Superman fought the Nazis in 1941. He squared off against the Ku Klux Klan in 1946. And, in 2025, Superman seemingly took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To have a beloved fictional character like Superman confront real-world villains invariably ruffles feathers. It did then and it does now. The latest film incarnation, “Superman,” released earlier this month, was branded “Superwoke” by Fox, for what it saw as “pro-immigrant” themes. A former adviser to President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, weighed in, telling the network, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to, and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.” Jesse Watters, another Fox host, piled on with a sarcastic jab: “He fights for truth, justice and your preferred pronouns. The new Superman is going woke.”
What these critics don’t seem to realize is that Superman has always been political. Conceived by two Jewish teenagers in 1933 — the same year Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor — Superman was less escapist fantasy than a pointed response to the frightening world in which his creators lived. Superman was constructed not as a bland expression of popular culture or a gesture of American exceptionalism, but as a defender of the marginalized, a rebuke to authoritarianism and a somewhat radical statement about what power could, and maybe should, be used for.
And so the socially conscious take by the latest “Superman” director, James Gunn, tackling Big Tech, immigration crackdowns, internet troll farms and even war in the Middle East, actually stays true to the original vision of the character’s co-creators. Jerry Siegel, the writer, and Joe Shuster, the illustrator, both had views very much aligned with the Rooseveltian New Deal era of the 1930s. Their character, Superman, was a reflection of those values.
“In many ways, James Gunn’s Superman is the one Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster would have made if they were working in today’s cultural climate,” A. David Lewis, a professor and comic book and graphic novel writer, told me. “I can say, without any hesitation, that Superman was an inherently political figure from his very first appearance,” entertainment writer Andrew Friedenthal echoed, adding, “Those who criticize using the character to tackle real-life issues have a deeply flawed understanding of what made him such an iconic figure in the first place.” Over the years, the comic book hero has taken on slum lords preying on their tenants, the prison system mistreating the incarcerated, crooked stockbrokers, autocrats, bullies, xenophobes, racists, weapons dealers, war profiteers and even, in rare cases, the U.S. government itself.
Siegel himself explicitly endorsed this notion. In a 1981 interview with the BBC, he cited the rise of Nazism as an inspiration for creating Superman. “I felt that the world desperately needed a crusader, if only a fictional one,” he said, describing his character as “a very clean-cut guy who could have ruled the world, and is all-powerful, but instead he uses his powers to aid the helpless and the deserving rather than to exploit them.”
Perhaps, then, Superman’s real power has never been X-ray vision or being faster than a speeding bullet. Perhaps, instead, it’s the character’s overall consistent penchant for social justice. Even when it wasn’t — or isn’t — popular.
Superman was introduced to the world in “Action Comics #1,” which was published in 1938. Within the first 14 pages of the 10-cent comic book, Superman establishes himself as a quasi-socialist, anti-fascist folk hero. He rescues a wrongfully accused prisoner from the electric chair, sets an abusive husband straight, then jets off to Washington, D.C., to foil a crooked politician and the hawkish lobbyist lining his pockets. (This, interestingly, mirrored an actual case at the time: The Senate in the 1930s was investigating arms manufacturers for potentially steering the country into World War I for profit.)
Successive issues of “Action Comics” had Superman stop a war in Latin America, drag an arms dealer into the conflict to witness the damage he was inflicting firsthand and force a corrupt mine owner to make working conditions safer.
“Action Comics” also had Superman prevent the police from arresting a group of young thieves. They weren’t hardened criminals, just poor kids trying to survive in the slums. So he destroyed the slums, leaving the city government with no choice but to build affordable housing.
Those early stories in “Action Comics,” of Superman “fighting against power-mad, out-of-control capitalists, predatory politicians and the looming threat of fascism,” as Friedenthal describes them, spoke to the initial intention of the character’s creators. This early incarnation, he said, was a “direct power fantasy of two young Jewish men,” angry and afraid at the rise of fascism in Europe, who created a hero who could fight back in a way they could not. “Those stories spoke very directly to a country on the verge of war.”
Siegel himself, in a 1975 press release, said:
What led me into conceiving Superman in the early thirties? Listening to President Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats.’ … Being unemployed and worried during the depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany. … Seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden. … Reading of gallant, crusading heroes in the pulps, and seeing equally crusading heroes on the screen in feature films and movie serials (often pitted against malevolent, grasping, ruthless madmen). I had the great urge to help … the despairing masses, somehow. How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer. And Superman, aiding the downtrodden and oppressed, has caught the imagination of the world.
