WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Action Comics #1024, by Brian Michael Bendis, John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson, Brad Anderson and Dave Sharpe, on sale now.
It's hard to find a character more iconic of moral principles than Superman. Over the years as the rest of the heroes at DC and Marvel grew darker, edgier, and more violent it was Superman who stood out as a slice of good old-fashioned American pie. But there are some lines he doesn't think twice about crossing are a major moral dilemma for some of his colleagues.
And in Action Comics #1024, Superman and his family spies on the entirety of Metropolis without a second thought.
The breach of privacy comes on the heels of a death that rocked Superman to his core. The Deputy Chief of the Fire Department, Melody Moore, recently made friends with Superman as the two saw hope for Metropolis amidst the corruption of the city that seemed to be everywhere. Superman helped Melody put out a few fires, as it were, and evidently that made her a target for the Invisible Mafia.
Adapting to new levels of discretion, organized crime in Metropolis developed into the Invisible Mafia as a response to Superman's absurd levels of surveillance. They form a comprehensive list of words they ban from their speech so that his super hearing will not detect him and only operate in facilities hidden from his prying x-ray vision. It turns out that they're just not discreet enough however, as killing Superman's pal Melody only spurs the superhero to sic his entire family on them.
Distraught for a moment by Melody's death, Superman immediately resorts to scanning the entirety of Metropolis with his super senses. He says that he is looking for blind spots or lead lining, trying to root out the Invisible Mafia wherever they are. Rather than admonish Superman for his breach in privacy, his whole family joins in. Both Superboys, Supergirl and even Brainiac 5 use their vast array of senses to comb across every detail of the city.
And the moral question doesn't even come up. In The Dark Knight the very question Superman ignores proved to be a major moral dilemma for the caped hero's counterpart. In that film, Batman used a type of sonar technology to turn every phone in Gotham into a spy network that allowed him to track down the Joker. Lucius Fox was so disgusted by the act he could not condone it and the technology was disposed of for being too much power for any one person to wield.
But such a question does not even come up for Superman. Instead, all five superheroes begin pouring over every inch of the city (and quite possibly the planet) while even explicitly mentioning how the can see private citizens using the bathroom. It's reduced to something of a joke about how "gross" people are, but at the bottom, it's actually a pretty severe violation of civil liberties.
The comic does not seem interested in grappling with such a problem materially, and that only raises further questions about how often and casually Superman does this. Does he only resort to spying on the whole city when a close friend dies, or does he do it all the time? Considering how many other heroes are all too eager to help him, this moment is packed with disturbing implications, and this might be a perfect example where truth, justice and the American way don't all fit together as neatly as Superman so often would like.