Superman Is as Good as We Can Stand Him Being
by Zach Rabiroff
It is the way of the world that Clark Kent must periodically stand in the dock before the nerds of the world to answer a single question: is Superman a fascist?
There are two schools of thought on this matter. The first is what we might call the Alan Moore School, most recently and bluntly summarized by Moore himself in a 2022 interview on the latest Batman movie: “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies,” he told Sam Leith at the Guardian. “Because that kind of infantilisation—that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities—that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” According to Moore, Superman was originally “very much a New Deal American,” but was then co-opted, just as “the early spiky, anarchic Mickey Mouse was very quickly modified into a suburbanite who wears short-sleeve shirts and has two nephews.”
It must be said that there is plenty of evidence for this reading when it comes to Superman’s appearances on film. The idea is wedded, more than a little uncomfortably, to the image of Superman as Christ: the alien Messiah sent by Father Jor-El to bring Kryptonian light to the benighted humans of earth, a moment born in 1978, in the cultural yellow sun of the most solemn and portentous sequences of Richard Donner’s first Superman film—think Marlon Brando impassively intoning, “For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you: my only son.” (Let whosoever sealeth his Action Comics in mylar never see them perish but have eternal life.)
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