Interesting article at MTV.com today:
Here's my reply:
The best "dark" Superman story? "The Incredibles". Disavowed by the world he's sworn to protect, forced into a life on tedious monotony, unable to fulfil his destiny, so fixated on his lost glory that he can't appreciate the love of his family - that's pretty dark. And then when he is finally free to pursue heroism again he finds that those he loves are his greatest vulnerability.
Unfortunately, "Superman Returns" had a chance to have such a profound storyline, and completely dropped the ball (other than making Superman a deadbeat dad to a disabled kid, which is really dark, but unintentionally so). Superman gone from Earth for six years to visit his dead homeworld returns to find... that nothing has changed, and in fact somehow Lois Lane instead of six years older is somehow younger (she must have been one of those tragic pregnant highschoolers/veteran newspaper reporters you read so much about these days).
How much more profound would it have been for Superman to return to Earth to find that while he was chasing the memory of a world that no longer exists, the home that had adopted him as their own was passing him by? Instead of six years, make it the actual 30 years since Superman II, cast Margot Kidder again (I'm only being slightly facetious). Now Superman is a man with no home - so caught up in the fate of Krypton that he lost Earth. That's Superman's greatest weakness - as much as he wants to be from Earth, he will always be an alien, and the people he strives so hard to protect will eventually succumb to their own human mortality and there's nothing he can do about it. His power is his prison.
Further, Superman is a hopeful character because he is meant to embody all that is great about America. America itself is such a darker concept now than it was during Superman's Golden Era that it should darken Superman correspondingly. The best "dark" Superman I've read is in "The Dark Knight Returns". Frank Miller captured the essence that if Superman serves as America's greatest weapon, than he is inevitably colored by how America chooses to use that weapon. If Superman is trapped between following the orders of his adopted homeland or following his moral code, Superman would gain some of the complexity that has lifted the Batman reboot into epic status.
