Here's A Thought...

So the latest development in the super-hero genre is the news that the next Superman film will have an African-American lead.  

For comic book fans, this is nothing new.  There have been a few iterations of The Man of Steel who weren't white men.  A Black Superman is guaranteed to rile up a certain segment of the population for a couple of reasons, all of which I think are silly at best, reprehensible at worst.

I'm not interested in that non-arguement.

What interests me is how they do this next film.  The likelihood is it will be a modern day take on Superman, somehow bent a little from the traditional narrative to make room for the changes to the character.  I'd like to see something else.

I'm currently watching Jupiter's Legacy.  It's a super-hero show with a decently real take on generational super-heroes and how that would actually work.  What's neat is that part of it is a period piece, set in the early days of the Great Depression.  It got me thinking about the early days of Superman and the world the character was born into.

We've seen a DC hero in a period piece recently with the first Wonder Woman film, set in WWI.  Thing is, she (the character) wasn't born then and the take on the character was pretty much the straight up version most comic fans know.

Imagine a Superman movie set in the days leading up to WWII but with a Black lead.  I think if the film-makers took the spirit of the original comic-book character, the whole "stranger from another world, the ultimate immigrant who becomes the symbol of what's right and true in America" and wove that narrative around a Black man growing up in the Depression and becoming his heroic self just as America was about to take its great leap into the role of global superpower, they might just have the greatest super-hero movie ever made in the making.

They could easily use the epic accomplishments of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics as a parallel to to ground the story of a Black Superman defying the message and power of Nazi Germany with some very real history.  Set up a showdown between Superman and Captain Nazi (he's technically a Shazam villain but I'm working the narrative, not the canon) and the whole thing sorta writes itself.

Then again, what do I know?