Star Trek’s Michael Dorn says his DC Steel book harkens back to the real John Henry legend

polygon.com:

Star Trek’s Michael Dorn voiced the first TV version of the superhero Steel in two episodes of Superman: The Animated Series, and I wouldn’t blame him for forgetting. The show was made a quarter of a century ago (aired in the wake of the 1997 release of the Shaquille O’Neal Steel movie) and Dorn was busy enough evolving his best-known role of Worf through the latter seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

But when DC Comics reached out to the actor, Dorn tells Polygon, he absolutely remembered the role. “It stands out because he is a Black character.”

This June, DC will publish Steelworks, a new series written by Dorn and drawn by Sami Basri centered on John Henry Irons, the engineer who built his own supersuit to protect Metropolis in the wake of Superman’s death. Like Iron Man, if he wasn’t an asshole. For Dorn, the series is all about John the superhero and John Henry the American legend.

Dorn told Polygon that aside from Steel’s rarity as a Black superhero role in the 1990s, he remembered the Superman voiceover gig because of his own vivid memories of the American folklore figure John Henry, specifically in George Pal’s rather haunting 1946 stop-motion retelling.

“John Henry was this guy who could drill railroad spikes faster than anybody, and he goes against the machine;” Dorn said, “he beats the machine but he dies in the process.” As a child, he remembers finding John Henry’s death disappointing and upsetting, and only later developed an appreciation for the legend’s enduring theme of the necessity and dangers of fighting more metaphorical machines.

“Ain’t no machine made can beat a man,” John Henry declares in Pal’s short, “once a man got a mind he can beat that machine.” For his John Henry Irons, Dorn says,