Discover J. Michael Straczynski’s Origin Story in the Bold Memoir Becoming Superman

I’m not sure what I was expecting from the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski, mastermind behind the seminal sci-fi serial Babylon 5 (among very many other impressive credits, the most recent of which include Netflix’s gloriously queer Sense8, the Clint Eastwood-directed film Changeling, and a long run on The Amazing Spider-Man).

Among the family’s greatest secrets is in his facist-loving father’s connection to a historical atrocity, a revelation that born storyteller (and, notably, former Murder, She Wrote writer) Straczynski can’t help but lay out as a mystery—albeit one which he himself was called upon to solve at the time. As someone with my own unconventional and occasionally quite dark upbringing, it takes a bit to shock me, but this writer’s backstory does just that. It’s a story that deserves to be told, and it’s told here compellingly, with as little gratuitousness as possible given the subject matter. By the time he uncovers his father’s damning secret and takes his last beating, the title Becoming Superman seems deserved—and not only because the fictional hero serves as the young Straczynski’s constant inspiration and polestar). Indeed, someone with this much trauma could easily have become a monster, perpetuating the cycles of family violence in a way that would have been sad but understandable. Similarly, the act of refashioning that childhood trauma into a compelling narrative with mystery and even a puckish sense of humor is impressive in itself.

But this is also the story of a writer’s journey, and, for fans of Straczynski’s work, the Hollywood stories offer a welcome relief from all that darkness (fellow famous writer type Neil Gaiman provides the introduction). Early encounters with luminaries like Harlan Ellison and Norman Corwin (by all means, look him up if you’re not familiar) helped steer the writer away from the life he’d seemed destined for. A bit of luck and his own determination saw him getting his feet wet in journalism and then trying his hand at script writing for cartoons like He-Man, She-Ra, and The Real Ghostbusters before he made the jump into live-action TV with shows like Jake and the Fatman and the aforementioned Murder, She Wrote. It was a long road to the franchise that is likely his magnum opus—the scrappy, literate, underfunded Babylon 5, still among the most unapologetically science-fictional shows ever made. That’s the stuff that we showed up for and if it turns out to be slightly less compelling than everything that leads up to it, it’s only because there’s so much more to the origin story than anyone could have imagined.