Mesocosm

Last night I dreamt that I was talking to a friend about Superman, and how much his selfless heroism meant to us as children.

Before I fell asleep, I was thinking about my old post on the orphan hero, and I guess it put thoughts of Superman in my head.

I remember being really moved by the Richard Donner Superman movies as a kid. I recently saw the director’s cut of Superman II, and had forgotten how much he really seemed to care about people, and how frightened he was that they might be harmed. It’s rather moving, especially in a world of bad-ass anti-heroes.

That bodhisattva-like altruism also came across beautifully in Grant Morrison’s superb limited run The All-Star Superman.

Morrison is pretty much my favorite comic book author, but he’s hit or miss when it comes to established titles. He can’t help bringing his personal oddball interests into play, and that works great in a series like The Invisibles, which is built for it, and is, incidentally, the best comic book series ever written. But when Batman starts talking about Dzogchen (as he does in Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. run), it comes across as forced.

Somehow, in his Superman run, he really nailed the essence of the character in a wonderful way. And if you ever see the documentary Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods, you can hear about how he was meditating on how to treat the character and the story, when he ran into a guy on the street dressed in a Superman costume. Morrison approached Superman and asked him a lot of questions about himself, and the guy replied completely in character, saying some remarkable things, like “Batman is a great man, but he doesn’t truly believe in people.”

Anyway, the point of this story is that later on in the dream, I received a dream notification from D. C. comics, warning me not to use Superman’s likeness in my dreams without their permission (really). I was unsure how concerned I should be, but it was a little anxiety-provoking.

Most likely, D. C. comics, possibly in collaboration with NSA, has developed the technology necessary to monitor dreams for copyright violations.