Star Wars Modern posted about the urbanism of superheroes, and the birth of the superhero as a new archetype of the Depression-era city. As our modern times become more like the era the superhero was born in, it’s no surprise that this time we have turned to superheroes to save us once again, even if only in the realm of our imaginations, and albeit this time largely in movie form instead of comic books.

In his book about the creators of golden age comics, Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones writes:

The superman was scarcely a new idea and was in fact a common motif of both low and high culture by the early Thirties, the inevitable product of those doctrines of perfectibility promoted by everyone from Bernarr Macfadden to Leon Trotsky. The word had descended from Nietzche’s Übermensch through Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, but it was easily wedded to ideas neither Nietzchean nor Shavian. In Germany Adolf Hitler was claiming that a whole nation of supermen could be forged through institutional racism and Militarism, and his popularity was rising steadily. In America the idea of eugenic was being explored as Ivy League universities… Even leftists could use the word: a Cleveland radical named Joseph Pirincin argued in his lectures that socialist production methods would create a ‘superabundance’ of goods and opportunities, would make the citizens of a socialist future a ‘veritable superman’ by our current standards.

That Depression Era mash of eugenics, nationalism, and progress/self-improvement, when introduced into the settings of the already popular crime pulps, gave birth to two enduring strains of superheroes: those that are inhumanly-super, like Superman; and those that are merely humanly-super, like Batman. Each has a place, an urban setting. More than childhood trauma or costume choices, it is these negative spaces that surround the heroes that make them what they are.

Superhero Urbanism (via Star Wars Modern)

(Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book)