@Sean-Malloy
How is that possible?
A “good fascist” is just a fascist that we agree with…
That old NPR article:
Superheroes are democratic ideals.
They exist to express what’s noblest about us: selflessness, sacrifice, a commitment to protect those who need protection, and to empower the powerless.
Superheroes are fascist ideals.
They exist to symbolize the notion that might equals right, that a select few should dictate the fate of the world, and that the status quo is to be protected at all costs.
Both of these things are true, and inextricably bound up with one another — but they weren’t always.
Might equals right. That’s Superman.
That’s pretty much all super-heroes. We just happen to agree with what they’re doing.
When he debuted in 1938, Superman was, briefly, a progressive icon. He sprang, after all, from the minds of two Jewish kids in Cleveland warily watching the rise of Hitler in Europe. In his first year of life, they sent their “Champion of the Oppressed” (his very first nickname, years before “Man of Steel”) after corrupt Senators, war-mongering foreign leaders, weapons merchants, and crooked stockbrokers. He purposefully razed a slum to force the city government to provide better low-income housing. (He also launched one-man crusades against slot machines, reckless drivers, and cheating college football teams, which … yeah. Guy kept busy.)
Both Captain America and Wonder Woman were created expressly to fight the Nazi threat. Literally, to fight it — to punch it right in its dumb Ratzi face.
Batman, on the other hand, spent much of his first year protecting only his city’s wealthy elite from murder plots, jewel thieves and extortion. (Also werewolves and madmen with Napoleon complexes piloting death-blimps. Comics, guys!) It took him a while to turn his attention to the kind of petty crime that afflicted the common citizen — the arrival of Robin the Boy Wonder helped him focus.
But with the advent of World War II, Superman, Batman and other costumed heroes found themselves conscripted alongside Captain America. Not to fight the Axis themselves, mind you, but to root out stateside saboteurs and urge readers to plant Victory gardens and buy war bonds.
In the process, the visual iconography of superheroes — which, comics being comics, is 50% of the formula, remember — melded with that of patriotic imagery. This continued for decades after the war, as once-progressive heroes like Superman came to symbolize bedrock Eisenhower-era American values — the American Way — in addition to notions of Truth and Justice.
And of course a lot of people still view Superman this way – to his detriment to an extent.
Jon is more the Social Justice Warrior Superman now. And I believe he’s only struck someone (been in a physical altercation) twice in 12 issues – and one of the times was when he was palling around with one of the Bat people; so you know who was the blame for starting that fight. 
Poppa Superman on the other hand is trapped a little. They can’t really change him too much or they run the risk of some crying that he’s being written out of character.
Yet there was always something about superheroes, and Superman in particular. He’d helped inspire the country to defeat fascism, but he looked like he did — the kind of idealized male musculature the Nazis fetishized — and he possessed “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.” What’s more, he used said powers and abilities against those comparatively weak and frail mortal men, if they stepped out of line. He also came from an advanced planet peopled by a — and here’s a pesky phrase that kept cropping up in Superman comics — “super-race.”
It wasn’t intended, but it was there. People noticed.
One person in particular: Dr. Fredric Wertham, who in his 1954 anti-comics screed Seduction of the Innocent, noted that Superman’s whole schtick was hurting criminals without getting hurt himself, and dubbed him an “un-American fascist” symbol. It hit a nerve.
Wertham’s crusade changed the industry completely, effectively ending crime and horror comics and shuttering many comics publishers, but the changes to superhero comics — and their fascist overtones — proved more subtle. Suddenly Superman’s powers didn’t derive from his “super-race” genetics, but from science: the rays of Earth’s yellow sun, to be specific. But Batman, who’d been deputized by Gotham’s Police Department as early as 1941, grew even chummier with the cops; most stories now began with an urgent plea for help from a worrisomely hapless Commissioner Gordon.
Yep.
Although conceived in a progressive spirit, the superhero genre’s central narrative has always been one of defending the status quo through overpowering might; in the vast majority of those cases, the one doing all that defending and overpowering is a straight white male. (This is just one of the reasons that the superhero genre, which has a knack for distilling American culture to its essence, can get a little on-the-nose, sometimes.)
More often than not, the straight white male in question has a square jaw and killer abs and holds vast amount of power but chooses not to use it to subjugate others, simply because he’s a Good Person.
Yep. Superman is a bit of a fascist. But he’s a good fascist because we just happen to agree with what he’s doing.
Which is to say: historically, the genre’s organizing principle is that the only thing keeping fascism from happening is that straight white dudes are chill.
But slowly, incrementally, as comics (and movies, and tv shows, and games, t-shirts and coffee mugs) start to fill up with more characters like Ms. Marvel (a Pakistani-American teenage girl from Jersey City), the visual iconography of superheroes, and what those superheroes mean to the culture, will force the genre to do something it has historically resisted.
It will change.
And once superheroes look different, and once the world on the comics page more closely resembles the world off of it, you will still be able to discern the low but steady drumbeat of fascism that the genre has never been able to escape.
But it will grow lower, and less steady.
You know what Warner Bros. should do, they should probably do a Superman movie with a Black Superman.
And maybe get a highly decorated progressive Black journalist and essayist to write it.
It would be a gas.
No, but one can make an argument that Superman is a bit of a fascist – and is a “good fascist” because, again, we agree with what he’s doing. And one can have an honest disagreement with that assessment and argue that he’s not fascist in any way.
I would of course say that they’re wrong, but it’s all just a matter of perspective. It’s all in how you look at it.
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! Also the council should be there.