[adventurous orchestral music] ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is scholar Roy Schwartz.

Roy, welcome to "Comic Culture."

- Thank you, thank you for having me.

- Now, Roy, you've written a rather interesting book with, from what I understand, an award-winning title, "Is Superman Circumcised?"

And it's about, I guess, the fact that the creators of Superman were Jewish, and that there are a lot of Jewish creators in comics, especially in the Golden Age.

So I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit, what the book is about, so the folks at home would have a better understanding.

- The subtitle of the book really tells you what it's about, and that is "The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero."

And what it's really about is the history of the comic book industry, more specifically, the superhero genre, and focusing on Superman as sort of the sherpa through that, because he is both the very first superhero, right, superheroes get the word super from Superman, as well as sort of the archetype, the mold.

Every superhero following Superman in one way or another is, is an antithesis to his original thesis.

He's the or text.

In my book, I compare the explosion of planet Krypton to the Big Bang.

All the matter, all the energy, all the ideas, all the tropes of the super genre were contained therein.

And when Superman, you know, showed up on the scene, he both created it and exhausted it in one single bound.

So that's sorta why I chose him, although I go laterally into all kinds of other characters.

And I don't actually focus only on the formative years of the Golden Age, because a lot of these themes and a lot of this fascinating historical context really continues throughout the years, particularly post-war silver age, bronze age, and really into the mid '80s.

And one thing I want to emphasize is, it's not a Jewish book, by which I mean, if I wrote a book about the history of jazz, for example, it would have to include the African American experience in the early 20th century in New Orleans or the Renaissance and that kind of stuff.

So it's that, it's the history of comics from that perspective rather than Judaism from the comic book perspective, if that makes sense.

- That makes perfect sense, and it's interesting because I think about the popular characters, and they generally are considered to be the WASP archetype.

Bruce Wayne is the millionaire, or now, I guess, billionaire.

And there's always the Christmas issues of "Superman" where he reads through the letters that he receives throughout the years and helps people.

And yet the creators of these characters are Jewish, and they're bringing a different sort of sensibility to the creation of these characters.

And I think maybe it was Jack Kirby who sort of gets credit for giving, I guess the Thing as the first, you know, canon Jewish character in comics, and I might be wrong there.

So what is it about the people who make these comics, their, I guess, desire to create characters that speak to a larger experience, and something that we can look at years later and still find fascinating?

- So the first character who was created as explicitly Jewish was actually DC Comics's Seraph.

He was created in 1977.

He showed up in the non-canonical "Super Friends" comic book, in number seven.

And then in '82, he made the transition into canon.

So he's the first explicit.

The oldest character that would then, you know, eventually came out as Jewish would have to be Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, who Tom King, who was on your show not too long ago, in 2015, and "Darkseid War: Green Lantern 1," finally after hints and hints over years and years, finally made it canonical, that he is indeed Jewish, born to a Jewish mother.

But when I say that Superman is Jewish, I don't mean within story.

So Clark Kent, first of all, he's an alien.

He happens to look like a human Caucasian hunk, but biologically, he might as well be a dolphin, right?

He shoots lasers from his eyes.

He's not human, but he is canonically Christian.

He was raised by the Kents in Kansas.

He's Methodist or Protestant, non-practicing.

He went to church when he was a kid.

That's not arguable, but as a character, as an IP in the real world, he was created by two Jews who didn't just happen to be Jewish.

They borrowed from their cultural orbit, all kinds of things, some of 'em not Jewish, like Popeye and Douglas Fairbanks movies.

But some of them were Jewish elements, which we can get into, like Moses and Samson and the golem.

And more than anything, and they talk about this, Superman was created as a reaction formation to the rise of Nazism.

In a very real way, the big red S was their counterargument to the swastika, the symbol powerful, you know, simple, powerful symbol.

And in that sense, he very much was a Jewish creation with Jewish DNA.

And he was developed as such for much of his youth.

- There are some elements of modern fandom that I struggle to deal with, fans who don't seem to understand that characters were created to sort of reflect their time.

And those core tenets are now being looked at differently by certain fans.

And I know that a lot of people get very upset if Superman isn't much like we would see in a Zack Snyder film, this angry guy who sort of projects authority and power, rather than somebody who's looking out for the little guy, kind of turning and facing the authority that's out there.

So you mentioned that this is a reaction to Nazism.

