Golden Age Superman terrorizes an innocent banker- Was Golden Age morality different?

Cafe Society
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I was in Barnes & Nobel last night looking at a collection of Golden Age Superman comic strips printed in the daily newspapers. One scene has this scenario where this logging camp owner needs a loan to keep an evil rival from taking over, and Superman assists him by storming into the loan meeting where the banker is (quite sensibly to all indications) refusing to give the logging camp owner a loan because he has no collateral.

Superman picks up a safe and says “Nice bank you’ve got here. It’d be shame if something happened to it”. And the banker is so scared of this threat he yields and grants to loan. Now… it it just me, or did Superman just basically extort a loan for the hapless logging camp owner by threatening to destroy the bank? Hardly seems very hero like.

In other strips you see villains accidentally starting fires, and burning down their hideouts or getaway trucks, and Superman sees the fire and then just flies away as they roast, saying essentially “Oh well, they did it to themselves.”

Was the morality of the comic strip Superman and the comic book Superman different, or was this just good old Golden Age rough justice?

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It’s just that Superman was a big jerk.

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No, he’s a dick.

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Well, young man, bankers weren’t always considered the pillars of virtue and wonderfulness that they are now. The Golden Age started in 1938, when America still hadn’t really come out of the Great Depression, a time when bankers were probably more beloved than pederasts are now … but not MUCH more.

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Some might go so far as to call him a dick. (http://www.superdickery.com)
Note: I’ve heard this sight had some spyware problems at one point so I won’t link to it. For what it’s worth, I’ve never had any problems.

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Curses, foiled again!

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Bankers in the 30s were money grubbing bastards who cared only for the bottom line. It’s different today*.

If you look at early Superman comics, they also reflected the common belief that wars were fought at the urging of munitions manufacturers.
*Irony alert.

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Superman used to be an insensitive bully (before he came out).

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I love the street-fightin’ Golden Age Superman! Here are some scans of my favorite panels from the first Superman Archives.

Example 1: If Superman wants to come visit, he WILL come visit.

Example 2: How great would it be if real life was like this?

Example 3: Before Single White Female! Before Misery! One of the creepiest Superman stories ever!

Example 4: Superman’s kind of a dick here, but he gets results.

Example 5: More of the Super-Bully, having a little too much fun.

Example 6: I’m sure he learned all about that place from Bruce and Dick.

Example 7: So he stopped the bomb from falling, but what about the plane?

Example 8: Superman’s a hardcore gangsta here.

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Holy Moley! He aint’ playin’!

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Those were the good old days before Superman and most other superheroes were turned into impotent wussies.

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In that same issue, Supes picks up an army interrogator and hurls him like a javelin to a violent death.

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It’s simply because the very early Superman stories were really and truly written by Jerry Siegel. Like many another poor Jewish kid growing up to hustle scraps for a living during the Depression, Siegel believed in a greater goodness than capitalist law. I don’t think Siegel was ever formally a socialist or communist, but he certainly felt that the money men were out to take him for every penny and never give him a break. If you go through the first several issues of Superman you can see that most of the stories were about Superman righting wrongs against labor in various guises.

The folks at DC started stomping on him heavily as soon as Superman became popular, which was within a year or so. They brought in Whitney Ellsworth, as WASPy as his name indicates, as his editor. And they kept Superman from fighting the Nazis when the European war started. By the time the radio show took off - as early as 1940, Superman was a symbolic boy from the all-American midwest, without a trace of Jewish heritage or sympathy for labor, and Jerry Siegel was just another hired hand.

Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones touches on all this background. I’m not sure it looks at the first issues that closely, but Siegel’s background and upbringing are detailed as well as anybody can know them today.

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Exapno covered that populist streak in those very earliest Superman strips and comics pretty well, but I would add that the collections from Barnes and Noble are a great bargain for golden age Superman material. They’ve got two big collections, one with about three years worth of daily strips and another with the first few years of the sunday strips and in the store they’re $20 each. They’re printed with the same quality as the Fantagraphics comic strip collections and I know that if they publish more I’ll definitely get them.

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I gotta give you the point about fighting for the little guy – but where exactly is Supes 1.0 demonstrating “Jewish heritage”? Does he ever stop flying because it’s Friday night? Battle any bad guys for sacred scrolls? Counsel small boys to become doctors or lawyers? Or was just being an untained populist pop-culture hero “Jewish” enough in those days?

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The Ubermensch

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Christlike, sure. I mean, duh.

I was thinking, “how is he supposed to represent bookish, physically disempowered, pop-culture-saturated, urbanized 1930s Jews such as those portrayed in The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay?”

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I think Expano Mapcase elaborated on the more obvious themes that were of concern to (not exclusively of course) Urban Jews in the Golden Age period. Superman going after corrupt capitalist financial and industrial tycoons as favored targets was hardly an accidental choice.

Social Justice

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Here’s the scene

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When people talk about “diversity” being in and of itself a good thing, they refer to the notion that different groups have widely varying responses to the same social stimuli. The “norms” that are often taken for granted in media look different to groups that are not well represented in the norm.

The default social reality in media was in the 1930s - and to an astounding extent is today - male-oriented, Christian, middle-class, white, straight, capitalist, politically moderate, family-oriented, hierarchical, consumerist, technological, and respective of authority. Any and all of these can be positive qualities. However, they are not the only possible positive qualities, and they can mask severe inequalities for those who choose to - or are forced to - live outside the norm.

Being Jewish means being outside of the social norm. This is absolutely automatic and no Christian can ever understand what that means, just as no white can ever understand what it means to be black, and no male can ever understand what it means to be female. In general terms, it is far easier for those outside the norm to mimic the experience of the majority than the reverse: they are simply exposed to it so constantly that assimilating it is a matter of survival. If they choose not to mimic the norm, however, the difference in viewpoint is dramatic and obvious.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that every decade in literature has seen a new outside group rise to put its own story in its own terms before the public: southerners, immigrants, Jews, blacks, women, gays, Asians, Muslims. And it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that each of these groups has been met with derision and contempt at first until their viewpoint has been assimilated (or co-opted) into general acceptance.

America being America, I don’t think there will ever be any lack of outsiders. AS Samuel R. Delany used to say, he was a gay black Communist science-fiction writer. What more perspective did he need on society?