Superheroes Get Religion, or the Other Way Around?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/s-brent-plate/superheroes-get-religion-or-the-other-way-around_b_3009310.html

S. Brent PlateVisiting
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Hamilton College

Posted: 04/07/2013 12:57 pm

In the August 2002 issue of "The Fantastic Four," the superhero known as The Thing finally came out as Jewish. Many knew this all along, and with a "real" name like Benjamin Jacob Grimm and the fact that he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan the obvious was there. Yet, in this particular Marvel issue, the secular Jew begins to observe. In the story, "Remembrance of Things Past," the impervious stone monster-hero stands above a dying man and fumbles to recite the shema prayer, recalling the words from his younger upbringing. When the dying man survives, he questions Grimm's religion and wonders why he hasn't made it more prominent up until now, to which The Thing responds, "Figure there's enough trouble in this world without people thinkin' Jews are all monsters like me." Fair enough. The man assuages Grimm's guilty inclinations by saying, "What you learned on the street, what you learned at the synagogue -- when you need those things, you can always ... get them back."

Scratch the surface of almost all great comic books and we might find something startling similar: the roots of today's superheroes lie in a particular Jewish culture transplanted from Europe to the United States in the first half of the 20th-century. The creators of Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men and many others were all from Jewish families and, as some have argued, infused their characters with Jewish values. Jack Kirby, hailed as the "King of Comics" and creator of many pen-and-ink superheroes, once said that "Underneath all the sophistication of modern comics, all the twists and psychological drama, good triumphs over evil. Those are the things I learned from my parents and from the Bible. It's part of my Jewish heritage."

Yet, names were changed for the sake of assimilation: Kirby was born as Jacob Kurtzberg; Stanley Lieber, creator of Spider-Man, became Stan Lee; Robert Kahn, creator of Batman, became Bob Kane, and so forth. And explicit religious references were generally disregarded. The Thing's 2002 revelation charts in microcosm some of the changes that have taken place in the four decades after his inception. Partly this is a shift in the specifics of Jewish identity in the wake of the Nazi takeover of much of Europe mid-century. But the fact that religious references in general have become more accepted in comics of the past decade or so tells us a good deal about the 21st century's connection between pop culture and religion.

The Rise of the Comic Superhero

Almost as if fulfilling the dying man's words ("you can always ... get them back&quot a number of books and museum exhibitions have emerged in recent years charting a clear line between the rise of comics and something about the Jewish identities of the young artists who created them. I recently visited the exhibition, bulkily titled "Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950," at Baltimore's Jewish Museum of Maryland. The late Jerry Robinson, who worked with the comic book industry for many years and who created Batman's sidekick "Robin," set up the exhibition with the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta in 2004. It has since traveled the United States. The Baltimore version had it confined to one large room, making the already visually complex imagery of comics more scrambled, but the overall effect worked a bit like a page with text and image conjoined in various panels. What the exhibition does well is show the rise of the superhero in comic books, and how that is situated within a specific socio-political-cultural field. This is no comic for comic's sake.

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