Now that superheroes have conquered the box office, the time is right for a movie like Brightburn. Produced by James Gunn, directed by David Yarovesky, and written by Brian and Mark Gunn, Brightburn is a dark revisioning of the Superman story: an alien boy with fantastic powers, raised by a kindly couple, suddenly turns violent, using his abilities to destroy regular humans.
The movie’s conceit plays on an unsettling principle implied by all superhero stories. While we cheer when the good guy zaps the baddies with laser eyes or soars across the sky, these people have much greater power than anyone else. We’re only kept safe because they happen to use those powers for good. But what if they didn’t?
We find Brightburn so compelling because it asks that question of the first and greatest superhero, Superman. Born Kal-El of the dying planet Krypton, Superman was sent to Earth as a baby and raised by Kansas farmers Jon and Martha Kent, where he learned the importance of caring for others. Given incredible powers by our yellow sun — including invincibility, unparalleled strength, heat vision, x-ray vision, and a bunch of other stuff writers sometimes make up on the spot — Superman embodies everything good and hopeful about superheroes.
By making Superman evil, Brightburn tells the most potent horror story in superhero fiction. If even the best and most powerful of us can go bad, what hope do we have?
It’s a great premise, one that comic book writers have explored for decades, even those writing about the real, actual Superman, not an homage or parody. We’ve seen plenty of stories in which Superman gets poisoned or mind controlled by a psychic alien starfish (you read that right — comics are rad), but here are eight comic stories in which the real Superman, Clark Kent aka Kal-El of Krypton, knowingly and willfully terrorized on the DC Universe.
1. “The Great Darkness Saga,” The Legion of Super-Heroes #290-294 (1982)
Few who know “The Great Darkness Saga” think of it as an evil Superman story. After all, Superman is only one of four minions serving the arc’s primary villain Darkseid, the nihilistic god who embodies cosmic despair. But Superman’s appearance here becomes more potent when one considers his place in the series’ lore. Inspired by the adventures of the teenage Superboy, the Legion of Super-Heroes consists of idealistic 30th century young people from across the universe using their powers for the good of the galaxy.
Written by Paul Levitz and drawn by Keith Giffen and Larry Mahlstedt, “The Great Darkness Saga” is still considered the greatest Legion of Super-Heroes story, one in which the young heroes — including a time-traveling Superboy — cannot stop Darkseid from conquering the universe. It begins in chapter one, “And the Servant Shall Be A Sign…”, in which a corrupted Superman made of smoldering brimstone attacks the Legionnaires. Bellowing lines like “You have nothing, fool. The darkness shall swallow it all,” the evil Superman easily defeats the heroes before returning to his master.
When Darkseid resurrects the long-dead Man of Steel as a monster, he strikes at the very heart of the team’s ethos. If even the original superhero can be twisted into something evil, what hope do his futuristic followers have against Darkseid?
2. Superman: The Dark Side (1998)
Variations of Superman and other heroes often appear in what DC Comics call their “Elseworld” tales, stories that reimagine familiar characters, telling the adventure of Batman and the Joker as pirates or of Superman raised in Stalin’s Russia.
Written by John Frances Moore with art by Kieron Dwyer and Hilary Barta, the miniseries Superman: The Dark Side has a more complicated wrinkle. His rocket diverted en route to earth, baby Kal-El crashes instead on Apokolips, the hellish planet ruled by Darkseid. Trained to be the dark god’s ultimate enforcer, the Superman razes the peaceful planet New Genesis and even murders Darkseid’s oldest son Kalibak to please his master.
Eventually, a desperate move by the freedom fighter Mister Miracle transports Superman to Earth, where he befriends Lois Lane and discovers something more like his traditional heroic identity. But even when doing good, Superman retains the brutality of his upbringing, and there’s something unforgettably unsettling about seeing the world’s greatest hero marauding in red and black armor (as we’ll see in a moment).
3. The Superman Monster (1999)
In addition to tweaking well-established characters, Elseworlds also allow creators to mashup superhero stories with other types of fiction. Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham places the Dark Knight in the 1910s factory milieu of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, while JLA: The Island of Doctor Moreau imagines H.G. Wells’s vivisector as the creator of the famed super-team.
Written by Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett, The Superman Monster splices the Superman story onto Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, telling the tragic tale of boundary-pushing researcher Viktor Luthor. After his grotesque experiments to reanimate the dead get him barred from 19th century Switzerland’s scientific community, Luthor has a breakthrough when he discovers a crashed space pod, containing the skeleton of an alien child. Guided by Kryptonian technology, Luthor stitches together exhumed bodies to create the Superman, a monster of tremendous power. Artists Anthony Williams and Tom Palmer give us a twisted take on the hero’s iconography, such as the S shield on top of an all-black costume and a disfigured face peering from under his spit-curl.
At times, this Superman shows glimmers of heroism, as when he rescues Luthor from a burning lab or finds peace working on a farm for the elderly Kant family. But when Luthor’s desire to control the Monster results in the Kant’s deaths, the Superman becomes uncontrollable and terrifying. These differing shades offer a different kind of horror to Shelley’s Promethean cautionary tale: instead of suggesting that toying in God’s domain necessarily creates monsters, The Superman Monster suggests that humans can create good living creatures but cannot escape their own depravity.
4. Lex Luthor: Man of Steel (2005)
The Superman Monster works because it contrasts Superman’s otherness to Luthor’s humanity. An in-canon story set in the mainstream DC Universe, Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s mini-series Lex Luthor: Man of Steel gives us the classic rivalry from the villain’s perspective.
