I am a big Superman fan and I can’t tell you how wrong this take is. Yes, certain comics portray Superman as friend and believer in the “American Way” and as sometimes ally of the US military. However, those takes are far from the normal status quo. Of course you get particularly liberal-minded writers who frequently use that take. However, those writers are the exception rather than the rule. Hell, the most famous instance of Superman being a government shill came from Frank Miller in The Dark Knight which is such a poor take on Superman as to be parody. Miller famously hates Superman and found a way to character assassinate him and have Batman beat the shit out of him (laughable). Frequently the US government and Superman are at odds with each other and Superman regularly defies them even going so far as to directly stop their actions.
Superman got his start as someone that opposed societal oppression in all it’s forms. In one golden age story Superman literally tears down a dilapidated tenement building being run by a slumlord who was extorting his tenants and refusing repairs, finding proper housing for the folks and forcing the slumlord to sell to the city to build something suitable. In another story Superman poses as a miner and goes undercover to expose a ruthless businessman exploiting his workers at the mine.
If Superman existed in the real world he definitely would be horrified at the actions of Israel and I have no doubt he’d step in. That’s actually a big point in the movie as he causes an international incident by stepping into stop troops from murdering civilians in a nation that is an obvious stand-in for Israel (it even had it’s own completely obvious pastiche of Netanyahu who meets a grisly fate at the end). At the end of the day these are American comics, by writers of various political and social backgrounds that will sometimes use Superman as a tool of patriotism and fundamentally misrepresent the essence of the character. It’s going to happen from time to time (pretty sure I just read an issue of Action Comics recently that made me cringe with the writer’s sucking-off of the military).
A Krypton stratified by strict class division (the ‘S’ stands for the worker class, the lowest class on Krypton). Kal-El actually grew up with his birth parents - Kal is about 10 -12 years old when Krypton explodes. Jor-El and Lara both class traitors, exiled from the science class to the worker class and fight for their fellow workers. Once Kal-El reaches Earth he barely spends time with the Kents, while helping workers around the world.
So far, Absolute Superman has been a trip to read.
Yes! It’s a fantastic series. I especially liked that they had Kal going around the globe and helping out various worker struggles in secret at the beginning of the series. It’s my favorite current Superman book right now. I just finished reading the latest issue earlier today. I’m excited to see where they’ll take it.
I recognize that Superman had better politics ages ago but as of the last 20-30 years (more so the last 20 I would imagine because of the so called ‘war on terror’), has he had good politics or just lib politics? I always got the impression even the DC universe got crafted to support US foreign policy (with nations like Qurac and Bialya which date back to the 80’s). One of the few ways I can see the comics avoiding having Superman allow the military to commit war crimes is to just basically pretend the military aren’t akin to the real world criminals or simply not talk about their actions at all (except with injustice for example where they talk about the military attempting a drone strike and superman stopping it, which would tell me the regular DC-verse superman allows them to occur). Ultimately with the government’s behavior, the DC-verse would have to either pretend it’s all not happening or that the military and the politicians in question are cleaner than they really are (so basically a lib portrayal of reality).
The movie however definitely sounds interesting from what you’ve said, and I can see why the Israeli subreddit is upset with it.
The military is usually depicted fairly kid-gloves, but then again you have organizations like Cadmus that are sanctioned by the government to kill or contain metahumans extra-judicially, so the goverment is definitely shown to be doing shady things in the shadows too.
Hmm, really it varies by writer as to how progressive he is politically. Generally his actions reflect his politics as they aren’t outright stated. However, he’s frequently championing social causes and doing things that help citizens directly but also stand in the way of regressive politicians and business leaders (Luthor being the most prominent of those). Unfortunately due to the majority of writers probably being liberal he doesn’t often get quite to socialist Superman as he was in the very beginning. So yes, lib for sure in the tone of the politics that are there. Sadly with big corporations owning these characters the amount of political dialogue allowed is abysmal.
Although, the movie is suprisingly political and makes a comment (albeit in fictional, but easily recognized pastiches) about the Israel conflict and a Superman intervention into such a confrontation. It’s refreshing to see. And from what I’ve heard it’s triggering a lot of libs, conservatives and Zionists. Apparently Fox had some particularly vitriolic things to say about the movie’s message (um, don’t exterminate people indiscriminately I guess).
Oh, I thought that war was a clear stand-in for Russia invading Ukraine from an average American liberal point of view. And the leader was just a sort of Eastern European old man USSR kinda guy they were going for. But now that I think about it, the victims were pretty Middle Eastern coded, so you may be more right.
Exactly, and it was made clear by Luthor’s plans to develop the land taken from the Borovians that the leader’s goal was one of ethnic cleansing to accomplish getting rid of them and taking their land.
