Cartoonist Arthur Jones writes stories through text and doodles on Post-It Notes, then reads his stories live to audiences as his cartoons scroll in the background. There are a few on his site, but my favorite is actually a translation of Jonathan Goldstein’s “Man Not Superman”. This is the story of the ordinary guy who dates Lois Lane after she breaks up with Superman, and tries to overcome his feelings of inadequacy. Jones’ comics just make this funny story even funnier.
Man Not Superman by Jonathan Goldstein
She missed normal men. Lois wanted someone normal. That’s how I won over a class act like Lois Lane — it was the fact that I was a mere mortal.
I first met Lois at a charity penny arcade event. At one point in the evening, as I stood hunched over a pinball machine,
I looked over to my side, and there was Lois Lane just standing there, watching me.
The left flipper wasn’t working, so I tried to keep the ball on the right, but when it came down the left,
we yelled like a couple of kids rolling down the side of a mountain together.
“I’ve always wanted to reach in there and hold the silver ball in my hand,” I said.
“I never thought of it that way,” said Lois,
and five minutes later she was ripping open an empty pack of Clorets and writing her number down on the white inside.
Lois was the kind of woman I had always dreamed of. Even her name — so cool and crisp — Lois Lane. It pierced my ear like an arrow.
Lois was the kind of woman who made you feel like “I am a man who dates Lois Lane,” and as simple as that sounds, it is the best way I can describe it.
At first I was a novelty. In the beginning, Lois would kiss my forehead and tell me she loved how squishy my arms were.
Once, I even gave my nipples eyelashes and smeared lipstick around my belly button. Lois swooned as I made my fat gut sing her sweet songs of love.
I liked making Lois laugh. One evening I purchased a jar of olives simply because one of them, pressed up against the glass,
looked like an old man’s head, with a little skewed stroke-mouth full of pimento.
I gave it a voice.
I made it say things like, “Get me out of here,”
and “My ass is asleep,”
and Lois appeared to find this delightful.
Although they were broken up, Lois and Superman decided to remain friends, and since they traveled in the same circles, I knew it was only a matter of time before Superman and I would meet,
and I knew that when we did, by any possible system of measurement, he would destroy me.
Lois told me that I should expect a call from Superman. She said he was really anxious to meet me, and several weeks into our relationship, I got the call. When I answered the phone, I felt my chest tighten.
“I’d like to keep Lois in my life,” he said, “and I guess that means we should get to know each other. I don’t want to make this into a big deal or anything, but Lois tells me you’re sort of between jobs right now, and I could use a sidekick.
When I saw Lois that night for dinner, she had already spoken to Superman, and she was going on about my sidekick-ship like it was already a done deal.
Before I knew it, we were drinking glass after glass of red wine,
and I was agreeing that it might be a good idea.
Lois is just so beautiful when she’s pleased.
The next morning, I met Superman for lunch. He handed me a rumpled paper bag.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Your new outfit,” he said.
He shooed me off to the bathroom, and in the toilet stall I changed into what was essentially a skintight black unitard. There was no cape.
The whole thing succeeded in making me look both skinny-legged and rotund around the middle.
Across the chest, in small Courier font, was the wordStuart.
“It’s your sidekick name,” Superman said. “And you’re not supposed to...”
“...wear your uniform with underwear.”
I spent most of my time wearing my Stuart outfit in Superman’s apartment, ironing his costume, fielding calls from the press,
and popping boils on his back with a nail and an atlas.
In between, Superman had me doing nonstop sit-ups. He called my gut “a crime against humanity.” His favorite joke was to put his hand on my stomach and ask, “How many months?”
But he wasn’t perfect, either. From up close Superman stank of Brylcreem, and when he was being all solemn, he would use words like shall and vex. He was also really full of himself. At one point he even told me I should use the word super sparingly. He said its use was only appropriate when describing works of God or Superman’s own feats and properties.
