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Chapter 4

Sipping While Super

Assemble! Photo Credit: © Beeline Creative

Let’s address the caped elephant in the room: comic book characters can’t seem to hold their liquor. For the purposes of this section, “comic book characters” means both their personas on the page and on the screen. So, I’m going to hopscotch between the two a bit.

Remember in the movie, Superman III, when everyone’s favorite Kryptonian refugee became his misanthropic alter ego? I know, most of us are trying to block out any memory of that celluloid travesty, but just humor me for a moment. Before his “good side” inexplicably splits off from him in the form of Clark Kent (I’m pretty sure the earth’s sun doesn’t really give Kal-El that power; they were just making it up as they went along), we find our blue-tighted hero pounding shots in a dive bar. “Oh no!” we all gasp as we collectively clutch our pearls. “Superman doesn’t DRINK! He must really be BAD!” I guess we’d all pretty much forgotten that he popped the cork on a bottle of champagne just prior to bedding Lois Lane for the first time in the previous film.

Audiences for superhero movies and their comic book source material are largely full of impressionable minors. Writers and studios are supposed to be After-School-Specialing them away from booze and drugs and all that, but part of the reason for alcohol abuse in this country—particularly where underage drinking is concerned—is that booze is too often portrayed as “evil” in pop culture. So when Superman goes on a bender after his brain is warped by some bizarre space rock, everyone’s “Just Say No” meter kicks in.