I hate to say this, both because some kids look up to him and because he was my best friend, but in reality Superman was a maudlin, self-pitying, jerk. And everyone who ever had the misfortune to spend an evening drinking with him knows exactly what I'm talking about.
I know, I know. I should be nicer about how I put this.
Superman had a bad childhood. He never got to resolve a whole truckload of issues with his parents. He never felt validated by all the human beings surrounding him. And most corrosively, he couldn't make love to a human woman using his "superpowers" the way they did on his planet.
Actually this last point bears discussion, because it is so indicative. Superman claimed to have lost the desire for human women at some point in the 1990's. He claimed that he was so far evolutionarily advanced over them that it was like having sex with sea plankton. And later, when a whole plethora of gangsta rappers started to refer to each other as "dog," Superman was delighted. "That's just what humans are to me, dogs. Some of you are loyal and nice, some vicious, but you are all ultimately dumb, limited, boring, and only of interest to the emotionally stunted who can't form relationships with proper sapient beings." Like so much with Superman, I'm convinced that this was a thin rationale. In fact his prodigious alcohol intake had by that point rendered the whole question of making love to a human woman moot. And if you'd seen his bloated, waxy, sweaty, and frankly stinking self during those last few years you would have to agree with me.
How do you save a savior? Maybe the supersmart people from his destroyed home planet could have figured something out, but all I could do was offer therapeutic, new-age platitudes. "Why not take a break from saving the world and work a little bit on saving yourself?" "You know, it's be 'super' if you went to rehab." It would have been easier if he was uniformly abusive when I stooped to that, but instead he would always say things like, "Yeah, I'm going to try to quit smoking tomorrow and then get back to the journalism thing," or "Well, I've already cut down," or "Give me a break, my girlfriend just dumped me" (see previous paragraph). When I quoted Yoda to him about the difference between saying you are going to try to do something (and he always said that about not drinking and getting back into journalism) and actually just doing it then he would get kind of abusive.
But now he's dead.
A couple of more things. (1) Why did I stay friends with such a self centered moron for so long? Well you don't really pick your friends. You just gravitate to people with similar senses of humor that don't bore you. When you spend enough time with them you end up caring for them. (2) If alcohol didn't bring his superpowers down, then I think the world would be over now. There were plenty of times when he would get drunk and abusive, but in such a state you could knock him over with a feather (as many girlfriends discovered). I actually think in retrospect, that was part of the reason drinking was so addictive to him. . . but here I am getting all therapeutic again.
The truth is, Superman was pretty much an a-hole and waste of space. Ultimately, he squandered his powers because he didn't love anyone but himself. He never took responsibility for any actions. He treated service personnel with horrifying, supercilious, condescension. Though in the abstract he had all the proper liberal attitudes about things, in the particular he really didn't care about the wellbeing of any individual person. He was selfish even as a friend. You were expected to help him with all sorts of things (and most of the help involved listening to him endlessly whine about his lot), but he would never help you with anything. . . . But he was my friend and I can't help but be consumed with guilt.