Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

Latepass on this one on a day full of screeners. But I really, really love that the new trailer for Man of Steel presents Superman as a story that Lois Lane is tracking down:

I’m not super-crazy about her giving Clark Kent his nom de guerre. But I really appreciate her being the audience surrogate, the one who frames the mystery of who Clark Kent has tried to be and who—and what—he actually is. Superhero stories have been very, very weighted towards internal journeys and self-discovery in recent years. Man of Steel is right to acknowledge that the emergence of people with superpowers would be an even more seismic change for the rest of us who have to live in the world changed by their presence.

I’ve been generally bullish on Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel, or as I’ve been jokingly calling it given the long shots of waves and broody atmosphere of the trailers, Terrence Malick’s Superman. So I was excited to see this latest trailer in the form of a calmly-voiced demand from General Zod (Michael Shannon), demanding that Clark Kent be turned over to him:

It’s also a reminder that while Marvel’s done a much better job of developing its full roster of heroes into a gigantic franchise that runs in multiple tracks that converge into event pictures like The Avengers, DC has its rival beat all hollow when it comes to the development of generally frightening and distinct villains. Marvel’s villains have tended to relatively cartoonish and disposable. Iron Man has faced off against Obadiah Stane, who despite Jeff Bridges’ generalized acting chops was a relatively generalized industrialist, the Ten Rings, who were relatively generic jihadists, and Ivan Vanko a reasonably generic Former Soviet Bloc Crazy With Eccentric Teeth. Captain America went up against the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and the bonkers makeup didn’t do much to conceal that Hugo Weaving’s villain schtick has seen better days. Only Thor has had a truly worthy adversary in his half-brother Loki, but it took two movies for him to morph from standard-issue petulance to achieve his “brain like a bag full of cats,” an unsettling combination of imbalance and precise manipulation.

DC, by contrast, has been extraordinarily lucky to have Christopher Nolan designing its villains for the better part of the last decade in his Batman films, which have anchored the DC franchise even as Marvel seemed ascendant. The Scarecrow may have been the least of Nolan’s creations, but it was an unsettling performance that made the best possible use of Cillian Murphy’s sharp, almost pretty features. As the Joker, Heath Ledger was so unsettling and so fully committed to the role that it remains uncomfortable to watch him. And if The Dark Knight Rises made some miscalculations in the handling of Bane, it provided Anne Hathaway with a career-shifting role that let her be sensual and angry in ways she’s never been on film before. These villains are indelible, rather than disposable—I think, not matter how unsettled they make us feel, they’re characters we’d happily spend time with on their own, and certainly ones who offer specific insight into facets of Batman’s personality and mission in a way Marvel villains rarely have. We’re still a long way from knowing how Man of Steel will shake out, but DC’s been wise to know that you can’t know superheroes without knowing their nemeses, and that’s a strong insight DC will have on its side as it tries to play catchup to its own rival.

The meme that Superman, having arrived as a child from Krypton through the machinations of his parents, is in fact an undocumented immigrant has percolated a bit during this round of the immigration reform debate. But it took novelist Junot Diaz, who appeared on The Colbert Report earlier in the week, to take that idea and turn it into the perfect question for people who treat immigration reform as an abstraction:

What do you do with the isolated child in the fire engine red cape with nowhere else to go? What are in his best interests? Do you proceed under the most optimistic assumptions about what he might be able to bring to his new country? The worst? The point is not that Superman deserves an H-1B visa. It’s that immigrants deserve a chance to make contributions to the country they want to adopt, not simply to be treated as a drag on it.

Chris Sprouse, the comics artist who’s drawn everything from Batman for DC Comics to the Dark Horse adaptation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, has announced that he will withdraw from illustrating Orson Scott Card’s Superman story for DC, on the grounds that the furor around Card’s grotesquely anti-gay advocacy made it impossible for the story to stand on its own:

“It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I’ve decided to step back as the artist on this story,” Sprouse said in a statement released Tuesday. “The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with. My relationship with DC Comics remains as strong as ever and I look forward to my next project with them.”

Due to the creative change, the Card story will not appear in the first collected issue out May 29. Instead, it will feature a story by writer Jeff Parker and artist Chris Samnee, as well as a tale by Jeff Lemire and one by writer Justin Jordan and artist Riley Rossmo.

DC is also looking for a replacement illustrator for Card’s story.

“We fully support, understand and respect Chris’s decision to step back from his Adventures of Superman assignment,” the company said in a statement. “Chris is a hugely talented artist, and we’re excited to work with him on his next DC Comics project. In the meantime, we will re-solicit the story at a later date when a new artist is hired.”

