A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called The Problem with Young Justice Superman talking about my dissatisfaction with Clark Kent’s portrayal in the named cartoon (particularly in Season 1, because there’s just not a much to say about him in the other seasons due to his minimal appearances – which I suppose is a problem in and of itself). The other day, I talked about Young Justice Superman and Superboy on the CBR Comics Forum, and I figured I’d share a slightly modified version of that on this blog. (The CBR thread contains a lot of interesting discussion of Superboy, so I recommend it for anyone interested.) In it, I was basically responding to the idea that Superboy having issues with wanting Superman to be a father figure to him, and Superman failing to live up to that, is a good thing that should be included in future media.
Young Justice is a good show, and certainly much more watched than the comics are read, but its depiction of Superman and Conner’s relationship is bad and not something I want to see emulated. If you’re going to be pedantic and say that he technically is a son and not a clone because he has 50% of Superman’s DNA, I could be pedantic and say we don’t know that he was formed by a sperm and egg meeting. I don’t think we should define their relationship by biological technicalities. His conception is clearly not the normal way children come about on either a biological or social level. And it’s obviously nothing close to a typical deadbeat dad situation, considering Clark had no involvement in his creation.
While Season 1 of YJ was great, the handling of Superman was a blemish on it. It made Clark seem unappealing and frankly kind of lame (as I discussed in the past blog post). But the one thing I actually like about it is how it implied (by Clark eventually calling Conner “little brother”) that trying to force Clark into a traditional parental role despite the unusual situation was harmful or at least not conducive to their relationship getting better.
I feel like Conner’s DNA and precedent in non-comics media isn’t really enough of a reason to emphasize the idea of Clark being his father. Obviously, it’s fine to like the idea, but I personally don’t. It feels a bit inauthentic to me. Relationships are not defined by DNA or a person’s origin and I think that’s a good theme to be present in the Super-family, considering Clark himself was adopted. It also risks making Clark look bad unnecessarily.