Superheroes and Modernity

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” The comparisons are not random, argues Aldo Regalado in Bending Steel: “By measuring Superman’s powers against those of the bullet, the train, and the skyscraper, these phrases offer clues that hint at the cultural, social, and historical origins of this uniquely American phenomenon.” Bullet, train, and skyscraper were symbols of modern achievement, and the comparison meant that “Superman of the late 1930s and early 1940s was defined by his triumph over technological, institutional, infrastructural, and bureaucratic forces that most would celebrate as markers of American military, economic, and global supremacy. “ 

American superheroes, in short, are “cultural responses to American modernity.” They were not antimodern, romantic heroes. They confronted modernity’s powers and overcame them: “Unlike previous fictional heroes, who often fled urban environments to prove their manhood in the wilderness away from the corrupting influences of the industrial city, superheroes tackled modernity head-on. Sometimes they did so in rage, but more often, they did so with playful wit and carnival humor. . . . superheroes expressed a resolve to accept the city as a reality of American life and treated the industrial landscape as a space to play in and triumph over.”

Despite this acceptance of modernity, superheroes represented also a recognition of the failures and limits of modernity, and the need for some power beyond the world: “early superhero fiction embraced the notion that some problems are too big to be solved by individual citizens alone and therefore require intervention from a pro-social outside force.” They were an answer to the Horatio Algers of the world.

Not surprisingly, neither superheroes nor their creators came from the American mainstream. Superman was an alien from Krypton, “a super-immigrant and decidedly not as an Anglo-Saxon.” He was created by “young men who stood at the margins of society” who formed their superheroes to fit the “sensibilities of ‘new immigrant’ creators, many of them Jewish, who had different experiences, dreams, and fears than the white Anglo-Saxon creators of the previous century. Effectively excluded from the promise of America by anti-Semitic social and cultural politics, these young men negotiated their way into the cultural mainstream through their characters and through the creation of the comic book industry itself.”