So, how is it sort of reflected in the creation that this is that counterbalance to Nazism?

- So in the Golden Age, in 1938, that's when he shows up right, in April, and then throughout the '40s, he actually fought Nazis quite a bit, explicitly where you see swastikas and Teutonic crosses, mostly on the covers, less so in individual comics.

A lot of it was by proxy, pastiches, you know, "Nation X" and that kinda stuff.

But he fought Nazis quite a bit, and it was always this interesting mix of solemn consecration, righteous anger, cathartic glee.

He was angry at them and he wanted to bully the bullies, but he also enjoyed humiliating them.

There was very, it was a lot of catharsis.

There was a lot of kind of revenge in fiction.

In an interview for the BBC in 1981, Siegel and Shuster said that in their mind, the S always stood for Siegel and for Shuster.

It was always their avatar in fiction, doing what needs to be done for the Nazis.

And long before he was the Man of Steel, he was known as the Champion of the Oppressed.

But it extends beyond in a very real way.

He was a golem in real life, in that out of 60 million American servicemen, eight million read comics regularly, and "Superman" outsold the rest five to one.

He essentially became regulation equipment.

And his image was, he wasn't just in people's backpacks.

His image was on Jeeps and tugboats and tanks.

The U.S. Air Force Reserve 33rd Bombardment Squadron renamed itself the Superman Squadron for the war, and plastered his image on all their planes.

So in a very real way, in real life, he was right there on the front lines punching Nazis, which I think is great.

- It's interesting because you mentioned that there's an interview on the BBC from 1981.

And you just talked about this squadron that is decorating their planes with Superman iconography.

So my question to you is, as a researcher, how are you finding all this out?

It seems like this is copious amount of time in the library, maybe going through stacks, maybe doing a lot of work on the internet.

So how do you find all this material that helps you write a book like this?

- First of all, I wanna give credit where credit is due.

I'm not the first one to note either the Jewish, the thematic parallels in Superman's comics, or the historical context of his creation.

Danny Fingeroth in his excellent "Disguised as Clark Kent, Jews in Comics," Arie Kaplan, "From Krakow to Krypton," Simcha Weinstein, "Up, Up, and Oy Vey," they've come before me.

What separates my book is that I go a lot deeper into the history, a lot deeper into the Jewish meaning of things.

I focus almost exclusively on Superman, and I don't stop in 1945.

I keep going all the way to today.

And that's really what separates me.

So, the metaphor I use is, it's like archeology.

Somebody discovered the tip of the pyramid and said, "Hey, there's something here," and then moved on.

And I came back and just dug the whole thing out.

That's sort of the metaphor.

And part of the research, so a lot of the credit goes to them.

It's their research and their insight upon which I make my own kind of discoveries.

Aside from that, I read every single Superman comic book ever published since 1938 to date.

I'm sure I missed all kinds of guest appearances, but main comics, Action Comics, "Superman," "Adventures of," et cetera, read all of them, watched all the movies, every TV show, every episode, every radio episode that survived, read every article in mainstream American press, the whole thing.

It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.

My wife would ask me, "What are you doing?"

"I'm, research for the book," and I'm reading Action Comics.

So that took a while, but I also got, I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship from the New York Public Library.

And I was actually a writer in residence for two years, because there was a lot of serious historical research.

The comics and all joking aside, there was a lot that I wanted to go into.

For example, I rifled through Nazi newspapers of the period to find references to Superman, and I found them, and I translated it all.

And it's in the book, and there's just amazing stuff, things that you can't invent, they're so great as historical documents.

So that's there.

Jerry Siegel in 1979, when the Christopher Reeve movie came out, wrote a memoir.

And that memoir was more or less property lost.

Never got published.

And it wasn't found until 2011, when Larry Tye was writing his Superman biography, "Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Favorite Hero."

And aside from him, nobody ever picked this up.

And it's at the Columbia Library, Special Collections, and Columbia University Library.

And I schlepped up there.

I scanned the whole thing.

It's a treasure trove, and it details all of his influences, Jewish and otherwise.

And it's also a really nice snapshot of that era in history, and how everything came to be, and how the industry worked.

So there was a lot of research and there was a lot of fun stories, just about how the research came about.

And it took six-and-a-half years, and it ended up culminating in a book that I wrote in casual English, or at least accessible English.

I wanted it to be fun to read and entertaining, something to take to the beach.

