I thought maybe it was going to be Christopher Columbus.

Not to mention the ones who didn’t even immigrate, but were involuntarily annexed, and then despised all the same. As many people in the Southwest like to say, “We didn’t move—the border did.”

The basic premise of Superman as an immigrant is largely lost on conservative fans of Superman, who just seem him as a symbol for American awesomeness and kickassery.

“Strange being from another planet, with powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary mortals.”

Yep,  it’s pretty easy to forget that he came from somewhere else.

The timing makes the irony particularly thick: DC comics just rebooted their entire line, and the new take on Superman takes the character back to his original conception as an anti-corporate, anti-establishment populist. In the new Action Comics #1 (released yesterday), Supes exposes a CEO for bribery, safety violations, and exploiting cheap labor, and saves a group of squatters whose building is being demolished while they are still inside.

Excellence

I love the line “An immigrant named Kal El”.

Supes would definitely be on the no-fly list with that moniker.

Jay Smooth’s blog is the only thing in the world that triggers in me a desire to be pregnant. I just want to make more of him.

@7: Good thing he doesn’t have to go to an airport then.

Re: DJA,  I might have to start reading again

@9: I hit blaspheme, then thought of that one second later.

That’s what I get for trying to be clever.

The timing makes the irony particularly thick: DC comics just rebooted their entire line, and the new take on Superman takes the character back to his original conception as an anti-corporate, anti-establishment populist. In the new Action Comics #1 (released yesterday), Supes exposes a CEO for bribery, safety violations, and exploiting cheap labor, and saves a group of squatters whose building is being demolished while they are still inside.

Maybe that’s because Krypton was planet peopled by and run by “liberals”? They didn’t even execute their worst criminals; they just stuck them into the Phantom Zone!

Satanicpanic, the new Action Comics is by Grant Morrison, who’s one of my favorite comics creators of all time. Unfortunately he’s also wildly inconsistent, veering all over from genius to wankery. That said, Morrison’s previous take on Superman (the All-Star Superman limited series) is probably the best Superman story of all time. And Action #1 is a very promising start, so I have high hopes for the series.

Satanic, even more so: the cover of the forthcoming Action Comics #3 has a crowd of xenophobes railing against Superman.

Would it have been more or less ironic if he had gone with Captain America?

Captain America, incidentally, also being of immigrant stock, albeit second-generation Irish rather than first-generation Kryptonian.

Amanda wrote:

Needless to say, the reason that the creators of Superman made him an undocumented immigrant who struggles to find his place in the American dream is that they themselves were the children of immigrants, and that was in fact their families’ dreams.

Ahhh, but Superman first appeared (nationally) in Action Comics in 1938, and, at that point, Clark Kent was already a college graduate, so Superman had to have been at least 22 years of age.  That would put him as having arrived on earth, assuming his age at the time to have been two years, in 1918 or earlier.  In 1918, we did not have any immigration restriction laws; anyone could come here.  Thus, Superman was a legal immigrant. 

In DC’s second continuity (1985-2011), Superman was an anchor baby—he was sent from Krypton in his Kryptonian gestation capsule and hatched in Kansas. (This actually became a plot point in a “possible future” story in 1991; because the gestation chamber opened in the US, he was a “natural born citizen” and thus eligible to run for president.

In 1918, we did not have any immigration restriction laws; anyone could come here.

Look up the Chinese Exclusion Act, Dana, and that’s not the only reason you’re wrong.

Guess I have new respect for the character now. Superman always annoyed me in a way cause of the whole clean-cut whitebread thing.

The supreme irony of the first “Superman” movie with Christopher Reeve was how it made a character who embodied the fantasies of a couple of Jewish immigrant kids and made him into Jesus.

Dana, there have been immigration laws long before the 20th century.  Really, please don’t comment on history when you are so blatently wrong. Please.  At least look it up first.

Though the first direct restriction (as opposed to just limiting naturalization) wasn’t until 1875, that’s still 43 years prior to 1918.

From 1917:

On February 4, 1917, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) with an overwhelming majority, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s December 14, 1916 veto. This act added to the number of undesirables banned from entering the country, including but not limited to “gays”, “lesbians”, “bisexuals”, “idiots”, “feeble-minded persons”, “criminals”, “epileptics”, “insane persons”, alcoholics, “professional beggars”, all persons “mentally or physically defective”, polygamists, and anarchists. Furthermore, it barred all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate. The most controversial part of the law was the section that designated an “Asiatic Barred Zone”, a region that included much of eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands from which people could not immigrate. Previously, only the Chinese had been excluded from admission to the country. Attempts at introducing literacy tests had been vetoed by Grover Cleveland in 1897 and William Taft in 1913. Wilson also objected to this clause in the Immigration Act but it was still passed by Congress on the fourth attempt.

Anxiety in the United States about immigration has often been directed toward immigrants from China and Japan. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese from entering the U.S. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 was made with Japan to regulate Japanese immigration to the U.S.[1] The Immigration Act of 1917 is one of many immigration acts during this time period which arose from nativist and xenophobic sentiment. These immigration laws were intentional efforts to control the composition of immigrant flow into the United States.

I never thought of Superman that way before.
Even after Kavalier and Klay,,,bad Chabon reader, no biscuit.

In 1918, we did not have any immigration restriction laws; anyone could come here.  Thus, Superman was a legal immigrant.

Tell that to my illegal immigrant great grandfather.  He was working on an Atlantic liner when he jumped ship without papers in New York around 1919.  It caused quite a stir with the immigration folks decades later when he visited his home country and then tried to return to the US without proper papers, despite the fact that he had lived, worked and raised a family in America.

The supreme irony of the first “Superman” movie with Christopher Reeve was how it made a character who embodied the fantasies of a couple of Jewish immigrant kids and made him into Jesus.

If you are not yourself Christian and don’t believe in the whole “son of God/virgin birth” thing, then you must acknowledge that Jesus himself was also created by a couple of Jewish kids.

Think about it, who is the first person on camera to see Superman as he starts his public career?

Also of interest, the music written for Superman seems to tend toward the triadic, this means it uses the the notes that make up the major chords in music: I III V, or in C major: C, E, G.

jeevmon, I like Jules Feiffer’s observation that only two Jews could come up with a white-bread name like Clark Kent, and his version of Superman:

“I used to be Superman . . . Wherever you looked I was saving somebody. Then one day I pulled this chick from the river. Do you think she thanked me? No! She just wanted to know why I had this compulsion to rescue . . . She accused me of doubting my masculinity . . . She took one look at my cape and said I was a latent transvestite.”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842864,00.html#ixzz1XTfv46Tm

Actually Dana is right-ish about superman, he wasn’t Asian and he could read at 14 so he could immigrate without worry. Although movie superman was totally undocumented.