I think him being exposed is a larger part of that. It points to the theme of secrets and of what makes a good secret and what makes a controllable secret.

I think it does point to a larger theme, though, that for so long he was able to hide behind just a pair of glasses. Maybe you could argue that Superman's bar for suspension of disbelief is a little bit higher than some other characters, but that's always just been a part of who he is. Anytime you approach a fantasy character, there's a certain level of suspension of disbelief that you are asked to participate in. Yeah, I mean I think that was always part of it. Do you think part of this story is attacking that notion head-on? This is like a Saturday Night Live joke, but there's something to it. In an era of facial recognition software, any number of organizations should be able to spot him fairly quickly. It plays into the idea of his being able to hold on to a secret identity. How does Superman, who embodies an older idea of the future, interact with a newer embodiment of the future? That's kind of what I wanted to play with in #42 and #43. I read somewhere that the idea of privacy doesn't really resonate with teenagers these days because they kind of just assume that they're always going to be recorded and there's going to be no privacy. The way human beings interact with information now and how we expect to interact with it in the future is really different. Nowadays, in terms of the future, we think in terms of information. Superman was this really fast, really strong guy. We're taking away a lot of the things that people associate with the character: We took away the spitcurl, we took away the cape, most of his costume so that all he has is the shield on a t-shirt, and within the context of that I think each of us is exploring a different aspect.įor me, Superman's always been called the Man of Tomorrow and when he was created, he did embody a lot of what we thought of as the future: Back then Americans thought of the future in terms of physical power so we thought of things getting faster and things getting stronger, and Superman was that. I think as a team, what we want to do is to strip Superman down to his core. In the course of this story, do you and John have a particular element of Superman that you're exploring in this title, versus what Greg is tackling in Action Comics, for instance?

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