Here is the full trailer for Man of Steel:

The thing I like most about this trailer is the part where Clark Kent is talking with his father about saving the bus full of kids and revealing his powers. Clark says, "What was I supposed to do? Just let them die?" His father responds, "Maybe." The thing about really great Superman stories is that they aren't about power. A lot of bad writers have written a lot of bad Superman stories. This is because Superman is basically God. He can be slowed down, but he can't be stopped. A good Superman story is always about internal struggle about important moral choices, about doing what's right, even if it's difficult.

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I haven't read a truly great, accessible Superman story in years. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman was a well-crafted, beautiful Superman comic book, but I think it's too mired in decades' worth of esoteric Superman comics to be truly accessible to all but the most hard-core fans. I thought Morrison's Action Comics was going to be that kind of book, the Superman story you could give anybody to explain Superman's appeal. But when I read the first collected edition, Superman and the Men of Steel, I was deeply disappointed. The book begins perfectly: We start with a young Superman fighting against slumlords and greedy businessmen. What he's doing isn't necessarily legal, but it's right. He's a little bit arrogant, but his heart's in the right place.

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Unfortunately, the book quickly escalates into generic sci-fi adventure, as Superman fights Brainiac and Lex Luthor. There are no stakes, and no difficult moral choices to make. The bad guys are unquestionably evil, and Superman is on his way to becoming unbeatable. The whole thing is a gigantic mess; it feels like Morrison is cramming thirty issues' of story into a few months worth of comics. While it's nice to read a comic that overextends itself—you won't find the modern superhero convention of pages worth of pointless dialogue here—Morrison misses the chance to write the great modern reintroduction to Superman.

But it could be worse; Morrison could've written J. Michael Straczynski's Superman Earth One Volume Two. The second chapter in the umpteenth Superman origin retelling pits Superman against the Parasite, and it introduces a new character: Clark Kent's neighbor, who happens to be a hooker with a heart of gold. The whole book is just elaborate time-wasting in the guise of boring superhero action. And the moral choices that Superman makes are questionable at best and dumb at worst. Even if Man of Steel is awful, it simply can't be as bad as Straczynski's Superman story. That would be pretty much impossible.