Of course, Luthor doesn’t consider himself the villain. Fancying himself a man of the people, Luthor sees Superman as living embodiment of human weakness. In Superman, he explains, “I see something no man can ever be. I see the end. The end of potential. The end of our achievements. The end of our dreams.” Throughout the five issue story, Luthor tries to overcome the end represented by Superman by creating his own hero, an android named Hope, a superhuman made by humans.
It’s to Azzarello and Bermejo’s great credit that even though Luthor’s plan to establish Hope as Metropolis’s true protector results in death of many children, Superman still feels like the series’ true monster. With Dave Stewart’s washed out colors muting the Man of Tomorrow’s classic red and blue, Superman appears either as a streak or a titan floating above us lowly humans. His eyes either obscured in shadow or glowing red with menace, Superman says almost nothing throughout the series. And when he finally speaks, declaring that he can see Luthor’s soul and judges it empty, we shudder in fear, not in awe.
5. Infinite Crisis (2005-2006)
Before Elseworlds, DC Comics stories regularly took place across multiple Earths, including Earth Two, a world in which the heroes from comics published in the 1930s-1950s lived separate from those created after 1958. The company consolidated all of these universes in the landmark crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths (1984-1985), wiping out all alternative characters save for four: the original Superman Kal-L and his wife Lois, a younger and kind-hearted version of Lex Luthor, and a Superboy from the planet Earth Prime.
Written by Geoff Johns and penciled by Phil Jimenez, sequel miniseries Infinite Crisis finds Superboy Prime disgusted by the actions of the mainline heroes. Plotting to replace our Superman and set things right, Superboy Prime turns Kal-L against Kal-El and brutally murders a number of Teen Titans, until the current Superboy sacrifices himself to stop him.
One of Johns’s favorite characters, Superboy Prime has often returned to attack the Green Lantern, the Legion of Super-Heroes, more Teen Titans, and just about everyone else. In addition to the raw power he unleashes on anyone in his way, Superboy Prime’s insistence on reshaping the world according to his preferences makes him a constant reminder of what Superman could be — an all-powerful tyrant who subjects humans to his will.
6. “The Dark Age” and “The Kryptonian” Earth 2 #16 – 26 (2013 – 2014)
After DC Comics rebooted its entire line in 2012, Earth 2 became a world in which Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman died fighting Darkseid and the forces of Apokolips. Just as the next generation of heroes were beginning to find their footing, the armies of Apokolips attacked again, this time including a powerful general clad in black and red armor. After using his heat vision to cleave in half another super-person, the general’s helmet evaporated to reveal Superman shouting, “Hail Darkseid.”
Like Giffen and Levitz in “The Great Darkness Saga,” Earth 2 writer Tom Taylor uses an evil Superman to demoralize the heroes as much as he physically destroys them. Not only are the newcomers overpowered by Superman, but artists Nicola Scott, Eddie Barrows, Barry Kitson, and Robson Rocha show them scared and confused. Issue #20 features Superman, his eyes burning red, leading a horde of Parademons over a charred city, juxtaposed to images of the heroes hiding in a cave, trying to recover their mettle.
Building to a battle between the corrupted Kal-El and a new Superman, the inexperienced young Kryptonian Val, these two story arcs allow Taylor to heighten the hopefulness represented by the new Superman by contrasting him to the horrific original.
7. Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013 – 2016)
The Injustice: Gods Among Us comics shouldn’t be this good. A weekly series of web comics tying into the fighting game of the same name, all they had to do is flesh out a premise to get heroes to fight each other. The first few issues of the series do exactly that by following the game’s storyline: after the Joker tricks him into killing the pregnant Lois Lane, Superman realizes that he’s been too lenient on criminals, and uses his powers to be a proactive force for good. That slippery slope not only quickly leads to a superhero civil war, with some joining Superman and others following Batman, but also a worldwide totalitarian state.
Definitively proving that he is a master of superhero horror, Tom Taylor (mastermind behind the current zombie Justice League series DCeased) crafts a narrative that’s tragic, terrifying, and often funny and moving. Even as he lords over humanity with a fist of steel, this Superman never feels incongruent with the idealistic Midwesterner he’s always been. Even as he murders allies like Green Arrow and Alfred, and commits petty acts of mayhem by revealing Batman’s secret identity via twitter (I told you, comics are rad), this Superman is still trying to save the day, to do whatever it takes to protect people from forces of danger.
And that’s the scariest part about Superman. He has all that power in his hands, and should he ever turn that against us — even if he thinks he’s doing good — there’s no escaping him.
8. Various Silver Age Comics
Even though we think of Superman as a paragon of goodness, his earliest writers didn’t always feel the same. In a lot of early Superman stories, he’s petty, haughty, and as a popular comics site puts it, kind of a dick.
Superman’s not really evil here, but he has no problem throwing a human gangster through a wall or dangling another above electrical wires. Covers from the era show Supes laughing as Aquaman and Jimmy Olsen die of thirst, demanding treasures from Earth’s citizens, and gaslighting Lois Lane in every conceivable way. He even spends his last dying days defacing the moon with the message, “Do good to others and every man can be a superman,” signed by “Superman (Clark Kent).” He must have fixed it after getting better.
Of course, most of these goofy pranks are more annoying than scary, so maybe we need something like Brightburn to restore the horror to the world’s greatest superhero.
