Superheroes generally have one power of which even they remain unaware: they don’t age.
We long-time fans here in the real world watched an unsettling progression: when we were children, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the others were older than we were. Then a few years later, they were our age. And now they’re much younger than we are.
“Like Umberto Eco’s commentary on Superman being a significant character because of his temporal ambiguity, superheroes’ experiences of time are much different than characters in other genres,” noted Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature.
“(S)uperhero stories never end (because there’s always a next issue)… We all want to live forever, or at the very least, pass into a world where we do live forever with all the people we love. This romantic idea is embodied by our superheroes, whom we love as cultural icons. Since we can’t live forever, superheroes have to live forever for us.”
In other words, Superman never gets any older, except when he does.
One way to look at Superman, and superheroes in general, is as a funhouse mirror exaggeration of ordinary human life. Certain stories make that especially clear.
One fact of human life is that there’s no escape from the ravages of aging, except the unpalatable one of an early death (which is hardly a solution).
In old age, we human beings have to face the fact that our powers will fail, and we will lose many of the people and things we love, one by one.
And even Superman is made to face that fact in writer Otto Binder and artist Curt Swan’s story Superman’s Old Age! (Action Comics 270, Nov. 1960).
While visiting Midvale Orphanage for a feature story, Clark Kent interviews Linda Lee, who is secretly Supergirl (then unknown to the public). Linda gives him a short story she’s written imagining her future career as Superwoman, and Clark takes it home to read in his apartment, where he falls asleep in a chair.
Readers are told that an earlier brush with kryptonite had weakened him, just in case we were to suspect him of napping on his never-ending job.
Clark awakens to spot a runaway rocket from Cape Canaveral flying wild over Metropolis. Zooming up to smash it, Superman accidentally exceeds the speed of light and finds himself decades in the future.
“People’s clothing, the buildings … they’re all changed! Everything is different except me!”
But there he’s wrong. Catching his reflection in a window, Superman is shocked to see that he’s now an elderly man.
And more shocks are coming. Attempting to move a stalled “rocketmobile” that has blocked traffic, Superman finds his super-strength gone.
“Give up, old man!” says the contemptuous driver. “Here comes someone who can help me.”
Superwoman arrives to move the vehicle, treating Superman as if he’s suffering from senile dementia and is confused about his powers
“Oh, I’ve explained that a dozen times,” she says. “The many times you were exposed to kryptonite radiations through the years finally weakened you permanently. I guess it weakened your super-memory too or you would recall that you became a normal man years ago!”
Despondent, thinking of himself as “an old, broken-down has-been,” Superman changes to Clark Kent and goes to the Daily Planet, where the stout, middle-aged editor Jimmy Olsen greets him as Superman. Olsen reminds him that he’d revealed his secret identity long ago when he’d lost his powers.
Linda Lee, who has taken his place as a reporter, shows him the copy for a story she’s writing, but he can’t read the fine print without his glasses. His former disguise has become his reality.
Lana Lang is wealthy and married. Bizarro is a powerless vagrant. Lex Luthor has reformed, cured cancer and become the mayor of Metropolis.
Superman sees a white dog in a tattered red cape scrounging for food, then watches helplessly as his pet is captured and taken to the pound.
“There goes Krypto, my last friend, out of my reach!” he thinks.
But he has one more friend left — Lois Lane.
On the cover, an elderly Lois bears down on the depressed superhero, wanting at least an apology for the fact that she wasted her life waiting for him.
“Doesn’t it make you think of the old days, Superman, when you had all your super powers?” she asks him. “And aren’t you sorry that I’ve become an old maid?”
Superman denied himself romantic love and family life in order to devote himself to the welfare of others who have now almost entirely forgotten him.
In the story, Lois suggests they forget their regrets and spend their last years together.
“Yes, Lois, I’ve lost my super powers, so there’s no reason why we can’t marry … but … uh … I feel dizzy! What’s happening?” Superman says, apparently fading back into the past.
“Please come back, my darling,” pleads the bereft Lois. “Please! I’ll always love you!”
In fact, it was all a dream Clark had sitting in his chair. But it’s wised him up a bit.
The next day, Lois is startled to find flowers from Superman waiting for her at her desk.
“Goodness,” she says. “Why is he suddenly treating me so nicely?”
“Who knows, Lois?” Clark replies. “Maybe he … er … is thinking how lonely old age can be if he has no, uh, companion by his side!”
Superman was at his most powerful during this era — traveling through time, moving planets around — and yet several of the stories from this period featured him as ineffectual and powerless, one way or another — old and weak, overwhelmed by Super-Menace, tricked and murdered by Luthor, and so forth.
“This story also fits in with the ‘rejection’ motif of many 1960 Superman family stories,” observed comics historian Michel E. Grost. “These tales, often written by Jerry Siegel, deal with the rejection of the protagonist by everyone around him. Binder’s treatment of this theme is less bitter than Siegel’s, but it still packs quite a punch. The story develops considerable pathos.”
Then, as now, youth-obsessed American society tended not to honor its old people, but to warehouse and ignore them. And this story unflinchingly reflects that.
When I was a child reading this issue, I found it impossible to believe that the world could ever forget a figure as famous as Superman. But my view has changed. I’ve learned that the most famous people can be forgotten in a shockingly short time.
For example, ask anyone born since 2000 who “Cary Grant” was, and you’ll most likely be met with a blank stare.
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