Foliate Oak Literary Magazine
Death of a Superhero
by William Bradley
As he flatlined, I thought, for some reason, about the issue of Action Comics he bought for me when I was five years old, back in 1987. The cover featured the villainous Silver Banshee standing over Superman's "dead," body, but Superman always came back—in fact, his "ghost" appeared to be right behind her. I had seen and loved the Christopher Reeve movies, of course, but I thought that cover was just the coolest, weirdest thing I'd ever seen. So I picked it up and showed my dad. He said, "Sure," and placed the three quarters in my hand so that I could pay the clerk myself.
I began flipping through the pages immediately once we got into his truck, asking him who the different characters were. "Jimmy Olsen." "Lois Lane." "Lex Luthor." "Perry something-or-other. He's Superman's boss at the newspaper." We read that comic book together when we got home, and routinely in the days and weeks that followed, until the cover fell off and the pages began to tear. But by then I had other comics to read with Dad—Green Lanterns and Spider-Mans and Firestorms. But the Superman books were still my favorite, and I think they were his too. They were the ones we would talk about after reading them—"Who should Clark be with, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, or Cat Grant?" "How do you pronounce Mr. Mxyzptlk?" "What if our sun turned red? Would he lose his powers immediately?" If these questions ever got tedious or annoying, as they surely must have, he never let on, and treated all of these discussions thoughtfully.
I found a copy of that comic in a used bookstore when my then-girlfriend and I were living in Austin. Dad and I weren't speaking to each other in those days. He thought I was wasting my time trying to be an artist, when he was perfectly willing to give me a job at his store. I thought he was a small-town rube who couldn't appreciate anything more sophisticated than the cop shows he watched or the lousy country songs he listened to. Looking back, I guess that attitude was his reward for teaching me to read with the Man of Steel's help.
I didn't buy the comic, but I flipped through it in the store. The Silver Banshee's wail seems to kill Superman. They have a funeral and everything. But it turned out he's not really dead—just in a really deep, Kryptonian coma. With the help of his friends from the Justice League, he wakes up and defeats the villain. Order is restored to Metropolis. Everything turns out okay.
"Please come back," I wanted to say, that afternoon in the hospital. But the Do Not Resuscitate order that left the nurses standing off to the side ensured that wouldn't happen. So instead, I kissed his forehead as my sisters held each other, and I thought of his hands on my sides, under my arms, as he lifted the small me, giggling, into the sky.
William Bradley's work has appeared in journals and magazines including Utne Reader, The Missouri Review, and The Normal School, and his prose chapbook Tales of a Multiverse in Peril! is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press. He lives in Canton, New York, where he teaches at St. Lawrence University.
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