Every once in a while I think about how Lois & Clark, a show that had almost no characters with superpowers outside of Superman, had two different unrelated ones played by the incredibly distinctive character actor Leslie Jordan.
I don't know how that happened but I think it was to the benefit of the show and the stories that he was cast in the part, as it was crucial in both cases that the character not actually be read as villainous despite being thrust into a supervillainous role.
His Invisible Man was Mr. Cellophane meets Henry Bemis, an overlooked man who made himself invisible and decided the best use of his power was to redistribute as many resources as a single pair of invisible hands could.
Which is a strong contrast to the classic original Invisible Man of H.G. Wells, who promptly decided that the only thing that stopped people from taking what they wanted was fear of being caught, so being invisible meant he could rule the world unstopped.
Of course, both of these fictional Men Invisible ran smack into all the other limitations beyond visibility that prevents people from seizing whatever they want to seize and doing whatever they want with it, for good or for ill.
...suddenly for the first time connecting the fact that HG Wells, famous author of Actually, Being Invisible Would Kind Of Suck For You also wrote a short story refuting the idea that being sighted in a kingdom of blind people would make you the natural ruler of it.
In both cases the underlying assumption by the main character is that "If I can see everybody else but nobody else can see me, that means I have perfect freedom and could assume absolute power."
Dragging this thread back on track! So Leslie Jordan played Alan Morris, the invisible man of Metropolis AKA "The Invisible Robin Hood", whose inventions were stolen and used by a gang of far more cutthroat and ruthless thieves...
...and then he was also William Wallace Webster Waldecker, a sad sack man at the end of his rope who got half of Superman's powers after a weird lightning accident and became "Resplendent Man", superhero for hire.
The thing is that Wells was more exploding that premise than exploring it. Griffin's invisibility was enough for him to terrify individuals and bedevil a town, but it's clear there's no way he could have succeeded at his dream of world conquest.
https://twitter.com/Cybren/status/1402386222241169409
And the protagonist of The Country of the Blind can't even explain to the "benighted" denizens of the land he's trapped in what vision is, much less why they should defer to him because he has it. They all function just fine without it.
Anyway, though. Leslie Jordan. One of his characters was a criminal who we were meant to find sympathetic and heroic in his aims, and the other was a "hero" who was an out-and-out heel.
And I suspect that the reason they wanted someone who can project such an aura of hapless, harmless, yet endearing and charming nebbishness to play those roles is because Lois & Clark was *not* a show about superheroes fighting supervillains.
And so for them to be able to play with concepts like science fiction power suits or what other people would do with Clark's abilities, they needed basically the most humany human imaginable, someone you could root for, if only you're rooting for them to do better.
There's layers here in that Jordan is a physically and vocally unimposing white cis gay man, so the choice of him in particular to play a part that needs to be read as whatever the opposite of "threat" or "thug" is has... you know, implications.
And it's not like they never dabbled with "powered" opponents. I think a S1 plotline involved cybernetically enhanced boxers? But against someone who lifted a giant building sized vessel into orbit in the pilot, that's. That's not much.
The point of Resplendent Man was he was created by plot device to be exactly as powerful as Superman was, and while his existence weakened Superman, he wasn't out to pick a fight.
...honestly, I compared Alan Morris to a Twilight Zone character (Henry Bemis, the man who had "time enough at last" to read after the bomb fell) and I think that at its heart, what made Lois & Clark work was a very Rod Serling brand of humanism.
The show was positioned more as being a kind of soap opera/sitcom dramedy show focused on the relationship between Lois and Clark, and the TV spots frequently were cut to make it look more superhero action-adventury than it actually was...
...but a lot of the episodes really work on a level of being "This is a Twilight Zone episode, and also, Superman is here."
By that I don't mean it was a bunch of weird, jarring twists and deliberate mind tricks, but that it was using science fiction trappings to explore questions about humanity, with what was ultimately a charitable and optimistic edge.
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