But at the same time, the book has 41 pages in notes and bibliography.

It's serious research.

You can use it to teach.

You can use it for papers, et cetera.

And I really try to have my cake and eat it whole, in that sense.

- It's difficult to write research that is accessible, like you say, and a lot of times what we see, or what I've seen, either reading textbooks or reading other scholars' work, is that it does sort of come off as dry, and yours is coming off very conversational, as you said.

So when you're writing something like this, when you're reading, gosh, what, over 80 years of Superman comics, and multiple months worth each year.

So I'm wondering how do you keep your love of comics while that becomes work and pleasure?

- I can't speak for other people who have done this, but it wasn't a problem.

If anything, it sort of added a whole layer of appreciation.

Here's the thing.

You don't need to care about any of this to enjoy Superman, any more than you have to care about Black American history, or the history of jazz to just enjoy a good, to enjoy John Coltrane.

But if you are really into it, and if you really like to see the matrix behind the thing, this adds, and it added such a layer of appreciation.

And when I started seeing all these Golden Age stories that I was familiar with.

But, you know, you read them in the past and then you forget about them, and you have to, you have this kind of general sense of what they were, and then you understand that no, this is Siegel and Shuster responding to a Nazi article, or this is them criticizing John Kennedy, you know, Jack Kennedy, John Kennedy's father, or this is them supporting the New Deal in sort of underhanded way.

It becomes that much richer.

So if anything it added to my appreciation of Superman, because here's the thing.

He created a whole genre.

There are thousands of characters, hundreds of famous superheroes, and they can all leap tall buildings at a single bound.

They can, they're all more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet.

But there's one thing that Superman, in my opinion, still does better than all of them, and that is inspire.

You wanna call it hope, you wanna call it betterment, but he inspires.

And I definitely gained a newfound appreciation for how cool he was, through my research.

And I hope that comes across in the book.

- I think it does.

I will admit, I wasn't able to finish the whole book, but I've read through quite a bit of it.

And what I enjoy about it is, that enthusiasm for the character is there.

And there are passages that are, that make me want to actually explore a little bit more.

In one chapter, you kinda touch on the "Superman," the motion picture.

And behind me, I've got Chris Reeve in costume from, oh yeah, I see right there.

So, can you talk a little bit about your take on that movie, and how it fits in with your book?

- My love affair with comics and superheroes.

And when I talk to laypeople, I make a point to distinguish between the medium of comics and the genre of superheroes, 'cause people tend to assume they're the same.

But honestly, those Venn diagrams overlap about 70%, for better or worse.

And I do love superheroes.

So for the sake of our conversation, one and the same.

And that really started with "Superman: The Movie."

It came out in 1978.

I hatched in 1980.

I grew up on it.

I would come back from school, put the video cassette on, watch it.

A while back, I read an interview with John Byrne, who said he watched that movie over 200 times.

And I remember thinking, "What an amateur."

[laughs] I watched it so many times, I knew the whole thing by heart.

Not anymore, so much, but I used to, and it was a huge influence on me.

And that was my gateway drug into superheroes, which were my gateway drug into comics in general, which is why I could never afford real drugs.

So I've always loved it.

I've always really been heavily into comics, and that movie, which I really do believe still is the single best superhero movie ever created, and the template that people follow.

And Kevin Feige of Marvel said that they used that as a template for every origin story, because they basically, that was the right way to do it.

And he's right, particularly when you think how unprecedented it was, and how unparalleled for more than a decade, until "Batman" came out in '89.

Christopher Reeve didn't feel like he was acting.

It felt like Richard Donner reached into the comic and plucked Superman out, in a sense, and that's always resonated with me.

And while that movie also marks the beginning of the Christianization of Superman.

The first Christ parallels really don't come from the comic.

They started with that movie, and then coming into sharper focus with "Smallville," the TV show, "Superman Returns" in 2006, and then the Cavill/Snyder movies, "Man of Steel," "Batman v Superman," et cetera.

But at the same time, aside from the origin story.

Let's think of the origin story for a second, in case somebody doesn't know.

Baby Kal-El, to save his life from the impending doom of his people, he's placed in a small vessel, and he's sent adrift on the Milky Way to an unknown fate.

He lands amidst the thick vegetation of a Kansas field.

He's found by people not his own.

He's renamed by his adoptive mother, and he grows in adulthood to be a great savior.

That is the origin story of Moses.

