Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

It reminded me that one of the most enlightening things I realized about superheroes was when I noticed that recent Superman movies try too hard to tie the Man of Steel to Jesus with a bunch of transparent cinematic metaphors. The best way to imagine Superman is as a messiah, but explicitly not Jesus: He is the messiah as imagined by a Jewish kid raised on mid-20th-century science fiction.

View on HN

The Amazing Adventures of Klavier and Clay by Michael Chabon touches on this idea. One of my favorite contemporary novels and a really fun read.

The original Superman , the comics one is more like Moses, now the movies are "converting" him in Jesus-alike.

Superman's origin story in both Movies and Comics is absolutely based on Moses.

But I don't think Superman really acts like Jesus, or Moses would in any situation.

I'm curious how you think the comics express Superman's personality or actions differently than the movies?

In the absence of anything other than a common origin, it may not be based on Moses. The story of Moses abandonment and adoption is itself a retelling of an older Sumerian myth, and thst was probably a retelling as well.

Go far enough back, and it's a metaphor for the fact that humanity themselves are descended from aliens, rather than evolved from terrestrial primates. Perhaps humans remembered this in ancient Sumeria or before? See also: The Jungle Book.

We’re all just Golgafrinchan middle managers.

That would be Sargon I:

http://www.fortfairfieldjournal.com/fte/060717.html

There's a great big book about it. Google, the company famed for having the greatest command of search and machine learning on the planet, classifies it under "abandoned children":

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Sargon_Legend.htm...

To be fair, Jesus was also the messiah as imagined by Jewish people, just a bit earlier in time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com