Behind Clark Kent's Glasses

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 23, 2007 Sign up now!

by Peter Sanderson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/23/2007 6:00:00 AM

In Danny Fingeroth’s new book, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, published this month by Continuum, he explores the role that Jewish-Americans played in pioneering the superhero genre. Among them were men like Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Batman’s Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Silver Age Marvel founding fathers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Fingeroth may be best known for his long career at Marvel, where he became group editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man titles. In recent years he created TwoMorrows Publishing’s Write Now! magazine, has taught courses about comics at New York University and Manhattan’s New School and authored a previous book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society.

PWCW: What motivated you to write this book?

Danny Fingeroth: I thought it was an interesting and challenging topic. How do you write about a subject that is so potentially fraught with controversy? What does it mean to suggest that one ethnic group “influenced” a medium? Is the very concept offensive, or illuminating?

PWCW: Were any of the Jewish comics creators of the Golden and Silver Ages consciously aware of putting themes that specifically reflected their ethnic background in their work?

DF: I don’t think so. I think they were, if anything, trying to divest their work of any such content and make it as “all-American” as possible. But the human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, and years later we can look at the work and tease out all sorts of below-the-surface meanings that weren’t intended to be there.

PWCW: Is there anything that specifically marks the American comic book superhero as an outgrowth of Jewish culture?

DF: Disguised leaves that as an open question. My personal inclination is to say, yes, in the sense that the business was largely founded and originally staffed (including writers and artists) by people of Eastern European Jewish descent. Certainly in the sense that superheroes offer hope for a world where power is wielded wisely and for the benefit of society by wise and compassionate people is a fantasy that Jews—and any historically persecuted minority—would be more likely to come up with than people from groups free of such history.

PWCW: What do you consider some of the principal themes that reflect Jewish culture in the classic superhero comics from the 1940s through the 1960s?

DF: Overall, that idea of a world where individuals are judged as individuals is the main theme I see as possibly “Jewish” in superhero stories. The 1940s stories were, naturally, anti-Nazi, but the entire country was, so I don’t know if there’s any particular Jewish aspect there. The 1950s and ’60s were, at both Marvel and DC, often about survivor’s guilt—Superman as survivor of Krypton, Captain America as survivor of World War II—and the ramifications of that. I think there is—again, not by intention—a parallel between these stories and the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt felt by many of those who lived through the Nazi death camps, as well as, arguably, from the Jewish creators (especially ones who hadn’t served in the military during the war) over having emerged physically, if not emotionally, unscathed from the war.

In the 1960s, there was a New York Jewish quality, especially to the Marvel comics of the era, although, again, I make no claim that Lee, Kirby et al. had any intention of making them Jewish, except that to portray New York meant to portray a certain Jewish consciousness.

One could even say that the Fantastic Four’s bickering was like that of an immigrant family’s bickering, and that perhaps Spider-Man’s sense of responsibility to his aunt and uncle was the result of that same immigrant sensibility. You could even say that the fact that, no matter how hard Spider-Man tried to do—and succeeded in doing—the right thing, people still thought ill of him, echoed aspects of Jewish history. Was that more Jewish than it was anything else? Again, I raise the questions and present certain facts. I leave it to the readers to be intelligent enough for me to not have to draw explicit conclusions.

PWCW: I was fascinated by what you said about the Lee/Kirby Thor and Odin forbidding Thor to marry outside their own community. This was one of the last places I expected to find parallels to Jewish-American culture!

DF: Me, too—which is what was so much fun about writing this book. Immigrant families are often concerned that their children [won’t] marry within the group. Jews, with their small numbers, are famous for this concern. So when I reread the Thor stories about Odin forbidding Thor to “intermarry” with mortal Jane Foster, it just seemed plain to me that this was reflective of the conflicts that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had to have experienced in their own lives and families.

PWCW: Jules Feiffer contends that the Spirit was Jewish, though Will Eisner denied it. Are there any classic superheroes you consider to be “coded” Jewish characters? Or did these Jewish-American writers and artists intend their characters to be gentiles in order to appeal to a wider public?

DF: Feiffer also makes the point, in an essay he wrote in the New York Times about Jerry Siegel at the time of the latter’s death, that American culture eventually morphed—in our modern, depersonalized age—to the point where everyone saw themselves as a Clark Kent with hidden “powers” that few people could appreciate. I interpret that as meaning that in the dance between popular culture and real life, where one inspires the other, that the Jewish and other immigrants, as outsiders, were able to see what was important to the majority society, then distill those values and ideas and reflect them back through the vehicle of popular culture.

It seems superfluous to say, but I will anyway, that “Jewish” values (or “Italian” values or “Christian” values, or whatever) are pretty much human values. What “flavor” does some pop culture have that makes it possible to see in it influences of a particular group, yet that also makes it so relatable to people of all backgrounds? I don’t think there’s an answer to these questions, but I do think they’re worth raising.

PWCW One of the reasons that Art Spiegelman withdrew his work from the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York [last year] was that he didn’t want people to regard comics as a specifically Jewish art form. Do you have similar qualms about reaction to your book? Or do you think that Jewish-Americans should celebrate their ethnic group’s key role in the creation of the American superhero?

DF: That was the trickiest part of writing this book for me. After all, much of what is found on anti-Semitic hate Web sites is the same information found on pro-Jewish sites. It is a matter of interpretation—as it is with prejudices about every racial, ethnic and religious group. I suppose Disguised as Clark Kent is ultimately, for me, about the sparks that are ignited when people struggle, consciously or unconsciously, with the balance between their individual and their group identities. That’s the main appeal of the secret identity, isn’t it—that we all have different parts of ourselves we conceal or reveal, emphasize or play down, depending on the circumstances.

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