Larry Tye (Hi, Larry!) writes an interesting essay about the origins and enduring popularity of Superman. I might take issue with one thing he says in it…
If [Superman] thrived in the hands of a couple of Jewish kids from the ghetto, he should flourish backed by the muscle of Time Warner, one of the world's biggest media cartels, which would be mad to let its billion-dollar franchise languish.
No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not people and they certainly are not creators. A couple of Jewish kids from the ghetto or some writer who acts as their successor can have a clever, incisive vision for what constitutes a good story. A corporation can, at best, employ a human being to provide that…and the property will only be as good or valuable (in a non-monetary sense as well as a monetary one) as the sensitivity and creativity of that person.
The problem that occurs far too often with corporate-owned characters is not that the company designates the wrong person to be in charge but that they designate no one. No one who wishes to endure and rise up in that company wants to lose whatever control he or she can manage to have over an important company asset so they do not cede this power. Bloody battles are fought within the halls of Time Warner over who controls Superman, who controls Batman, who controls Bugs Bunny, etc.
I had this friend named Greg Burson who was one of the people (the best, I thought) who did the voice of Bugs after Mel Blanc died. Every time a different division there needed the voice of Bugs for a cartoon or a commercial or a toy or something, Greg had to go in and audition. Why did he have to keep auditioning when there were plenty of examples of him doing Bugs for major Time Warner projects? For that matter, why wasn't one person the new voice of Bugs? Why were there about eight who all were called in to audition?
Because the guy in charge of each Bugs project wanted to be in charge of Bugs. He wanted control of Bugs and you can't be in control if you're just going along with what was decided by the guy in the office down the hall who also wanted control of Bugs. Greg swore to me that one time, he lost a Bugs job and the guy told him, "You were the best but I'm trying to convince them that I know Bugs better than this other executive…and he's the one who chose you in the first place." It's like that with Superman, too. Everybody in the firm thinks they know what's best for Superman and that there is great career advancement to be had in asserting that.
The classic, universally-understood concept of Superman will endure forever. Whether the current Superman comic books or movies or TV shows or videogames deliver that depends on whether they're written by and/or managed by someone who understands that concept. On a movie or TV show, it's more or less understood that there has to be one person — or at best, an in-sync team — who is the ultimate arbiter of what's right and wrong for the project; someone who has both the contractual and moral authority to say, "No, our hero wouldn't do that."
It's bad enough when that one person is wrong. It's even worse when that one person is fifteen different people. They can be deadlier than Kryptonite — the green kind, not the others.