You can't not see those parallels once you do see them.

It's like Magic Eye picture, right?

And that has been noted before me, but that movie, in this movie, for example, something that hasn't been noted for whatever reason, if you remember, when he turns 18, after his father dies from a heart attack, he hears the green crystal, the Sunstone crystal calling to him from the barn.

He picks it up and he decides to go on this walkabout across the North Pole.

He throws it.

It creates the Fortress of Solitude, whereupon he encounters the hologram of his father, Jor-El, this bright apparition.

And he goes, "I am Jor-El.

I am your father.

You are from Krypton.

They can be a great people.

They wish to be.

They only lack the light to show the way.

I have sent them you."

And while there's very strong Christ parallels of the Heavenly Father sending His Son, that is Moses and the burning bush.

When Moses turned 18, after he killed the slave driver, he runs across the desert of Midian.

He comes across the burning bush, an angel of the Lord appears, said, "I am the Lord of your father."

There's a messianic story where it's in the voice of his actual father.

"I am the God of your father.

You are of my people.

They can be a great people.

They need somebody to lead them.

Go back and lead them," et cetera.

And if you look at Exodus 11, something, I forget, it's almost verbatim.

The dialogue, which was written up by Mario Puzo, by Tom Mankiewicz, is almost verbatim that of Exodus.

So there's that story as well.

So those parallels are really, you can find them throughout the whole mythology.

- It is something that we do see quite a bit.

I think there back to that Alex Ross image of Superman floating above the Earth, and we see that in "Superman Returns," the same sort of image.

And then of course, Zack Snyder really leans into it.

Now you mentioned John Byrne having watched the movie 200 times, and I will admit, I've probably seen it only about a hundred times myself.

And it's interesting because John Byrne uses the film as his inspiration for the rebooting of Superman, one of the first rebootings of a superhero character, especially at DC when they had their whole "Crisis on the Infinite Earths."

So when you are looking at that reboot, which you do in your book, what parallels do you see to the Siegel and Shuster creation, and what do you see that he takes from the film?

And what do you see that he kind of just gets away from entirely, and does his own thing?

- John Byrne's "Man of Steel," and the woefully underrated "World of Krypton," the miniseries that also goes with it, are some of my favorite of Superman's 83 years.

They're just fantastic.

And they're very '80s.

I think at some point in the book, I say that his Superman looked like Christopher Reeve trained by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and styled by Liberace, with the big cape and the big everything.

And it's great.

There's definitely still the Jewish themes, but there's a shift.

First of all, Christ in "Infinite Earths," which was really a Marvel wolfman, and a few other guys sort of brainchild, has its own Jewish parallels.

And we can go into that later on.

But the new Superman, he talks about how Krypton doesn't mean anything to him.

It's a vestige of a life that might have been.

And it's that famous, supposed role reversal of Clark Kent and Superman.

It cast doubt on exactly how much of a reversal that really was, but supposed, that was like the angle for it.

And in many ways, that's the second or third generation, homegrown American, the one who's not an immigrant, or was raised in the household of immigrants, but the son of, or the grandson of, for whom the old country is exactly that.

It's some old world that's long since been destroyed, that's just a vestige, maybe some remnant of heritage, but doesn't have any bearing on his day-to-day life.

There's no need to assimilate.

There's no need to prove yourself.

There's no need to hide who you are, and sort of have this assimilation slash assertion conflict that the Golden Age Superman so perfectly symbolized.

And I think in that sense, Byrne captured something.

Now Byrne himself is an immigrant, right?

He came from England and all that kinda stuff, although it's very different if you're White and Christian and you were born in a Western country compared to somebody who comes from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and all that kind of stuff, and speaks Yiddish at home.

- It's interesting because, I didn't think of it before, but certainly by the 1980s, the majority of Americans are not immigrants or first generation, and yet Siegel and Shuster find themselves in that immigrant family.

So, as Superman is contemporized to, I guess, his times, how do you think that plays into the current films where Superman has taken on a different feel entirely?

- I try to be sensitive when it comes to criticizing, 'cause everybody has such ownership of Superman, because he's such a symbolically important character.

Even people who don't actually care about him that much, who don't read the comics regularly, or never read them, still have some sense of protection over the character.

I've seen this a lot.

And I tend to, when somebody, I tend to ask people, "Have you, when was the last time you've read action comics?"