I am a big Superman fan and I can’t tell you how wrong this take is. Yes, certain comics portray Superman as friend and believer in the “American Way” and as sometimes ally of the US military. However, those takes are far from the normal status quo. Of course you get particularly liberal-minded writers who frequently use that take. However, those writers are the exception rather than the rule. Hell, the most famous instance of Superman being a government shill came from Frank Miller in The Dark Knight which is such a poor take on Superman as to be parody. Miller famously hates Superman and found a way to character assassinate him and have Batman beat the shit out of him (laughable). Frequently the US government and Superman are at odds with each other and Superman regularly defies them even going so far as to directly stop their actions.
Superman got his start as someone that opposed societal oppression in all it’s forms. In one golden age story Superman literally tears down a dilapidated tenement building being run by a slumlord who was extorting his tenants and refusing repairs, finding proper housing for the folks and forcing the slumlord to sell to the city to build something suitable. In another story Superman poses as a miner and goes undercover to expose a ruthless businessman exploiting his workers at the mine.
If Superman existed in the real world he definitely would be horrified at the actions of Israel and I have no doubt he’d step in. That’s actually a big point in the movie as he causes an international incident by stepping into stop troops from murdering civilians in a nation that is an obvious stand-in for Israel (it even had it’s own completely obvious pastiche of Netanyahu who meets a grisly fate at the end). At the end of the day these are American comics, by writers of various political and social backgrounds that will sometimes use Superman as a tool of patriotism and fundamentally misrepresent the essence of the character. It’s going to happen from time to time (pretty sure I just read an issue of Action Comics recently that made me cringe with the writer’s sucking-off of the military).
Sorry to be off topic here, but there is a current version of Superman that takes him totally back to his roots of opposition to societal oppression: https://readallcomics.com/category/absolute-superman/
A Krypton stratified by strict class division (the ‘S’ stands for the worker class, the lowest class on Krypton). Kal-El actually grew up with his birth parents - Kal is about 10 -12 years old when Krypton explodes. Jor-El and Lara both class traitors, exiled from the science class to the worker class and fight for their fellow workers. Once Kal-El reaches Earth he barely spends time with the Kents, while helping workers around the world.
So far, Absolute Superman has been a trip to read.
Yes! It’s a fantastic series. I especially liked that they had Kal going around the globe and helping out various worker struggles in secret at the beginning of the series. It’s my favorite current Superman book right now. I just finished reading the latest issue earlier today. I’m excited to see where they’ll take it.
I recognize that Superman had better politics ages ago but as of the last 20-30 years (more so the last 20 I would imagine because of the so called ‘war on terror’), has he had good politics or just lib politics? I always got the impression even the DC universe got crafted to support US foreign policy (with nations like Qurac and Bialya which date back to the 80’s). One of the few ways I can see the comics avoiding having Superman allow the military to commit war crimes is to just basically pretend the military aren’t akin to the real world criminals or simply not talk about their actions at all (except with injustice for example where they talk about the military attempting a drone strike and superman stopping it, which would tell me the regular DC-verse superman allows them to occur). Ultimately with the government’s behavior, the DC-verse would have to either pretend it’s all not happening or that the military and the politicians in question are cleaner than they really are (so basically a lib portrayal of reality).
The movie however definitely sounds interesting from what you’ve said, and I can see why the Israeli subreddit is upset with it.
The military is usually depicted fairly kid-gloves, but then again you have organizations like Cadmus that are sanctioned by the government to kill or contain metahumans extra-judicially, so the goverment is definitely shown to be doing shady things in the shadows too.
Hmm, really it varies by writer as to how progressive he is politically. Generally his actions reflect his politics as they aren’t outright stated. However, he’s frequently championing social causes and doing things that help citizens directly but also stand in the way of regressive politicians and business leaders (Luthor being the most prominent of those). Unfortunately due to the majority of writers probably being liberal he doesn’t often get quite to socialist Superman as he was in the very beginning. So yes, lib for sure in the tone of the politics that are there. Sadly with big corporations owning these characters the amount of political dialogue allowed is abysmal.
Although, the movie is suprisingly political and makes a comment (albeit in fictional, but easily recognized pastiches) about the Israel conflict and a Superman intervention into such a confrontation. It’s refreshing to see. And from what I’ve heard it’s triggering a lot of libs, conservatives and Zionists. Apparently Fox had some particularly vitriolic things to say about the movie’s message (um, don’t exterminate people indiscriminately I guess).
Oh, I thought that war was a clear stand-in for Russia invading Ukraine from an average American liberal point of view. And the leader was just a sort of Eastern European old man USSR kinda guy they were going for. But now that I think about it, the victims were pretty Middle Eastern coded, so you may be more right.
Exactly, and it was made clear by Luthor’s plans to develop the land taken from the Borovians that the leader’s goal was one of ethnic cleansing to accomplish getting rid of them and taking their land.