This strikes me as one of the best possible outcomes we could have hoped for in this case. I know a lot of people would have liked to see Card summarily dismissed, but that seems like a decision that could have made him a martyr for people who don’t actually understand how First Amendment rights function, and might have limited the incident to a one-off, requiring more organizing the next time a comics company hired Card to write a title. What Sprouse’s decision does is illustrate something more useful: a shift in the market that suggests Card isn’t a good choice to work with because his active work to ban equal marriage rights and to recriminalize homosexuality make it impossible for his work to stand alone as fiction. I think it’s very, very risky to support political litmus tests for whether people are allowed to work or not—though I have no problem with political litmus tests for whether or not you want to give someone your money, or how you want to offset giving your money to someone who would use it for ill. But if someone’s political advocacy is making it more difficult for them to do the job they’re up for, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable not to hire them or work for them. We want the norms around Card to change, not to be fighting him title by title and watching the companies that employ him fail to learn the same lesson each time.

Whether DC still intends to stay in the Card business after this remains an open question. If I were them, I might not formally cancel his contract, but now that he’s no longer being used to launch the title, I might just…not rebid the art on it for a long time that could gradually turn in to forever. If they “fully suport, understand, and respect Chris’s decision,” not to be associated with a story that was going to attract nothing but disapprobation and boycotts, I wouldn’t be surprised if DC finds a way to follow in his footsteps, however quietly and slowly.

In a fairly predictable cycle of events, DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card to write Adventures of Superman, and large segments of the internet are displeased. As Comic Book Resources reports:

An online petition calling on the publisher to drop the “virulently anti-gay writer” has already drawn more than 4,800 signers. And while comic book fans and petitions seem to go hand in hand — it was just last month Marvel was being called upon to cancel Avengers Arena – this effort is being spearheaded by All Out, an initiative of the Purpose Foundation advocating for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. The drive has already attracted the attention of mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Although Card is best known for his award-winning 1985 novel Ender’s Game, he has become notorious for outspoken views on homosexuality and his advocacy against gay rights. A board member of the National Organization for Marriage, a group dedicated to the opposition of same-sex marriage, the author has tried to link homosexuality to childhood molestation, advocated home-schooling to ensure children “are not propagandized with the ‘normality’ of ‘gay marriage’” (with Card, the phrase is always in quotation marks), and floated slippery-slope scenarios in which marriage-equality opponents one day will be classified as “mentally ill” and parents who encourage their children to pursue heterosexual marriage “will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.”

I’m of two minds about the petition. As much as I find Card’s views abhorrent, I do believe that he has a right to work, which of course is not the same thing as a requirement that anyone hire him. And I think it would be worrisome to set a precedent that political views which are unrelated to the content of a person’s job should be the grounds for firing them—obviously, Card’s views on homosexuality and gay rights would be a reason not to, say, put him in a position to make benefits determinations for gay families, or to decide whether or not to prosecute hate crimes. Now, obviously Card’s views have affected some of his creative output, and I’d be willing to listen to an argument that they affect even his works that aren’t primarily concerned with adult sexuality (though I think it would be a very heavy lift to convince me that Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, as stand-alone books, are noxious works).

The really interesting question for me is who else other than Card DC considered to write Superman, and why Card’s pitch, whatever it was, stood out to the company. Card seems to me to be someone who has been coasting creatively on the reputation of Ender’s Game for an extremely long time, rather than a genuinely exciting active talent. But I wouldn’t be surprised if DC went with him because, if nothing else, he’s a recognizable brand name. That’s a kind of hiring laziness that is infuriating, particularly when, as Joseph Hughes wrote in a great piece at Comics Alliance earlier this month that inspired predictable-but-still-depressing hysteria, “There is currently not a single black writer working on a monthly series for either of the two biggest comic book publishers in the United States, and precious few working for any of the others.” Hiring a white, once-innovative writer whose attitudes both offend potential readers in general, and have the potential to seep into his work in a way that makes it deeply unappealing, is apparently still more attractive to DC Comics than seeking out a new and refreshing voice, no matter what body that voice is housed in.

io9 passes along an intriguing rumor that, in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Superman gets defeated, but by a fellow Kryptonian, Faora, rather than by Michael Shannon’s General Zod:

At first they’re not as powerful but later on as she applies her fight training and adapts them to her powers, she gives Superman one of the worst beatings a hero has faced on camera… She “Doomsdays” him… literally pulverizing him with precision and lethal strength with hitting pressure-points, nerves and even just outclasses Supes in bare knuckle and gives Supes a severe beat down…he’s total agony this entire time, bloody and broken and barely gets away. My buddy doesn’t know at all how Superman defeats these guys eventually but he did say that Superman in this film gets hurt a lot more easily than Routh’s pre-crisis Superman…the military can hurt him too but Faora pretty much nearly kills him in hand to hand.

This wouldn’t particularly surprise me, given Snyder’s interest in fighting women. Who knows what the actual execution would be like (I should here cop to my standard weakness for Sucker-Punch, and acknowledge that everyone thinks I’m insane). And I do really hope that Snyder’s version of Faora isn’t the one from Action Comics, who survived the destruction of Krypton because she was serving an off-world sentence for setting up a concentration camp where she was murdering men. Because I’m not sure the nerd community could survive the conversations about misandry and misogyny that would be the result.

