After his X-ray death vision, young Clark (Dylan Sprayberry) locks himself in a Smallville school closet. Man of Steel, the new reboot of the Superman franchise, has just such a scene. But if you were a 12-year-old who suddenly learned he had X-ray vision, it would freak you out. Later in Man of Steel, as the adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), he will use this gift to perform instant laser surgery on Lois (Amy Adams). It’s not a gift but a curse, unless Superman were to give up his day job and become the infallible detector of cancer in its early, curable stages. Real radiology, focused on a human form, would reveal the bones and organs, and perhaps the diseases, within. The X-ray vision, for example: it doesn’t penetrate walls, to detect lurking villains it wouldn’t undress Lois down to her undies, as Christopher Reeve did to Margot Kidder in the 1978 Superman movie. It’s fine that they had a figure to mirror the deathless hero they imagined as their alter ego - but they didn’t think things through. Now about those kids, all those generations of Superman fanciers. If anything has survived and thrived in the three-quarters of a century since the Man of Steel was born into the American consciousness, it’s superhero comic books and their billion-dollar descendants, superhero movies. And you can’t change clothes in an iPhone there’s no app for that. The daily newspaper is threatened by the Internet more than Metropolis ever was by Lex Luthor. As the prime mode of long-distance business travel, trains gave way to planes and then to Skype.
Dated is the word to be applied to Superman’s accoutrements today. 1 in June 1938 - 75 years ago this month. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced the first four-color superhero in the pages of Action Comics No. That notion of manliness is now as antique as locomotives, phone booths and great metropolitan newspapers. And your X-ray vision comes in handy when you stroll past the girls’ locker room. Sure, Lois Lane, the cutie-pie on the school newspaper, pretends to ignore the Clark Kent whom you appear to be in class, but she adores the inner you, your secret Superman: strong, noble, virile and darned near indestructible, except for your Achilles’ heel, Kryptonite. Outracing a locomotive, bending steel like licorice, leaping tall buildings, flying around saving people and sneaking into phone booths to slip out of your civvies and into your form-fitting red-and-blue outfit, with a cape as a manly fashion flourish. Follow Superman was so cool that’s what decades of comics-reading boys thought.