Plural identities, genders, and citizenships in Tom Taylor’s and John Timms’ <i>Superman: Son of Kal-El</i> (2021–22)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the discourse surrounding Tom Taylor’s and John Timms’ Superman: Son of Kal-El (2021–22) has concentrated on the titular character Jon Kent’s bisexuality. Actor Dean Cain, best known for his portrayal of Clark Kent in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–97), goes so far as to critique the series’ wokeness in an op-ed for Real Clear Politics (14 October 2021). In this article, I attend to the first six issues of Son of Kal-El, beginning with Jon’s plural statuses as the child of both a Kryptonian and a human, and as a lover of both men and women. My central claim is that Taylor and Timms employ these positions to empower Jon, allowing him to deal with pressing issues. In the series, Jon investigates and provides relief to Gamorran refugees in response to discoveries made by his love interest and now partner, the journalist Jay Nakamura, himself a Gamorran refugee: the nation of Gamorra is prevalently advertised as a paradise when it is, in fact, a hotbed of crime. My essay advances scholarship by revealing how Taylor and Timms write back to earlier incarnations of Superman and superhero narratives and by reflecting on how comics enable them to engage readers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".