Years of Superman fighting Batman warped a symbol of hope into a villain

polygon.com:

There are two Supermans: the Man of Tomorrow, an infant refugee raised on hard work and kind guidance into a man constitutionally dedicated to sharing his vast gifts with humanity; and the Man of Steel, a blazing-eyed alien warrior whose power raises questions about our own helplessness, and whose battles shake the foundations of our planet. And one of them is winning — at least in Hollywood.

The dark, conflicted Superman, or even a Superman who’s gone fully over — Superman as the bad guy — commands the current zeitgeist. The last few years have seen The Boys, with its mercurial demagogue-in-the-making, Homelander; the neck-snapping Superman of Man of Steel through Justice League; the laser-eyed unstoppable force of Ikaris in Marvel’s Eternals. The shadows of breakthrough graphic novels of the 1980s like The Dark Knight Returns (Superman as a loyal tool of American imperialism) and Watchmen (Superman as a being so powerful he ceases to care about humanity) loom over Hollywood nearly three decades after their publication. Smaller productions like Brightburn have even made a bad guy out of the superchild.

It wasn’t always this way: Back in 1978, Christopher Reeves and director Richard Donner delivered a Superman worth believing in. And it’s not that you can’t find the benevolent Superman out there — in comics and on the CW he’s a father and truth teller. But how did our popular imagining of Superman gain this reputation as conflicted and reluctant? Naive and unwitting? As a stooge of the silent majority? Or as a tyrant in waiting?

The snap judgment might be that today’s creators view cynicism as hand in hand with sophistication, or misunderstand the character’s classic incarnation and assume it lacks the depth to