Superman and the Immigrant Metaphor

Everyone's talking about it.

"Superman No 146 - Superman - Cleveland Public Library" by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I’m Thomas Fuller, and I’d like to welcome you to my Substack blog. I’m going to talk about films, comic books, religion, and politics, plus anything else that seems important.

In 2012, comics legend Dennis O’Neil wrote a blog post in which he called Superman the “patron superhero” of immigrants. In 2016 blogger David Mann argued that Superman doesn’t work well as an immigrant metaphor in a 21st Century setting, saying “he probably shouldn’t be white” and complaining that Superman’s in-universe detractors are not upset about him “sleeping with humans or praying to an alien god.” Mann’s post was inspired by Zack Snyder's movies but wasn't entirely limited to the DCEU in its critique (it correctly noted that Zack Snyder’s Superman has some roots in John Byrne’s run). In this post of my own, I’m going to explore the tension between O’Neil’s and Mann’s competing views. Many other people have voiced the same arguments, but I will use O’Neil and Mann as representatives. I think they both have a point.

Before the mid-1960s, the United States had laws which heavily restricted immigration from Asia and Africa. The American immigrants who stood out as a distinct population from the early-arriving British and German settlers were Italians, the Irish, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews. These people are often referred to as “white ethnics.” I once saw a conservative blogger evocatively call them the “Ellis Island demographic.”

Prior to the 1990s, Superman comics were often written or edited by Americans with fairly recent Jewish immigrant parents or grandparents, most famously Jerry Siegel but also Bill Finger, Mort Weisinger, Elliot S! Maggin, Jack Kirby, and Marv Wolfman. To my knowledge, the only Jewish person who has had a creative role on Superman comics since then is Brian Michael Bendis.

In the Golden Age of Comics, Krypton was not very important. Superman first became aware of its existence in a Bill Finger story from 1948, and this was a story set in the present day - not a flashback or an origin. The original Superman (the one who was later declared to be the Superman of Earth-Two, when DC decided that their late-1950s revamps of various characters needed to share a multiverse with their older comics) spent most of his comics unaware of his alien heritage. The original Siegel/Shuster Superman run is often said to be influenced by the creators’ lives as poor urban Jews, with Clark’s baby rocket resembling Moses’ crib, Krypton’s destruction resembling the events that caused Siegel’s parents to flee Lithuania, and Clark’s initial focus on fighting evil businessmen, politicians, and police/soldiers reflecting both the Moses story and the loose anti-establishment sentiments of Depression-era "white ethnics." Clark isn’t a visible minority in these stories, just as the “white ethnics” were not visible minorities. Earth-Two Superman isn’t visibly culturally distinct from the humans around him (unlike in every subsequent era he isn’t dressing like a superhero, but like a circus strongman), and he doesn’t have a stereotypically Jewish phenotype (he looks a lot like Siegel, but with straighter hair). This Superman never met other Kryptonians until after the 1948 story, and the ones he did meet were villains. People often talk about this run as if Siegel was writing Clark as a straightforward stand-in for himself. I think there is some truth in this, most visible in the fact that Clark’s politics change when Siegel’s do. Clark goes from frequently decrying and punishing people who want to start wars, to picking fights with the Nazis in comics written before Pearl Harbor, to enthusiastically supporting the US war effort.

Mort Weisinger is the editor who presided over the Superman titles in the Silver Age (1958-1970). His parents had come to America from the part of Austria-Hungary that is now the Czech Republic. Weisinger’s Superman (dubbed the Superman of Earth-One) is very familiar with Kryptonian culture and history. He has recorded messages from his father, he often visits Krypton through time travel, and he has memories of being a young boy on Krypton, something the Earth-Two Superman and the Post-Crisis Superman both never had. He often talks to his cousin Kara, who has even more memories of Krypton. He has a city full of shrunken Kryptonians rescued from Brainiac in his fortress, and often shrinks himself to spend time in this city. When startled, he exclaims “Great Rao!” the name of Krypton’s deity, and many readers today interpret this to mean the Earth-One Clark is a practitioner of the Kryptonian religion. (This can be exaggerated somewhat. An “imaginary story” from the 1960s shows Clark having a church funeral.)

It’s worth noting that many Weisinger-era Superman comics were written by Siegel. I don’t mean to say that the difference between the two visions of the role of Krypton I just outlined are a case of Siegel vs. Weisinger. Siegel’s Cleveland upbringing was not less Jewish than Weisinger’s New York upbringing. It’s more like a case of Golden Age vs. Silver Age. American pop culture in general was more interested in spacefaring science fiction in the 1950s/1960s than the 1930s/1940s. Weisinger emphasized aliens (Kryptonian and otherwise!) because that was what was in. But it is arguable that the avowedly philo-semitic postwar America Weisinger worked in allowed him (and Finger and Siegel) to pursue a more overt immigrant metaphor in their comics than had been possible in the Golden Age. To my knowledge none of these creators ever talked about this metaphor when being interviewed by the comic book press in their old age, and they never talked about it publicly during the era when they were current. Today, the immigrant metaphor is universally agreed to be part of Superman, and new Superman writers often talk about it when promoting their new runs. At some point, the metaphor became conventional wisdom.

