Culture is not just about how you grew up, but how you're perceived. Barack Obama grew up with his white, irish-american mother and grandmother and has several times openly identified with his irish-american heritage.

Yet he cannot escape being perceived as having a primarily African American identity, even though his father was African, not African American and therefore would have no ties to a specific African American culture beyond the colour of his skin.

If he were to say : "I feel like I'm an Irish American, not an African American" that would not be interpreted as Irish pride but as being ashamed of being black.

And if one views it with some form of realism, as the last survivor of Krypton, there would be considerable expectations on Superman to know about and relate to that culture.

Of course, this is fiction, so to what extent he relates to his Kryptonian heritage is up to the writers, but there is fertile ground to be mined in a character finding himself between two cultures. Of course his eventual commitment will be to an earth-based culture (as that is presumably the writers' preferred culture) but there is drama in the process.

As I see it, Pre-Crisis exclamations of "Great Rao" were simply used because it would be bad form to have him exclaim "Jesus Christ". Mainly because we don't actually know (Pre Crisis) whether Clark and the rest of the Kent family are Christian, Jewish or Atheist.

Personally, as an atheist, if Superman had gone "Oh, Jesus Christ" or "Holy Mary, Mother of God" instead of "Great Rao", I would have become a bit sceptical of the character early on (While of course Christians might have responded more positively to it).

For a character to make religious references that only relate to their fictional universes (like "Rao" and the "Crom" of the Conan stories) does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. But once they commit to an actual world religion, I have to view them in relation to that.

Which is why I prefer it when there is limited use of both religion and party politics in mainstream superhero books. I'll forego any number of characters agreeing with me about religion or politics as long as I never have to run the risk of seeing Superman refer to Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman "a great political leader" or have Batman declare himself a Mormon or Reed Richards declare himself a Scientologist.

But it isn't altogether real either. Which is why some of us have said,
neither identity is the real one.

But pre-crisis Kal-el remembered his biological parents and
homeworld. Because of super-memory, he was more like a human 13
year being adopted after his parents died. His formative core
memories were Kryptonian. Byrne solved this by erasing his life on
Krypton.

Great Rao made him sound like a comic book Super-hero. Human
expressions made him more realistic. I am not sure which is best.

If he's called Superman or "Clark Kent" or "Kal-(E)l" isn't really that important, those are just names. Especially since his parents died he was an outsider who hid his true self from virtually everyone. The fact that Siegel saw himself as undervalued by the people around him this is all reflected in the nature of Superman / Clark Kent.

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I don't find that argument really valid unless you take it in its entirety.
Originally, he didn't fly, and wasn't even as powerful as JB's Superman.
His Kryptonian identity was added and so were many of his
fundamental powers. If you use the "original" version reason, you
have to use it for everything they created: powers, personality, etc.,
including the fact that he killed bad guys.

Edited by Kip Lewis on 29 August 2011 at 8:22am