The Four Color Media Monitor

With the new Superman movie soon to open in the coming week, the BBC opportunistically produced a report where they make it sound bizarrely like the Golden Age renditions of Superman literally potray him as a "socialist":

Returning to cinemas next week, the superhero may be known as the ultimate all-American Mr Nice Guy – but, back in the 1930s, he didn't begin that way.

James Gunn's new Superman film will be flying into cinemas next week, but ever since the first trailers were released, superhero fans have been having online debates about whether the Man of Steel played by David Corenswet is true to the one in the comics. Is he too gloomy? Is he too woke? Should he still be wearing red swimming trunks over his blue tights? Underlying these debates is an agreement that a few details are non-negotiable: Superman should be faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive. He should come from the planet Krypton and live in a city called Metropolis. And he should be in love with Lois Lane. Beyond that, he should also be noble and wholesome – and perhaps a bit of a bore. While the likes of Batman and Wolverine are popular because they break the rules, Superman has to be a law-abiding, upstanding all-American Mr Nice Guy.

But that hasn't always been the case. The first Superman strips were written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, and published in Action Comics magazine in 1938 by DC (or National Allied, as the company was then called). And in those, he was a far more unruly, and in some ways far more modern character. He was "a head-bashing Superman who took no prisoners, who made his own law and enforced it with his fists, who gleefully intimidated his foes with a wicked grin and a baleful glare", says Mark Waid, a comics writer and historian, in his introduction to a volume of classic Action Comics reprints. "He was no super-cop. He was a super-anarchist." If this rowdy and rebellious Superman were introduced today, he'd be hailed as one of the most subversive superheroes around.

"I had no idea the character was like that until I started writing my book," says Paul S Hirsch, author of Pulp Empire: A Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. "But it blew my mind when I saw it. He's essentially a violent socialist." The earliest issues of Action Comics bear out this assessment. When there are wrongs to be righted, Superman knocks down doors and dangles suspects from fifth-storey windows, and he makes hearty jokes while he's doing so: "See how easily I crush your watch in my palm? I'll give your neck the same treatment!"

Some of the people who are roughed up by this boisterous outlaw are pistol-packing racketeers, but usually they are a less glamorous brand of villain – a domestic abuser, an orphanage superintendent who is cruel to children – and the majority are so wealthy that they don't need to rob banks: there is the mine owner who skimps on safety measures, the construction magnate who sabotages a competitor's buildings, the politician who buys a newspaper in order to turn it into a propaganda sheet. Rather than being a typical costumed crime-fighter, then, the Superman of 1938 was a left-wing revolutionary.

Oh for heaven's sake. Are they saying a capitalist couldn't and wouldn't take the same damning approach to violent villains, no matter their financial status? This is one of the most disgusting excuses for hijacking other people's creations just to claim an icon as "theirs", and possibly to discourage right-wingers from being fans of the Man of Steel. I should note that, as somebody who owns some Golden Age archives, there were gangsters in various stories that could be considered anything but millionaires too, and a lot of Golden Age stories with other superheroes featured mafia-style crooks as the antagonists too. So where does this Hirsch get off making it sound like socialists are saints, or something like that? It should be noted Harvey Weinstein is left-wing, and he turned out to be just the kind of wealthy villain Superman could be depicted taking on. Also note how the article is so ambiguous on whether the villains can actually be considered wealthy in every sense, when racketeers are anything but that, no matter how much money the fleece off the innocent. And there have been cases of apartment landlords at the time who abused the well-being of their tenants, though simultaneously, New York's rent control laws also caused damage regardless. It's insulting to the intellect how they make it sound like nobody's aware wealthy can be just as corrupt as anybody poorer. That's talking down to the audience, but no surprise the BBC could do that.

What they miss is that, what Superman was depicted doing in some stories wasn't all that different from what even the Punisher could've later been seen doing, and even Daredevil, save for that Superman even back then usually didn't kill. And worst of all, what they obscure is that Superman, just like those characters, was and still is a vigilante, violent or otherwise. Even Spider-Man could be described that way. The difference is that Superman's angle was more on the bright/optimistic side, as was Spidey's. So, how did it get to a point where these hack writers want everyone to believe the Man of Steel, in the early tales, was solely a socialist? And are they implying he wasn't all that different in rendition than what he'd been written fighting soon enough during WW2? Or wasn't all that different from Lenin and Stalin? Well, knowing how mendacious the BBC could be for many years, this is no surprise. This is just another regurgitation of the old "superheroes are fascists" smear that even Fredric Wertham may have been guilty of precipitating.

Something to ponder: even Batman could've been depicted dangling felons out windows, as could the Punisher, and nobody calls them socialists the way Superman's being embarrassed with this puff piece. And of course, the oxymoron is that the same people calling Supes a left-wing revolutionary have no love for the Punisher, no matter the angles involved. Why do they make it sound like superheroes with super-strength never put it to use as a warning to violent felons? And then:

"I absolutely love those old issues," Matthew K Manning, the writer of Superman: The Ultimate Guide and John Carpenter's Tales of Science Fiction, tells the BBC. "They're clearly the work of young people frustrated with the injustices of the world, and rightfully so. Keep in mind, these were two Jewish men reaching adulthood just before the start of World War Two. There was plenty to be angry about. And suddenly they had this character who could give a voice to their concerns and hold the corrupt accountable."

