Note: This series was originally published in 2013 on my old site, www.berkeleyplaceblog.com, which is now devoted 100% to music. I have reprinted the series here, for posterity.
Mr. Orr—the human version of God in a story examining the meaning of power, God and faith, can cure Father Leone’s cancer. This puts Daniel Leone in the classic position of Adam—tempted by the “Devil’s” cure. Only in this book, it’s not clear that Superman is an all-positive God, or that Orr is an all-evil Devil. Orr tells Leone that Superman can cure his cancer, or Orr can.
This is God-as-destroyer, and recalled, for me at least, Noah and the Great Flood. An Earth-based God (the four elements) threatens to kill all humans, and Superman’s response is basically to say that he’d miss people, but he’d just go find another alien race to adopt as his own. (I’ll see your genocide and raise you one global destruction.) In other words, without Lois Lane, humans seem to mean much, much less to Superman. This helps explain why he refuses to cure Father Leone’s cancer in #210…
Superman “says” that he won’t cure cancer because, if he was able to, humans would expect too much of him. But is that really what’s going on here? I mean, if he can then why not do it? He’s already stopped wars and saved the universe hundreds of times. In fact, he was out saving another galaxy—a million miles away—when Lois was vanished.