But I am so, so eager to see genuinely super-powered women who aren’t providing assistants and who don’t have to be someone’s girlfriend. It’s not that Joss Whedon didn’t revitalize Black Widow in The Avengers, or that I didn’t appreciate the tremendous sexual chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield as Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man. I like romances. Watching The Thomas Crown Affair over the weekend, I realized how desperate I am for more love stories in which the participants and the obstacles to their union are both genuinely adult. Superhero movies, despite the criticism they get for playing to childish fantasies, are actually giving us some terrific portraits of women who get to be women, rather than girls, and their spiky romances with the men they love. But I would love to see a woman’s hyper-competence separated from her interest in the physical and mental health of the man she loved, to see a story where a woman like Selina Kyle save a man like Bruce Wayne’s armored ass because she can and she wants to, but for reasons other than that she’s fallen in love with him. I don’t want to cut down on the romances. I just want more, and more kinds of stories for women within this context. If the only way we can get to watch a woman grow into her power in a superhero movie right now is as a villain, I’ll take it. And hopefully Faora can knock out some of the pigeonholing of super-powered women while she’s at it. Not to mention that in between Faora and Selina Kyle, great female characters could be a dandy way for DC to put some real daylight in between their franchise and Marvel.

Lots of folks have joked, on seeing the trailer for Zack Snyder’s newest movie, that they’re excited to see Terrence Malick’s Man of Steel:

The thing that actually strikes me as most powerful about this trailer, though, is that Pa Kent’s speech is one a mortal man could easily give his human son. Our superhero movies have gotten kind of disconnected from masculinity in general. Bruce Wayne has a particular violent experience in childhood that spurs him to superheroism, and even more particular resources with which to finance his ambitions. Peter Parker may be the only person to be bitten by a radioactive spider, but great responsibility doesn’t come only with great power—sometimes that relationship is crushingly inverse. The X-Men are valuable precisely because they’re a metaphor for otherness. But the truth is that white men are more likely to possess money and privilege, the currency that can purchase or convey the closest things we have to superpowers, and how they use it matters.

It’s easy to treat Superman as an alien, or even as a kind of bodhisattva. But he’s potentially even more interesting as a man, a kind of sober Ron Swanson, a vision of masculinity divorced from contempt for women or concerns about heterosexual credibility. I don’t know that there’s anything in Snyder’s ouvre that suggests he’s up for that. And after The Dark Knight Rises, I have significant concerns about David Goyer’s ability to handle big ideas with much in the way of deftness or commitment. But it’s a thought, and I’ll be curious to see if either of them rise to the occasion.

I just read Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant’s All-Star Superman courtesy Douglas Wolk, who gave me a copy last week, and I have to say, I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

We tend to assume that people with superheroes will use their great powers for the greater good — or to commit great evil. But most of the dominant stories about extraordinarily able people don’t assume that they’ll turn inward, to projects of self-improvement, contemplation, and to the tender range of the emotional spectrum. When Superman tells Lois, who didn’t know he could sew or cook, that “I thought I should learn. My trip to the sun did more than triple my strength, Lois. It tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity…The meal is from the actual one…from the Titanic…I picked the ingredients and prepared it myself,” it seems sort of mundane. But it’s also intensely human, and it’s striking that the things he’s picking to learn are traditionally feminine skills. We all know that Superman is compassionate, but it’s exciting to see him surprised or awed, as Quitely draws him when he sees Lois marching bold out of an alley in the suit that lets her experience his powers while he’s still shucking his Clark Kent disguise; as he is with a big arm cradling his father’s tombstone.

And the political nerd in me is interested to see the way All-Star Superman transmits that awe and empathy to us, through Lex Luthor, who in giving himself superpowers, accidentally taps into the way Superman sees the world, and is overwhelmed by it, if only temporarily. “I can actually see the machinery and wire connecting and separating everything since it all began,” he tells his niece, who is embarrassed by the sudden uncoolness of her favorite uncle.” This is how he sees all the time, every day. Like it’s all just us in here, together. And we’re all we’ve got….You’re supposed to be dead! I had it timed!…I saw how to save the world! I could have made everyone see. I could have saved the world if it wasn’t for you!” But of course he’s wrong. Superman is just an excuse. “You could have saved the world years ago if it mattered to you, Lex Luthor,” Superman reminds him, before knocking his nemesis out yet again.

Douglas thinks that after his defeat, Lex travels back in time and becomes Leo Quintum, the scientist to whom Superman entrusts his DNA and the secret of how to combine it with Lois’. I’ll admit that I was too absorbed in the emotions of All-Star Superman while reading it to pick up on the clues that he found, but it certainly seems plausible, and if so, it’s interesting in that it suggests that experiencing overwhelming empathy is transformative, even alchemical.

The bridge is yours.

-Oprah should know the best way to do tequila shots is with oranges and cinnamon.

-I’m reading All-Star Superman, so Scott Eric Kaufman’s observations on the visual forms in the comic are very useful.

-Zombies and superheroes invade highbrow fiction.

-Dress like Lisbeth Salander.

-Martin Sheen is annoyed at his fellow Hollywood liberals: