Houston Southard

s on your chest

It started with a facebook post:

“I made a site with my stories and speeches and stuff. Pretty sure it works. I like this for a site logo because a lot of people after the depression likened Superman to the second coming of Jesus, and I write about that illiterate little drug dealer quite a bit. Link in bio.”

For the handful of people I've confused, no, I don't think superman was jesus. This was a provocative half-cocked post to get people to check out my website, some stories on which include some real things about the real jesus.

As a big superman fan, and yes, because the 's' is also the first letter of my last name (but not for long) I drew a comparison between the two. People have speculated similarities because a jewish writer authored the first superhero comic about a messianic character who came to save the people of earth. There were parallels.

I like superman because he represents an outsider thriving amidst the loss of his family. Jerry Siegel's dad was gunned down defending his secondhand suit shop in Cleveland (where I'm from) and so he channeled his grief by writing a character who couldn't be shot and who would save people who couldn't protect themselves from the same types of muggers who killed his dad.

That, and because the day after his his dad died the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a column authored by an A. L. Luthor on the need for more depression-era vigilantism. So here comes this character, the first of his kind, as a response to this plea and this tragedy, wearing a suit (suit shop) sporting a shield-shaped breastplate (for protection, like the one pictured above) adorned with a blood-red 'S' (Siegel or Shuster or Superman). He's an alien, like Siegel and Shuster (the sons of jewish aliens) who comes as an outsider to a Metropolis (as Joe did from small-town Rotterdam, Toronto to the urban sprawl of Cleveland) trying to save people.

I like jesus because he was just a shanty town woodworker tired of an oppressive roman regime trying to tear down his home and force his people to worship the greek pantheon from which the roman empire had just conquered and acclimated its people to. That’s what imperialists do. He was a zealous revolutionary trying to better his faith with the same hallucinogenic and love-inducing rituals that his religion had its true roots in.

Both superman and jesus tried to do right, and their legend produced iterations of them that were far from what they wanted their legacy to be. Neither started as gods. Neither wanted the mantle of messiah (which was considered an act of treason during JC's lifetime). People made them into things they weren't, because that's what story-telling does to things. They are similar. Both their origins are really cool. And neither contemporary character remotely resembles the original. So, ya, it’s a fitting symbol for what I was trying to do and I understand the context was cryptic.