Superman was rebooted again in 1986, more consciously/intentionally than when Weisinger did it in 1958. The runs that had kept Weisinger’s continuity going after his departure had sold badly. Crisis on Infinite Earths, the most important DC comic of the 1980s, had opened up a space for a drastic reinvention. The key creative this time was John Byrne, a British-born gentile Canadian. Byrne controversially had a much more negative take on Krypton than Weisinger or Siegel. Byrne’s Krypton was eugenicist and shunned romantic love, and Byrne’s Clark Kent explicitly identified as a human man of Earth, not Krypton. In Byrne’s take, Clark’s Kryptonian parents don’t embody Krypton’s culture so much as rebel against it. In the 2000s, the continuity Byrne created (known as Post-Crisis) was recalibrated somewhat to have a more Weisinger-esque Krypton, but the 1990s writers were obligated to use Byrne’s Krypton. A frequent criticism of the Byrne run is that it promotes assimilation. It’s not clear to me if people in the late 1980s when Byrne was writing already had the notion of Krypton as a mythic symbol for “where immigrants are from” in their heads, but 21st Century people looking at 20th Century comics often read the Byrne run through this lens. The Krypton-centric issues of the Byrne run are therefore the most controversial part of the run. Some recent high-profile DC adaptations have used a Byrne-inspired approach to Krypton, despite the comics turning away from this ages ago. Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is an example; so is the current animated TV show My Adventures With Superman, where a massive Kryptonian space empire is a recurring enemy. (For what it’s worth, Ritesh Babu once defended Snyder’s Byrne-inspired Krypton by saying it resonated with him as a critique of Indian upper-caste privilege/supremacy.)

It became common in the 2000s to portray Superman encountering anti-alien prejudice, with obvious, intentional parallels to racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Earlier post-Crisis comics showed Lex Luthor voicing these sentiments, but I think the 2000s are when this became a universal part of How To Write Superman. Mark Waid built a clash with this kind of nativism into Superman’s origin for the first time, an idea many subsequent origins would reuse. Jeph Loeb brought Clark's cousin back, allowing Clark to play the role of the relative who helps the newcomer adjust. Geoff Johns, Kurt Busiek, and James Robinson had Clark often clash with villains who tried to play up Clark’s foreignness, and Johns, a half-Lebanese man, wrote stories about Clark defending other aliens from xenophobic humans. Robinson had Clark spend time living and working on a "New Krypton" inhabited by people from all walks of Kryptonian society, while clashing with both an evil Kryptonian general and an evil human general. In the 2010s Peter J. Tomasi wrote a story in which a Kryptonian robot takes umbrage at Clark for fathering a half-human child.

It makes sense that the immigrant metaphor resonated with Dennis O’Neil. O’Neil was an Irish American, a “white ethnic.” Siegel’s vision, Weisinger’s vision, and Byrne’s vision probably all felt applicable to his own family’s history in some way. The root of the debate over whether the metaphor is useful or not comes from the reality that most current American immigrants are not “white ethnics.” John Ostrander and Phil Jimenez, in their Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman runs, both made a point of having their respective heroes tell Superman early in the run that they were more marginalized in America than Clark is, thanks to among other things their foreign upbringings. Ritesh Babu once summarized the issue by saying “Superman is the fantasy of an immigrant (alien) from another world (nation) who is raised in America, and is thus a quintessential American story. But beyond that, at its root, Superman is the fantasy of an immigrant who can ‘pass’ in White America of the ‘30s. It is a fantasy impossible for any immigrant who isn’t white-passing, which is where you run into problems.” In 2014, Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson created one of Marvel’s most celebrated characters of the 2010s, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan. Kamala is a character created to resonate with the contemporary immigrant-family reality in a literal way. Kamala is not the same kind of immigrant that Clark is.

DC Comics can’t or won’t come right out and say this. Ostrander and Jimenez were allowed to write the aforementioned stories, but I think that was back before the immigrant metaphor was so frequently used to promote this franchise. Today, Gene Luen Yang, a Chinese American writer and teacher from California, has unofficially become a kind of ambassador or custodian for the Superman immigrant metaphor. Yang wrote Superman Smashes the Klan, an award-winning comic that draws parallels between the experiences of Chinese Metropolitans and Clark himself. But what I want to highlight isn’t Klan so much as Yang’s public statements and posts about the franchise. Yang works really hard to argue that Superman is very specifically applicable to his own Chinese American community’s experience with American race relations, an argument he outlines in this blog post and in Supersquare, a two-page comic by Yang which was published in Action Comics: 80 Years of Superman and heavily shared on social media around the time that that collected edition came out. Yang posits that Superman’s nice guy persona and lack of “cool” villain-taunting lines is an intentional strategy for countering xenophobia. Yang’s argument is the best argument against Babu’s argument I’ve seen, and something like it is a necessary argument if Superman is to continue being seen as a “general” or “universal” stand-in for immigrant life in America. Would it be better to just declare Superman a representative of the “white ethnic” immigrant experience and leave representing other ones to newer characters like Kamala Khan? Or does this metaphor deserve to be flexible? I’m torn.

Philip Kennedy Johnson’s recent, excellent Action Comics run concluded with a group of surviving Kryptonian refugees settling in Metropolis and having a residential neighbourhood built for them. I fear that subsequent writers will not want to do anything with this, but if they do make use of it then there could be all kinds of opportunities for extending and refining the metaphor.