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oliveroctavius:

To reply to @sarahsscrapbook here, rather than cluttering up someone else’s reblogs:

Screenshot: I'm only half Jewish (it's... complicated) but when I heard Alan Moore describe superhero comics as "white supremacist dreams of the master race" I felt an absolute rage that even now, years later, has never entirely gone away.ALT

I DEFINITELY have my issues with Alan Moore, but that quote has been taken widely out of context to fuel the rage machine. In context, this is commentary on the modern mass-media superhero movie, specifically how far it is from its working-class Jewish roots:

Today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. […] The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race.

This is a legitimate criticism of popular superheroes, even early on. An example relevant to this quote: Alan Moore grew up with Marvelman, Britain’s homegrown 1950s stand-in for Captain Marvel. Some pretty visible choices were made about who could be superhuman in their version of this story.

The Marvel Family. The heroes are a black-haired man, a brown-haired girl, and a black-haired boy, all flying together.ALT
The Marvelman family. The members are two blonde men and one black-haired boy, all flying together.ALT

Not obvious from this image: Freddy Freeman (left image, in blue) was the one Marvel Family member with a Jewish co-creator (Mac Raboy). He was a disabled boy with a very personal vendetta against the Nazis who had targeted him and his grandfather. All this was left out of his (fully abled) Marvelman counterpart. But even Captain Marvel was a version of Superman made marketable by filing down the anti-establishment edges! (Unlike early Supes, Cap would never talk back to a cop.)

All this buries the lede: Mick Anglo, creator of the Marvelman Family, was also Jewish. I don’t know why he made the choices he did.

The initial image in the post you commented on is from “Superman is Jewish? How comic book superheroes came to serve truth, justice, and the Jewish-American way” by Harry Brod. It’s available on archive.org and while it’s ultimately a celebration of Jewish contributions to comics, it touches on a lot of these points: the popular re-capture of the underdog’s dreams of righteous violence, the “de-Jewification” of superheroes in the modern movie imagination, and the idea that not all art created by [identity] people will actually express that identity, especially when writing into a different dominant culture.

Alan Moore can be dismissive of the Jewish histories to superheroism, but I don’t like throwing out his argument out of hand–white supremacy has sunk its hooks deep into the genre’s imagery since Siegel and Shuster put pen to paper.

Oh wow thanks so much for taking the time to write all this out. I feel much less rage now. (Maybe I’ll just transfer the rest of it back to Nick Spencer.)

And I will check out that book mentioned! It sounds very interesting. :) I notice it includes a chapter on Maus which is a book that really and honestly changed my life.