What's really irritating is how they run the gauntlet of putting Siegel/Shuster in the same boat as Germany's National Socialists, or even Russia's communists, implying that Jewish-Americans weren't all that different in any way from the socialists of eastern Europe. And don't they realize communists brutalized dissidents and threw them in the Gulag in the USSR? Even Jewish inhabitants of eastern Europe were victims of this. The obfuscation of these historical topics is shameful.

Not that Siegel and Shuster were the only comics professionals with such liberal views. "The comic-book industry was founded largely by people barred from work in more legitimate fields," Hirsch explains to the BBC, "because they were Jewish, they were immigrants, they were people of colour, they were women. It was a creative ghetto where a lot of very talented people ended up because they weren't able to get a Madison Avenue advertising job, and they couldn't write for Life Magazine. A lot of those people were radical – or at least not mainstream – and DC was founded by men who very much fit that mould: men who were recent immigrants, men who had leftist sympathies from growing up in New York City at that time."

Ah, and here, they're hinting at their own left-wing positions from a modern perspective, which they must be trying to apply to figures from the past as well in the same twisted logic. Well that's shameful, and besides, I don't recall any stories from the Golden Age that made it sound like everybody should literally be given free money and not work at all for a living.

All the same, few comic characters were as militant as Superman. In one early issue, he demolishes a row of slum homes in order to force the authorities to build better housing (a risky strategy, that one). In another, he takes on the city's gambling industry because it is bankrupting addicts. And in another, he declares war on everyone he sees as being responsible for traffic-related deaths. He terrifies reckless drivers, he abducts the mayor who hasn't enforced traffic laws, he smashes up the stock of a second-hand car dealer, and he wrecks a factory where faulty cars are assembled. "It's because you use inferior metals and parts so as to make higher profits at the cost of human lives," he informs the owner. Were Superman's direct-action protest campaigns strictly legal? No, but they were riotous, boldly political fun – and almost 90 years on, they stand as a fascinating street-level account of US urban life in the 1930s.

While I don't deny the notion of demolishing slums straight off the bat doesn't come without question, I do wonder why they make gambling dens sound so benign - even today, there's gambling dens run by mafia and loan sharks, and they can be very dangerous to anybody foolish enough to waste money at their joints. My own family had a relative or two in past decades who were threatened by organized syndicates because they gambled stupidly at their shoddy grottos. It was a stupid thing to do, but that doesn't excuse that these gangsters did something bad, all over mere money. Do violent felons deserve to run gambling dens without opposition? Nope. Such dens in themselves are a form of socialism in disguise. And why should we care if there's a story where Supes tears down a gangster's grotto because they're luring people in to lose money and face death threats if they don't pay up? Also, he wasn't depicted tearing down the slum houses so they could be rebuilt to house the kind of illegal immigrants who turned the USA and Europe into a horror story. He was depicted doing it, if anything, for the folks who already lived in that neighborhood, including the delinquents he was speaking to.

All too soon, however, Superman turned his attention to mad scientists and giant monsters, and away from Metropolis's under-privileged masses. After a handful of issues, his "opponents were all larger than life, and while that made for exciting comics, his days of social crusading were becoming a thing of the past", writes Waid.

Umm, I think even after this "brief period" as they describe it, there were still plenty of stories for a time where rank-and-file gangsters were adversaries, but in any event, what they claim about the early issues is definitely exaggerated and blatant.

What was the Kryptonite that sapped Superman's social conscience? Hirsch argues that it was a compound of two elements. One was the "blandification" that occurs when the sales of any commercial property go up, up and away. "Superman is unbelievably popular from the moment they get the sales numbers for the first issue," he says. "So they suddenly realise what they have on their hands, and they don't want to jeopardise it. Jack Liebowitz, the president of DC, sees that they can sell Superman pillowcases and pyjamas – but if Superman's running around throwing people out of windows and threatening to wrap iron bars around their necks, it isn't going to work."

Alongside that familiar story of a big star selling out, "the ultimate thing that ends Superman's radical streak is the beginning of the war", says Hirsch. "All of the immigrant and non-white people who were working in this industry, they wanted to be seen as patriotic. And it makes sense. That's what you had to do to fit in. And even more nuts-and-bolts, that's what you had to do to get your paper ration [for printing magazines]. If you were doing things that bothered the government in 1941, maybe you wouldn't get your wood pulp."

I think Mr. Hirsch is implying patriotism is wrong. No surprise there, of course, coming from the BBC. Many Jewish movements at the time campaigned for the USA to help fight against Germany's National Socialist-led military monsters, and they're obfuscating even that much for the sake of their shoddy claim the early Superman tales echoed "socialism"? What a fraud indeed. I will not buy his books if I can help it. Something that was obscured in all this mess is that, IIRC, Jerry Siegel was interviewed by the BBC in 1981 and told them he fully supported the "truth, justice and the American way" slogan that was first featured in radio broadcasts in the early 40s. That's not exactly something you see today's Chomskyites upholding, is it?

Anyway, to think much of comicdom, no matter the political standings of its contributors, would've been produced all so that modern ideologues like those contributing to the BBC could exploit them just to limit everything to their own narrow beliefs, it's just devastating. And it goes without saying that, the would-be historians they interviewed don't deserve to own any comics like these if all they can think of doing is taking them way out of context with exaggerated claims just to justify their own narrow visions. All they're doing is insulting the memory of fine folks like Siegel and Shuster, who, while they obviously weren't saints, neither were they the kind of far-left communists this puff piece runs the risk of making them sound like.

Labels: dc comics, good artists, good writers, history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, Superman, violence