The Hero
What is the hero? Simply formulated, the hero is who human beings aspire to be like. If I could change some aspect of my body or personality, my heroes are defined as those individuals that would model my new person. Traditionally, our heroes are strong, intelligent, funny, and confident. And ethically? Traditional heroes are morally good. They embody temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice; faith, hope, and love. We portray and choose virtuous heroes because human beings desire to be virtuous themselves.
Superman is a perfect example of the hero. He is physically gifted with superpowers, but he also (in most renditions) holds tightly to traditional ethics and morality. Superman will save the damsel in distress, hand the villain over to the legal authorities, and work to bring justice to those criminals oppress. Superman, by design, is everything humanity aspires to be.
So why is he so boring?
Perhaps it is because virtually every conflict he is involved in is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps he is simply too dated, so that every conceivable variation on the few weakness he has to exploit has been done. He is boring because we cannot relate to him. Superman is so perfect, so extremely invulnerable, so virtuous, that the conflicts that beset him are either not true conflicts or strain our ability to suspend disbelief. We want our heroes to triumph over their real weaknesses, real temptations, and real conflicts, because it is more like our everyday lives. A brief survey of the literary canon reveals that this perfect hero is extremely rare. The most famous and abiding heroes in our culture are almost always far more complex and weak. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Hamlet, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Churchill: they are all intensely flawed heroes. We can relate to them in their weaknesses, making their strengths and victories all the more admirable and inspiring.
The perfect hero then, exists only in some abstract way or theory in our minds. We might desire those qualities, but we do not find a human being who perfectly embodies all of them realistic. We might even be offended by them.