Geek Punditry #157: One Year Later-What Is Superman?

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Yesterday, January 1st, was the first day since 2024 that I didn’t read, watch, or listen to anything related to Superman.

And I missed doing it.

Unless you’ve been living under a Kryptonite rock, you know that at the end of 2024, enthused for the then-upcoming James Gunn movie, I declared that 2025 would be my Year of Superman, and for the next 365 days I adhered to that. Every day for a solid year I read comics, watched movies and TV shows, listened to podcasts, and otherwise spent time with stories featuring my favorite superhero and his extended family. 52 blog posts later (all of which are archived right here, by the way) it’s time for me to look back and think about what it all means to me.

Nailed it.

To begin with, I don’t do this very often, but I’ve got to congratulate myself for actually accomplishing the goal. In that original column when I announced the project, I said that I would give myself grace, fully expecting that at some point in the year I would slip up and miss a day. And let me tell you, there were days in 2025 in which I didn’t want to read or watch anything. Bad days came and I didn’t want to do much more than retreat to my own Fortress of Solitude. But I didn’t. I made it without missing a single day. Let’s talk about what that means by the numbers. Over the course of 2025, the media I consumed included:

That’s – and keep in mind that I’m referring to myself here – batshit insane. If I wasn’t teaching or spending time with my wife and kid, I spent the year immersed in Superman. I don’t know if David Corenswet spent as much time in 2025 thinking about Superman as I did. So after all that…what does it mean? What have I learned about him? 

The truth is, I find that the things I already believed were mostly affirmed. Superman has been around for nearly 90 years now, and in that time there have been many stories told about him and many different interpretations of the character. And that’s all fine. But let me tell you about MY Superman, what I get from the character, why he matters so damned much to ME.

In Man of Steel, Henry Cavill popularized to the mainstream something that had been part of the comics for a few years at that point, that the S-shield Superman wears, the emblem of the House of El (at least going back to the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie) was a Kryptonian symbol for hope. But what exactly does that mean? Is it just because Superman is so powerful? Is it because when you see that symbol, you know that the danger you’re in is only temporary, that somebody will be there to save you? Is that “S” just for “Superman,” or does it also mean “Savior?”

Yeah. That guy. Any of him.

Superman’s story has a lot of allusions to Christianity, with Marlon Brando’s Jor-El even referring to Kal-El as “my only son,” but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish and the story perhaps fit the concept of Moses even better. If you’ll forgive a brief moment of spirituality, Jesus was sent as the Savior of the human race in a direct way, and we get that whenever Superman saves someone falling from a burning building, leaps in front of a speeding bullet, or stops a locomotive to save the kid stuck on the tracks. Moses, on the other hand, was a less direct kind of savior, a leader, someone who GUIDES his people to a better world. And it is in this capacity that the parallels to Superman are stronger. Sure, Superman will save you from a flood, but more importantly, he’s there to show you that there’s a better way.

Let’s say it one more time: It’s not subtle.

It’s almost a cliche to say it at this point, but Superman’s greatest power is not his strength, his speed, his ability to fly or see through walls. His greatest power is his compassion, his unflinching belief in the goodness of people, and his ability to help others see things that way as well. Superman is the man who will never give up on you: no matter who you are or what you’ve done, he will always have faith in your ability to be better. 

If you’re going to wear that shield, Kenan, you need to remember this.

In the climax of the new movie, David Corenswet tells Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor that his greatest strength is his humanity, and that he hopes for the good of the world that some day Luthor will realize the same thing about himself. From anybody else, that line would sound trite, pat, and cloying. From Superman, you believe it. The tragedy of Lex Luthor is not that he’s a criminal or a killer or anything else. That makes him a villain. What makes him a tragic figure, what Superman laments every time he faces him, is that he has a mind that could make the world a better place, but chooses to use it selfishly. And every time he faces Luthor, Superman hopes that this will be the time that Luthor sees the light. It’s even happened in the comics a few times, where Lex has turned good. It’s always been temporary, of course, except for in self-contained continuities like All-Star Superman, but we’ve seen time and again that even Lex Luthor has within him a seed of redemption. We’ve seen time and again that Superman is right. And if he’s right – if even LEX LUTHOR has the potential to be a better person tomorrow than he is today – then what does that mean for the rest of us?

Superman believes the best in you. And he inspires you to believe the best in others. In the final episode of Superman and Lois we see him in flight with his extended family of heroes, and we learn that he and Lois manage to change their world for the better. In Final Night, we are reminded that half the superheroes in the world look to him as inspiration (the other half, naturally, look to Batman). The whole point of The Iron Giant is that the Giant himself – an alien weapon – looks to the example of Superman and sees that he can make himself better.

The Giant gets it better than anybody on BlueSky.

We cannot bend steel in our bare hands. We cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound. We cannot change the course of mighty rivers, or freeze those rivers with our breath. We cannot fly through space unaided, travel through time, or crush a lump of coal into a diamond. Those things are beyond us.

But we can believe in the best of each other. And maybe, if we do enough of that, those others will actually begin to earn that trust. And maybe, if we do enough of that, we can learn to believe in the best of ourselves.

We should believe the best of ourselves.

Because Superman would.

And remind yourself, in those times where you’re dangling off the edge of that cliff and you think you’ll never make it, that Superman would believe in you. 

And who are you to tell Superman that he’s wrong?

And don’t you forget it.

So now what?

Some people, after spending an entire year dwelling on a single character, would get tired of it. I…I’m not. I want more Superman. And there’s so much more to come. There’s the Supergirl movie coming out later this year, of course. And a new season of My Adventures of Superman is also scheduled to drop some time in 2026. Next year we’ll get Man of Tomorrow. DC Comics has announced some really interesting things for the ongoing Superman comics after the current DC KO event wraps up that I’m certainly going to want to talk about. DC has also teased the return of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and come on, if Superman’s not involved with that in some way, what are we even doing? And let’s not forget that in March, after decades apart, Superman is finally going to meet Marvel’s friendly neighborhood webslinger again in a new Superman/Spider-Man crossover.

We’re back, baby!

Then there’s all the stuff on my list that I just didn’t get around to this year: John Ostrander’s amazing miniseries The Kents, Grant Morrison’s DC One Million event (which – let’s be honest – is a Superman story at its core), or the “world without Superman” Elseworlds series Justice League: The Nail. There are still several animated films I didn’t get to watch. I had hoped to do an entire week on fanfilms, but ran out of time. And I had stories picked out for weeks focusing on Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, and other characters that didn’t get scratched off the list. 

The truth is, I don’t want to stop reading, watching, or writing about Superman. I just don’t want to HAVE to do it EVERY DAY. 

So consider this my official announcement. Starting in 2026 and going on…well, as long as I wanna do it, I’ll be bringing you SUPERMAN STUFF right here on the blog. Sometimes it’ll be new comics, new movies, new TV shows. Sometimes it’ll be classic stuff that I haven’t talked about before. I’ll still endeavor to have at least one blog post a week, but they won’t be as long as they were in 2025 (you’re welcome) and they may not necessarily always be on a Wednesday. 

The world of Superman is vast, and despite the mountain of stuff that I mentioned in the list above, there’s plenty more to dig into. The regular Geek Punditry blog here on Fridays won’t change. But I’m going to continue to devote real estate here to talking about the characters and stories that I love. 

Because there’s something to be learned here. And it’s a lesson we can all use.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. To all the people who sent him messages urging him to make 2026 “The Year of Captain Underpants,” he considered it. A little.

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