In February 1940 — the same month the Nazis established the Lodz ghetto in Poland — an issue of Look magazine, the general interest bi-weekly, featured a special two-page story titled “How Superman Would End the War.” Siegel and Schuster wrote and illustrated the story, in which Superman flies to war-torn Europe, busts through the Siegfried line on Germany’s western border and smashes Nazi weaponry, before finally capturing Hitler. Superman then flies to Moscow to get Stalin. The story ends how real life never did: with Superman dragging both dictators to Geneva, straight to the League of Nations, to answer for their war crimes. At one point, Superman snatches Hitler by the throat and says, “I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw.”
It was just two pages. But two pages, it turned out, were all it took to enrage the Third Reich. So much so, in fact, that Nazi Germany’s SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps devoted an entire page to denouncing Superman who, apparently, struck a real nerve with the regime. Calling out the creators’ Jewish heritage, the Nazi paper framed Superman not as a symbol of justice but as a dangerous piece of “Jewish propaganda” undermining Aryan ideals. The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels even attacked Siegel by name, calling him “an intellectually and physically circumcised chap.” Hitler’s regime, threatened by a fictional comic book hero in tights, inadvertently confirmed Superman’s role as a powerful symbol of cultural resistance in the face of rising fascism.
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini recognized the subversive power of Superman before the war even began. In 1939, he banned Superman and all other American comics from Fascist Italy. (Everything except for Mickey Mouse, that is. Supposedly, Mussolini had a soft spot for Disney’s favorite rodent.)
Six years after Superman pissed off the Nazis, the character took on a new real-world foe: the KKK. Stetson Kennedy, a human rights activist born into a privileged Southern family, had made it his mission to bring the klan down. Like many well-to-do white families of the time, his household employed Black servants, one of whom, he said, was “like a second mother.” One day, when she confronted a white bus driver who overcharged her for a ticket, the klan retaliated by kidnapping, beating and raping her — a horrifying act that deeply affected Kennedy.
Determined to fight back, he infiltrated the klan and documented their bizarre, secretive rituals. But taking on a hate group as entrenched as the KKK wasn’t a one-person job. So Kennedy called in backup: Superman. Or, more accurately, the producers of “The Adventures of Superman” radio show.
It was 1946 and the show, with the help of Kennedy’s expertise, aired a 16-part story called “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” centered around a confrontation Superman has with a fictionalized analog of the KKK. In the story, the hate group targets a Chinese-American baseball player, prompting Superman and the Daily Planet to step in.
Kennedy’s insider knowledge became the foundation for the groundbreaking Superman radio show that exposed the KKK’s inner workings — their code words, ceremonies and hierarchical structure — much of it never before made public. The show didn’t just reveal klan secrets; it mocked them, portraying the group as a gaggle of incompetent cowards who were both physically and ideologically beatable.
This use of Superman occurred amid fierce racism during the twilight of Jim Crow, more than a decade before landmark civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. Yet, despite this climate, the broadcast grabbed widespread attention. Soon after, in real life, KKK membership took a sharp nosedive across the country and the state of Georgia revoked the klan’s corporate charter. Both suggest that the fictional Superman was capable of real-world impact.
By 1949, Superman’s likeness was used as a messaging tactic in public schools across the country. He encouraged schoolchildren to embrace diversity, reminding them that discrimination based on race, religion or sex was, in his words, “un-American.” In 1953, a DC Comics public service announcement told the story of a Black boy who bravely stopped an escaped lion until Superman arrived. When the circus owner mistakenly tried to praise a white boy instead, Superman called out his bias, making a bold statement against racial prejudice.
Yet, come the 1950s, the political landscape was shifting. Science fiction, as a genre, had gained traction and there was a growing cultural backlash against comic books. Before heavy metal was accused of promoting satanism and video games were scapegoated for mass shootings, comic books were once a controversial flashpoint in the culture wars.
Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist, became a prominent anticomic crusader. In 1954, Wertham published “Seduction of the Innocent,” a scathing critique of comic books that blamed them for corrupting America’s youth. The book ignited both a media frenzy and public outrage, culminating in the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, led by Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The hearings sought to determine whether comics contributed, as Wertham said they did, to the corruption of American youth.
The subcommittee ultimately stopped short of recommending government-imposed censorship, but it did place enormous pressure on the industry to self-regulate. The result was the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in late 1954, developed by the Comics Magazine Association of America. While it had no official legal sway over creators’ artistic choices, comics that failed to receive the CCA’s approval seal were often refused shelf space by retailers, effectively suppressing noncompliant content.
The CCA’s guidelines were strict: Heroes could never kill, blood could not be shown, villains could not be glorified and any suggestion of debauchery — sexual, political or otherwise — was not to be tolerated. The Cold War was also well underway and, on the rare occasion that Superman was used in a political context, it reflected more the McCarthy-era culture of the time, painting Superman as a patriotic all-American who served as a hedge against communism. Ultimately, the Superman of the ‘50s was tamed by regulation.