And some of them don't even know what that is, but they still have this strong sense of ownership.

One of the things they say.

Listen, first of all, talking about the Jewish influences doesn't invalidate in any way the Christian influences.

He is as much a Christ figure as he is anything else.

There's enough room for everybody.

It's not about ownership.

It's about noting contribution, right?

It's just one more layer added.

It doesn't compete.

And as far as the interpretation of Superman, the Zack Snyder, Henry Cavill Superman doesn't speak to me as much as Christopher Reeve.

It doesn't have that sheltering warmth.

It doesn't have, you know, things bother me.

I think if you have a 40-minute fight scene where a city gets leveled, you can have a literally two-second moment where he seems disturbed by the collateral damage, which "Superman II" had.

He says, "The people, you're hurting the people."

It's two seconds.

So, I am definitely of that camp, but again, I don't, people who feel, people who love the Zack Snyder work, I'm perfectly on board with that.

I don't wanna invalidate their feeling.

And I understand how this post-modern, post 9/11 Superman, you know, I talk about that Man of Steel in the book as very much a post 9/11, aside from the fact that the scenes of destruction of Metropolis were clearly meant to evoke the familiar scenes of 9/11.

They're very intentionally supposed to kind of ring that bell for us.

But if you think of Zod, aside from the fact that he is a race purist, right?

He's like a Nazi.

He wants to, he wanted to snip the generative bloodlines of Krypton's council, and he wants to revive only the households he deems worthy, only the family trees he deems worthy.

But he is the zealot, the implacable, aggressive, unstoppable zealot, and Superman, from America's own perspective, is the good guy who reluctantly gets sucked into a violent act that he had no choice but to take.

And it's a very post 9/11 narrative, at least as I see it in these movies.

And, I understand.

I just have a hard time accepting, including even the snapping of the neck.

I just have a hard time accepting that.

- I find myself in a similar point of view that you have.

I've seen, let's say the reboot of the "Star Trek" films with Christopher Pine.

And I realized that that was not the "Star Trek" that I grew up watching on TV, and the movies that I would go and see with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

And at first it was very difficult for me to enjoy the film, because it wasn't doing what Roddenberry's vision was, or at least my interpretation of it, that bit of that fandom that I owned.

And it was, I had to make a conscious choice.

I'm just going to watch this as a science fiction movie or an adventure movie rather than "Star Trek."

Again, with all deference to the Zack Snyder fans out there, I personally struggled sitting through "Man of Steel."

I found that there should have been that moment of reflection, that we are going to do something other than snap the neck.

But when you put it into that 9/11 context, it sort of becomes, we have to do what's necessary.

It's sort of that good guy with a gun theory.

When you are doing this sort of research, are you going to, let's say the posts on Twitter or chat rooms to kinda find what people are saying, and see what their reflections are in this, to maybe get the pulse of fandom, or are you just strictly sticking to the source material and maybe some scholarly writings?

- It depends, I try to be very responsible in my book in distinguishing between what we know is fact, because Siegel and Shuster said so, or Elliot S Maggin, or Paul Levitz, or anybody else.

What we know as fact, what we have evidence to support, what seems self evident, what is a maybe, what is conjectural, what is just playful.

I try to be very responsible, and put every point I'm making in some sort of context.

'Cause I didn't want somebody to come and say, "Well, you said that Pharaoh and Lex Luthor are both.

That's not proof."

Yes, it's cracking a dad joke.

So I try to be very responsible about these things.

And in some cases, it was very relevant what fandom thinks, and I actually went out and said, "Here's what people have been saying," or "Here's what the press said," or I quote "The Times" a couple of times.

I quote Fox a couple of times.

There's an entire chapter called "Phone Booth/Confession Booth/Voting Booth," which is about expressions of religion and politics in the actual comics, not just kind of contextual.

And I quote all kinds of creators that had issues in either direction with Superman and that kind of stuff.

'Cause again, everybody feels ownership.

You know, you ask five people, you get six-and-a-half opinions.

There's no end to it.

So I had to sort of stay true to my research and to my thoughts, but I really was trying to be, not respectful because I wanted to walk on eggshells, but because I wanted to give room to everything and to be responsible in how I convey it.

At the end of the day, the book is not a polemic.

It's a research book.

- Well, Roy, they are telling us that we've run out of time.

I wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk with me.

- Thank you for having me.

It's been a pleasure.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

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