Superman and World History.

I figure it is only right to have my first blog entry on the first superhero, Superman. Not only is this more than enough of a good reason to start with Superman but he is also the reason for this blog. I became interested in the whole idea of teaching history through the use of comics due to Superman’s early adventures. I bought a copy of The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told and in that collection there was a story about Superman arresting Hitler and Stalin. It does not get any better than that for a young superhero and history buff.

I eventually wrote a speech about Superman and how his power levels rose with the increase in power of the United States. Then a buddy and I started up the Four Color Podcast, which is in hiatus due to my busy schedule, and now here I am going solo.

Now let me be honest, I am a bigger fan of the modern Batman than I am of the modern Superman but in reading DC’s sweet Chronicles collections I am finding more and more that I totally dig the golden age Superman far more than the GA Batman.

After three volumes of each I think I have it pinned down as to why. GA Supes was quite the world traveler, he was kicking ass worldwide while Batman kept is ass kicking strictly in Gotham.
So for my purposes Superman provides a lot more examples of world history than Batman. GA Superman went looking for trouble of all sorts, and early on much like Batman he was taking on street level crime and government officials but more importantly Superman was traveling overseas.

One of the best examples of Superman intermixing with world events is in Action Comics #22. In this exciting issue Clark and Lois head overseas to report on the war in Europe, it was of course between totally made up countries but Superman intervenes to sort the whole mess out.




Now in order to get overseas in the early twentieth century you had to take an ocean liner, which goes without saying, is very cool. The first passenger flight across the Atlantic was on June 28, 1939. Action Comics #22 was published in March 1940 so this mode of travel was very new and very expensive much more than even a great metropolitan newspaper is going to pay for two reporters. Now having your main characters cross the ocean in a boat is neat and all but very boring so nine times our of ten, Clark got into trouble and ended up swimming the rest of the way as Superman.


GA Superman could not fly like he can now; remember he was only “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
Another great travel tip of GA Superman’s was to jump on top of a plane and hitch a ride.

Now my first example of Superman intersecting with history is an adventure where the Ultra Humanite who had his brain placed into the smoking hot body of Dolores Winters’, which leads to comicdom’s first transvestite. No Ultra Dolores had been macking on a scientist in order to get his place for his nuclear disintegrator. That’s right nuclear. “It’s pronounced nu-cle-er”.

This was published in 1940 and the first nuclear bomb was in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Not only that but over at Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed, Brian Cronin wrote that “Alvin Schwartz wrote Superman stories in the 1940s and 1950s, including the daily comic strips at one point.
In one story, Superman fought Professor Duske, who had a cyclotron (one of the earliest types of particle accelerators).

According to the Amazing World of DC Comics #16, the United States War Department was alarmed by this story, and in a letter from the War Department to the District Engineer at the United States Engineer Office in Tennessee, expressed their concern.

They were not, as some people feared, upset about the level of detail the books went into, but rather, the fact that having a cyclotron appear in a comic book would cause the public to take the device less seriously, and the government wanted its citizens to have a healthy amount of fear about the nuclear devices the government used.”

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2005/07/14/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-7/

Plus one of the readers there posted this:

“Battle of the Atoms” was originally going to appear in late 1944, but finally appeared in Superman #38 (January-February 1946) and featured a classic battle with Luthor save for the fact that Luthor’s new weapon was an “Atomic Bomb”. Since the Manhattan project, which gave rise to the first two American nuclear weapons, was in full swing in 1944, the Defense Department wanted nothing tipping off the Germans that America was even considering work on an atomic bomb, not even from a comic book. While the weapon used by Luthor looked nothing like the actual weapon, and was not anywhere near as destructive as the real bomb, government agents came to DC’s offices and demanded that the story not be printed until official clearance was given, citing the need for a unified national defense. Obviously, the people at DC were confused, realizing that they must have come up with something more than their normal fantastic story.

Following that, another story, “Crime Paradise”, was also censored and delayed. It ultimately appeared in 1946 in Action Comics #101 and told the story of Superman covering an atom bomb test, actually filming it for the Army. It featured a great cover by Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye showing an explosion with the now familiar “mushroom cloud”.


“Battle of The Atoms” was reprinted in SUPERMAN, V1 #243.

http://www.supermanhomepage.com/comics/comics.php?topic=articles/supes-war

The second example I have is possible they greatest piece of wish fulfillment ever was published in comics. In this story Superman decided to end the war in Europe by heading over and capturing Hitler and Stalin, you know the guy who lead the country we teamed up with to kick Hitler’s ass.


He takes both of them to the soon to be defunct League of Nations to have them sentence them in a tribunal.

Some of the cooler aspects of this story to me is the art of the soldier’s outfits, the weapons used and the tanks and planes that GA Superman tears through.

Not only this but it is total political commentary but Shuster and Siegel. You would never see two real life political figures used in a comic book story where a hero goes out to take them down and not only that but has a friggin wartime tribunal waiting to try their asses for crimes against humanity.

Germany and the Soviet Union had a treaty for a while and it was called the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which was signed in 1939 but ended in June of 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The United States then extended its Lend-Lease act to the Soviet Union in September of 1941.

It is great to see what Shuster and Siegel nailed Stalin early on but the story was published in Look Magazine in 1943, which is right smack in the middle of our alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Okay back to my original point, you will never see two real life political figures featured in a comic book story nor would they be judged like Stalin and Hitler were.

Just another reason to love the Golden Age.