It didn’t help that his forward-thinking creators, Siegel and Shuster, had sold all rights to the character to National Allied Publications (later known as DC Comics) for a one-time payment of $130, a decision both would later regret. So while the pair still occasionally wrote Superman stories for DC, they no longer had creative control of their character.
Siegel had officially left DC Comics in 1947 and, by 1959, he was living with his family in a one-bedroom apartment on Long Island, surviving paycheck to paycheck. He briefly returned to DC that same year, encouraged by his second wife, and wrote a few more Superman stories, but when DC learned in 1966 that Siegel and Shuster were planning a second lawsuit to reclaim the copyright to Superman, they stopped giving him work.
In hindsight, Wertham misread Superman. He ignored not only the character’s anti-fascist origins but also his role as a New Deal-era champion of the marginalized. In a twist of irony, Wertham helped temporarily cement Superman’s role as, at best, a tepid form of pop culture and, at worst, a cultural errand boy of sorts to advance the idea of American exceptionalism.
In 2011, reflecting on the Man of Steel’s shift away from his early activist origins, “Superman” writer Grant Morrison wrote, “It came to pass that our socialist, utopian, humanist hero was slowly transformed into a marketing tool, a patriotic stooge, and, worse; the betrayer of his own creators.”
But this situation didn’t last. The CCA’s influence waned over the years and socially minded writers with a finger on the pulse soon began writing Superman stories again, with political interventions about real issues returning to the character.
“Superman vs. Muhammad Ali” was a comic book published in 1978. Ali was, at the time, a polarizing figure in the U.S. political landscape. One reason for this was that Ali, whose conversion to Islam inspired his subsequent name change, was a staunchly outspoken critic of the Vietnam War — so much so that, citing his religious beliefs as a newfound Muslim, he refused to be drafted into the U.S. military. Ali paid dearly for this stance; he was stripped of his heavyweight title, banned from boxing and faced legal charges.
So it was a big deal that a comic book had Ali face off against the quintessential American icon that is Superman. It was an even bigger deal that the comic strip didn’t use Superman as a weapon to beat Ali; instead, Ali beat Superman. At the end of the story, both raised their gloves and Ali declared, “We are the greatest!” This validated Ali for both the bigotry he had faced and the social causes for which he had advocated. In a later interview, the artist Neal Adams called the decision to portray Ali as equal to the “mythical white Superman” a subtle political act.
That same year, “Superman: The Movie” came out, starring Christopher Reeve. In one scene of the film, Lois Lane sarcastically remarks that if Superman is actually standing up for his ideals of “truth, justice and the American way,” then he’s “gonna end up fighting every elected official in this country!”
Another injection of politics came in the 1980s, when Superman’s archnemesis, Lex Luthor, got a makeover inspired by the real world. Luthor first showed up in “Action Comics #23” back in 1940, imagined by Siegel and Shuster as a bald-headed war profiteer egging on European powers to destroy each other for his own financial gain. He was a classic Siegel-Shuster villain — part madman, part metaphor. But over time, and especially through the ‘50s, Luthor gradually drifted into sci-fi territory, becoming less robber baron and more ray guns and rocket ships.
Then came the 1980s. According to Friedenthal, this reimagined Luthor wasn’t just inspired by Wall Street or corporate greed but modeled, at least in part, after Trump himself. “It showed another way to make the character relevant to the real world, by pointing to the fact that no matter how physically powerful a person might be, they can’t punch the power structures that support greed, corruption and prejudice,” Friedenthal told me. “The one foe Superman has never been able to overcome, despite decades of attempts to do so, is capitalism.”
Then, for the milestone 900th issue of “Action Comics” in 2011, something wildly controversial happened: Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship. Interestingly, Superman’s breaking point was a fictional incident that happened in Iran. In the comic, he flew to Tehran amid a massive protest. In an act of solidarity with the Iranian demonstrators, he stood silently for 24 hours. Some of the Iranians threw flowers at him, others Molotov cocktails. The Iranian government, however, saw Superman as an agent of the U.S. To them, a superpowered American showing up uninvited during civil unrest was nothing short of an act of war.
“I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy,” Superman said in a speech bubble. Frustrated by the assumption that everything he does reflects Washington’s agenda, Superman then said: “Truth, justice, and the American way — it’s not enough anymore. The world’s too small, too connected.” By the end of the comic, Superman appeared before the United Nations and renounced his U.S. citizenship.
Ten years later, in 2021, DC announced that the 1950s-era Superman motto — “Truth, justice and the American way” — would be officially changed to “Truth, justice and a better tomorrow.” This irked not only the usual suspects, like Fox, but also the Heritage Foundation, which is closely linked with the Trump administration, and whose website explained the change with the analysis that “It has become very cool to hate on America.”