As horrible as it all got, in the evening there was Lois, and she seemed so proud of me. Still, Superman was a constant, unspoken presence between us.
I always knew he was out there, feeling better than me. And when I looked at Lois sometimes, I knew she knew I was thinking it, and I guess it made her want to think about it a little herself.
It all came to a head one Thursday night. There was this Thursday-night tradition where all the superheroes got together for beer and chicken wings, and on this particular evening, Lois was going to join us.
The superheroes sat together at one table, capes all undone, laughing and slapping each other on the back,
while the sidekicks sat at another table, commiserating and trash talking.
I looked around my table. There was the angry-looking hunchback the Green Lantern worked with, and Wonder Woman had brought along a sad-eyed, mousy college-aged girl who sketched on napkins all night.
And then, of course, there was Batman’s sidekick, Robin.
Robin told me that the Caped Crusader was such a control freak he had continued to bathe Robin well into his late teens. “I can scrub my own ass,” Robin would yell, but Batman was so strong. When he put his hand on Robin’s shoulder, Robin wasn’t going no place.
I looked over at Superman laughing it up with Batman-- the best of buddies- their massive upper torsos jerking in an impossibly manly manner. Suddenly Superman turned to me, and our eyes locked. Much has been written about Superman, but there is an aspect of him that is very difficult to describe. There is a certain feeling one gets when looking into his eyes, and of all the articles I have read, there isn’t one that touches on it.
Being looked at by Superman makes you feel more there than even a dozen TV cameras. And it’s not simply that you’re there, but that you’re there swaddled in fur coats while sipping warm cider. When Lois walked in to the bar, instinctively, she made her way over to Superman and kissed his cheek hello.
I got up and walked out of the bar. Because I was in my Stuart outfit, I didn’t even have pockets to dig my fists into.
Some time after one in the morning, Lois showed up at my place full of apologies. She had spent the whole night talking with Superman. She said that he was really depressed.
“I’ve never seen him like this. I’m actually a bit worried,” she said.
“He’s obsessed with the emptiness of the universe. He said that after we broke up, he went looking for God — literally looking for God, zipping across the universe — and he came up with nothing. I never realized how obsessive he can be.
He told me there was once a certain way I flipped my hair that so beguiled him he spun around the earth reversing the moment 75,000 times. I never knew that.”
I felt myself grow queasy.
“He’s just so intense,” she continued, “and this planet can be so cold. Did you know that on Krypton, when two people fell in love, they became inseparable? They even had special clothes they wore together, and they learned to move together in unison. He said that on Earth these kinds of garments have names like Fundies and are sold only in the pages of pornographic magazines. He said Earth is a sick, sick place.”
After she left my apartment, I decided to take a walk to clear my head. I did so while cursing Superman until there were tears in my eyes. I had walked only a couple of blocks when I ran into Clark Kent.
I had been introduced to Clark at a couple of Lois’s soirees and, although I hardly knew him, he was someone I really liked. He possessed a kind of small-town warmth that I genuinely enjoyed being around.
Clark told me I looked terribly sad. Terribly sad. People didn’t say stuff like that anymore. Having him call meterribly sad, instead of depressed or bummed made me start to feel a little bit better. He asked me if I wanted to grab a beer, and I said sure.
I told Clark all about the evening, and he listened to me. That was all I really needed just then: to be listened to.
“How do you know she’ll go running back to Superman?” asked Clark. “You should hear her talk,” I said. Superman once went back in time and beat up Hitler.’ I mean, who can compete with that?”
Clark started laughing so hard that people at the other tables turned around to look at us. I was on a roll. With his laughter egging me on, I told him all the things that over the last few weeks I wished I had said to Superman. I wished I had said,
“You’re such a phony,” I said. “You have this idea of what it means to be human, but it’s a parody. Humans feel pain, and you don’t understand what pain is. You may be super, but you are certainly not a man.”
Clark thought that was just perfect. He put his arm around my neck and rocked me back and forth as we both laughed.
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