In a recent interview with The Times, Superman director James Gunn said that his new blockbuster tells the story of “an immigrant.” He also explained it was a story about “basic human kindness.” But that first comment — about Superman’s foreign origins — is the one that set off some pundits on the right.
Fox News commentator Jesse Watters joked on air: “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” Ben Shapiro blasted Gunn and the Hollywood left for being out of touch with everyday American audiences: “The reality [is] that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it’s about America.”
But, Grant Morrison — author of the seminal comic book series All-Star Superman — said the conservative backlash ignores the leftist origins of the world’s most famous superhero.
Not only was Superman created by the sons of Jewish immigrants, but those very first comics portrayed their character as a “socialist figure.”
In one comic published in 1939, Superman is seen shielding young thieves from police because he figured the kids were victims of poverty, then tearing down slums and forcing authorities to build low-rent housing. Before becoming the “Man of Steel,” Superman was “The Champion of the Oppressed.”
Gunn has said that All-Star Superman was a big influence on his new film. Morrison sat down with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to talk about where Superman came from, how the character has evolved, and why he will endure.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How did you get into Superman? What did this character mean to you?
I grew up on the west coast of Scotland next to an American naval and nuclear base. My parents were anti-nuclear activists. My father was a World War II soldier who became a peacenik. So, my big fear in the world was the atom bomb, and I associated it with the Americans, but the Americans also brought the comics.
Then I discovered Superman. And although I knew no real Superman was coming to save me from an actual atom bomb, metaphorically he really solved a lot of problems for my head when I was a little kid.
Those are the primal roots for me, and they’re quite deep. So yeah, getting a chance to do that character, sitting here overlooking that same stretch of water where we did the protests…To write All-Star Superman kind of defies the forces of entropy. If anything survives in my career, it will be that one book.
Who was the Superman that you created in that series?
We went for an older Superman. The basic idea was: What if Superman was dying and he had a year to live? Basically, it’s a part of Lex Luthor’s scheme to send Superman to the sun, and the solar radiation overcharges Superman’s cells, so they begin to decay and die. Basically, Superman’s dying of cancer. What would this man do in the last 12 months of his life to leave the Earth a better place than he found it?
Were you surprised to find out that James Gunn wanted to relaunch this character and relaunch an entire cinematic universe with your story about a dying Superman?
James didn’t necessarily take the dying part. His is a younger Superman. But I think he certainly took the character as we decided to define it, and he saw something that he could work with. Instead of Superman having flaws, let’s present a fictional character who doesn’t have flaws. You know, he has problems of his own. He still can’t get the girl. He still works for a boss in an office, but he’s Superman. He’s a kind of everyman whose life happens at a much higher scale. He’s got an unruly dog, but his unruly dog can laser his own dinner and cook a steak. His unruly dog can fly through buildings, but he’s still dealing with an unruly dog.
In previous attempts people have asked: What would Superman be like if he was in the real world? Which to me is an absurd question. The only existence Superman has in the real world is as a comic book or movie character, and that’s where he is most useful and most functional, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a metaphor. He is an allegory. He stands for everything that is good in us.
It sounds like there have been at least some iterations of this character throughout his near-century of existence — from your dying version to this ideal version, to this all-powerful version. But I believe Superman even started as a bit of a tough guy, a headbasher, and maybe even a left-wing revolutionary. Can you tell us about the non-Kryptonian origins of this character, and how he came to be on Earth?
Well, he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. He was created by two teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who’d met at school. Jerry was the writer and Joe was the artist. They wanted to work for newspapers. Newspaper syndication was the place to go for cartoons back then. They were working on this notion called “The Superman.” The original version was an evil bald guy who eventually became Lex Luthor in the Superman story. But after a few tries, they hit on this fabulous notion of: Let’s give him a wrestling costume with a cape so that we can track his movement across the panels, and make him very colorful so that he’s memorable.
The greatest addition to the design was to put his monogram on his chest so that the character’s entire identity was summed up in this very simple advertising motif that people can remember and people can also wear and partake in being Superman. It was created by two young kids who were the sons of immigrants — European immigrants, Jewish boys — and this was their vision.
Superman was a do-gooder. He was here to help people. He’d come from a distant world, but thought the only use for power and strength was to help the downtrodden and the oppressed. Early issues of Action Comics depict a Superman who’s very much an outlaw. He goes after corrupt union bosses. He goes after mine owners. He goes after politicians who are corrupt.
Superman later was seen as a messianic figure of hope, which I don’t really like, because I think he’s a fighter, he’s a scrapper. He gets into fights on behalf of the little guy. He gets bloodied up and he gets up again. You shoot him [with] a tank shell, and he gets up again.
Through the years, that changed quite radically. The socialist figure of the early years hit 1942 and suddenly it was war, and Superman became incredibly patriotic, and that’s where the “Truth, justice, and the American way” thing first appears.
Then, in the 1950s, Superman changes again completely. You’re dealing with guys coming home from the war, domestication, and living in suburbia. So Superman becomes a family drama, but on a titanic scale. He has friends from the future who visit and cause trouble. He has a cousin who survived the destruction of Krypton, he has a dog, and he has a monkey. So Superman then, to me, was probably at his peak, but he was representative of post-war masculinity trying to adjust to a world of relatives and not being married. Those stories were obsessed with the relationship with Lois [Lane].
In the 1960s, he becomes a cosmic seeker. He almost goes back to his roots, and we have stories where he is fighting for Native American land rights, he’s up against polluters, and very much back to the activist Superman. And so it goes. In the 1980s, he’s a yuppie. In the 1990s, they kill him in order to make it interesting, then bring it back as a soap opera set around the fictional newspaper, the Daily Planet. And into the 2000s, you get the work that I did.
It’s funny to hear you lay out this history in which Superman at one point is something of a socialist warrior, because all of these pundits who are mad about James Gunn saying that Superman’s an immigrant, if they really knew the history here, there’s so much more they could be mad about.
Absolutely. As you say, if anyone had bothered to look at the history of Superman, they’d see that he was always an immigrant created by immigrants. He represented that experience, but he was assimilated. I mean, he was an American. He’d been raised by American parents. So that was very important as well. And I think the combination of these two qualities is what maybe drives people mad, because they want it to be either one thing or another, but Superman’s trying to embody everyone.
It’s funny, a thing that we talk about the first half of the show is that depending on how tuned into the news you are, you can see a lot of what’s going on in the world today in this movie. But of course, this movie wasn’t made this week. It was made a year ago.Yeah.The meetings about this movie probably started five years ago. Do you think there’s something about the nature of Superman that makes him timeless?
I definitely believe that. I mean, we are talking about the history of Superman, which goes back to 1938. Superman has outlived his creators. He’s also outlived the people who took over from his creators, and the next generation of the people who took over from his creators.
Superman is more real than I am. He’s more real than most of us. He will outlive us all, and he’ll still have meaning to people in the future. People have even forgotten that his look was based on early 20th-century circus strongmen and wrestling outfits. So now it’s the template for the ideal superhero. And because he was the first, he’s got the best name, the most primal name. I absolutely think Superman will persist beyond even the next few generations. As long as the world stays together and there’s such a thing as culture, I think there’ll still be a Superman.