“As a character, Superman was designed to be the ideal, an exemplar,” Lewis told me. “But I think people sometimes misunderstand that to mean how powerful he is or how much respect or authority he commands. Superman is an ideal in terms of human spirit. He represents our best angles, our highest conscience and our most realized selves in a society.”
Having spent the summer of 2023 working in Palestine, it was impossible for me not to notice my government’s hand in systemic oppression there. This is why when the new Superman movie made it a point to stop the war in Gaza — I mean, um, Jarhanpur — I was so struck.
“There’s a general sense that there’s something real-wordly about the war subplot in ‘Superman,’” Danny Fingeroth, author of “Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us,” wrote to me via email, “but since it’s between fictional nations whose religions are left vague, there’s wiggle room for interpretation.”
Luthor is the 2025 film’s chief villain, portrayed as a conniving tech billionaire CEO reminiscent of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. Luthor is arming the fictional nation of Boravia — white, wealthy and a close U.S. ally — as it launches a brutal assault on its smaller neighbor, Jarhanpur, a poorer, nonwhite state. Boravia’s leader, many online have pointed out, not only has some Netanyahuisms but also resembles David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister. (Luthor is also promised a sizable chunk of real estate in Jarhanpur after the locals are driven out, recalling Trump’s fantasy of turning Gaza’s ruins into a “Middle East Riviera.”)
In an early scene, Lane interviews Superman about his controversial intervention to stop Boravia’s war. She mentions Jarhanpur’s authoritarian regime (a possible reference to Hamas). Superman dismisses this. Repression, he counters, doesn’t justify invasion.
The later invasion scene paints a clearer Gaza-esque picture. Tanks roll in. Mostly unarmed protesters scatter. A boy hoists a Superman flag as gunfire erupts. Viewers have drawn lines to the Gaza border protests of 2018 and 2019, when Israeli snipers killed over 200 Palestinians and wounded thousands more.
Elsewhere, the film seems to clearly address immigration-related issues. Luthor, hell-bent on neutralizing Superman, launches a digital smear campaign that floods social media with anti-Superman content to stir up support. Accusations fly: He’s a foreign threat, an alien seducer, a would-be enslaver of humanity. Given the fact that Superman is a refugee from the dying planet Krypton, the rhetoric in the film even mirrors “great replacement” conspiracies, which ultimately lead to Superman’s imprisonment. And because he’s an “alien,” the U.S. government doesn’t read him his rights, nor does he get due process. Instead, he’s thrown into a secret facility for the state’s political opponents, where torture is routine.
Later in the film, Luthor screams, “Alien!” at Superman. This brings to mind the way that term has been weaponized as a pejorative in the U.S. toward migrants, especially from Trump administration insiders like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller has said, advocating to end birthright citizenship and introduce a “denaturalization process.”
“I’m as human as anyone,” is how Superman replies to Luthor. “I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and, despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time. But that’s being human. And that’s my greatest strength.”
None of it struck me as political. None of it struck me as pushing an agenda. If anything, it struck me as deeply Superman. And I clearly wasn’t the only one. Yes, it has irked the likes of Fox News and the right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, but to many longtime Superman fans, Gunn’s film was a home run.
Take Craig Ferguson, for example. He’s a former U.S. Marine veteran, a “huge Superman fan” and the owner of Hero Headquarters, Inc. — the Colorado comic store I frequented as a kid. Ferguson told me that he loved the film, that “Superman to me always embodied goodness and hope. He is truly an amazing character in how he is always there for us tackling things we cannot.” My own brother also credits his decision to become a firefighter, at least in part, to the example Superman set for him as a kid, which he feels was aptly reflected in the new movie.
“The movie has rekindled hopepunk,” Lewis told me. Coined by the author Alexandra Rowland, “hopepunk” is a subgenre of fiction that pushes back against fatalism and nihilism, and instead champions optimism and empathy. It’s a spirit Gunn’s “Superman” embraces wholeheartedly.
Franchises like “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” have hopepunk hues, Lewis notes, though often through gentler, more introspective characters. “For Superman,” Lewis said, “the freakin’ strongest and most-loved hero, to be leading a hopepunk revival is amazing.”
This is an opinion echoed by Gunn himself. In a recent interview, he said that his Superman, who appears bloodied and battered at the film’s start, is a sort of metaphor for the country. “I believe that most people in this country, despite their ideological beliefs or their politics, are doing their best to get by and trying to be good people, despite what it may seem like to the other side,” Gunn said. And that’s what Superman is all about, according to Gunn: “the basic, fundamental decency of human beings all over the world.”
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