relaunch an entire cinematic universe, as they come to call it now, with your story about a dying Superman?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, well, I mean, I think what, James didn't necessarily take the dying part of it, because I've seen the movie now and obviously went in a very different direction.
--:-- Grant Morrison: His is a younger Superman, but I think he certainly took the character as we decided to refine it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he saw something in that that he could work with, the idea of, you know, instead of Superman having flaws, let's present a fictional character who doesn't have our flaws.
--:-- Grant Morrison: You know, he has problems of his own.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He still can't get the girl.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He still works for a boss in an office.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he's Superman.
--:-- Grant Morrison: You know, he's a kind of everyman whose life happens at a much higher scale than us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think James Gunn took that notion of Superman.
--:-- Grant Morrison: You know, he's very much us, but played on a larger, more operatic stage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's got an unruly dog.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Crypto!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But his unruly dog can laser his own dinner and cook a steak.
--:-- Grant Morrison: His unruly dog can fly through buildings, but he's still dealing with an unruly dog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Crypto!
--:-- Grant Morrison: Ow! Ow! Stop it! Stop! Sit! Sit! Stay!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For me, what I loved about that is, rather than previous attempts, people have sort of said, what would Superman be like if he was in the real world?
--:-- Grant Morrison: Which to me is an absurd question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He'll never be in the real world.
--:-- Grant Morrison: The only existence Superman has in the real world is as a comic book or a movie character.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's where he's most useful and most functional as far as I'm concerned.
--:-- Grant Morrison: So again, I think James took that notion of, let's not ask ourselves the ridiculous question, what would it be like if Superman was real?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because the answer to that is usually he would be super corrupt.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And you get things like the character Homelander from the boys' TV show, who's a kind of evil Superman, who's representative of all the worst elements of America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You people should be thanking Christ that I am who and what I am because you need me.
--:-- Grant Morrison: But we thought that the original Superman is the best and most useful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a fictional character.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He's a metaphor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's an allegory.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He stands for everything that is good in us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like there have been at least some iterations of this character throughout his nearly century of existence from your dying version to this ideal version to this all-powerful version.
--:-- Grant Morrison: But I believe Superman even started as a bit of a tough guy, like a head basher, and I think maybe even a left-wing revolutionary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can you tell us about the non-Kryptonian origins of this character, like how he came to be on Earth?
--:-- Grant Morrison: Well, he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was created by two teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who'd met at school, and Jerry was the writer and Joe was the artist.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And they wanted to work for newspapers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Newspaper syndication was the kind of place to go for cartoons back then.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And they were working on this notion called the Superman
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The original version was an evil bald guy who eventually became Lex Luthor in the Superman story
--:-- Grant Morrison: But after a few tries they hit on this fabulous notion of let's give him a wrestling costume with a cape so that we can track his movement across the panels and make him very colourful so that he's memorable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kent steps into the storeroom, closes the door behind him and in a few brief seconds has made the transformation from the mild-mannered bespectacular reporter to the red-caped blue costume figure of Superman.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And then the greatest addition to the design was to put his monogram on his chest so that the character's entire identity is summed up in this really very simple advertising motif that people can remember and people can also wear and partake in that sense of being Superman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yeah, it was created by two young kids who were the sons of immigrants, European immigrants, Jewish boys, and this was their vision of the Superman.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Who can bend steel in his bare hands, race a speeding bullet to its target, and who mingles with ordinary men disguised as Clark Kent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was a do-gooder, he was here to help people, he'd come from a distant world, but he saw the only use for power and strength was to help the downtrodden and help the oppressed.
--:-- Grant Morrison: So yeah, as you see, those early issues of action comics depict a Superman who very much is an outlaw, you know, he just goes after corrupt union bosses, he goes after mine owners, He goes after politicians who are corrupt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he's that person and he's quite scary.
--:-- Grant Morrison: What I always say is Superman later was seen as a messianic figure of hope, which I don't really like, because I think what he is, he's a fighter, he's a scrapper.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He gets into fights on behalf of the little guy.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And he gets bloodied up and he gets up again and he's shooting with a tank shell.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He gets up again.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And that's the character that he was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so as you see, through the years that changed quite radically.
--:-- Grant Morrison: You know, the socialist figure of the early years hit 1942 and suddenly it was war and Superman became incredibly patriotic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's where the truth, justice and the American way thing first appears.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Anyone who tries to tell you that a man can't be a good American because he's a Catholic or a Jew or Protestant or whatever, you can be pretty sure he's a rotten American himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not only a rotten American, but a rotten human being.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Then in the 50s Superman changes again completely you're dealing with guys coming home from the war and dealing with domestication and living in suburbia so Superman becomes a family drama like I say but on a titanic scale he has friends from the future who visit and cause trouble he has a cousin who survived Krypton he has a dog he has a monkey he has all of this stuff and they added a lot of lore so Superman then to me was probably at his peak but he was representative of masculinity post-war trying to adjust to a world of relatives and being not necessarily married but very much those stories were obsessed with the relationship stuff with Lois you know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it was that.
--:-- Grant Morrison: In the 60s, he becomes Cosmic Seeker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the 60s, again, he almost goes back to his roots.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And we have stories where he's fighting for Native American land rights, and he's up against polluters, and very much back to the activist Superman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it goes in the 80s.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He's a yuppie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the 90s, they kill him in order to make it interesting.
--:-- Grant Morrison: And then bring it back very much as a soap opera set around the Daily Planet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And into the 2000s, you get the work that I did.
--:-- Grant Morrison: It's funny to hear you, you know, lay out this history in which Superman at one point is something of a socialist warrior because all of these pundits who are mad about James Gunn saying that Superman's an immigrant, if they really knew the history here, there's so much more they could be mad about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Absolutely.
--:-- Grant Morrison: As you say if anyone had bothered to look at the history of Superman they'd see that he was always an immigrant created by immigrants he represented that experience but he was assimilated I mean the whole thing was he was an American he'd been raised by American parents a baby it's alive how could it be that was very important as well and I think the combination of these two qualities is what maybe drives people mad because they want it to be either one thing or another.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Superman's trying to embody everyone.
--:-- Grant Morrison: The thing that we talk about the first half of the show is that, you know, depending on how tuned into the news you are, you can see a lot of what's going on in the world today in this movie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But of course, this movie wasn't made this week.
--:-- Grant Morrison: It was made, you know, a year ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The meetings about this movie probably started five years ago.
--:-- Grant Morrison: Do you think there's something about the nature of Superman that makes him timeless?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I definitely believe that.
--:-- Grant Morrison: As I've said many times, we're talking about the history of Superman, which goes back to 1938.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Superman has outlived his creators.
--:-- Grant Morrison: He's also outlived the people who took over from his creators and the next generation of the people who took over from his creators.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As I often say Superman is more real than I am he's more real than most of us he will outlive us all and he'll still have meaning to people in the future and because he looks like nothing else people have even forgotten that that was based on early 20th century circus strongman and wrestling outfits people have forgotten that so now it's the template for the superhero this ideal of the superhero and he's got because he was the first he got the best name the most primal name.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I absolutely think Superman will persist like Sherlock Holmes and characters like that, way beyond even the next few generations.
--:-- Grant Morrison: As long as the world stays together and there's such a thing as culture, I think there'll still be a Superman that is recognisable to us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Grant Morrison writes comic books from the most excellent order of the British Empire. All-Star Superman is the place to start.
--:-- Laura Bullard: I fact-checked today's show.
--:-- Amina Alsadi: I edited it.
--:-- Patrick Boyd: I mixed it.
--:-- Rebecca Ibarra: I produced this episode of Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You
