The Nazis had a hangup about comics, and my well-considered response.

I have a peculiar problem. I like to talk about things that other people don't. And I want to create a comic book about the 1930's and 1940's. And in doing research it occurred to me, that I want to create comics that take the objections that have been made about them into account. 

Some far-right extremists say comics are part of a Jewish media conspiracy. Perhaps I could make a comic that takes this into account. How do I take that into account? First I need to visualize the problem. So I look at a picture of Jewish people creating Superman. 

I see what the far right in Germany thought about this photo. Joe Schuster is pointing his pen at Superman. He is selling out the Nazi ideal image, forming a media presence, and helping form a positive impression about Jewish people worldwide.

The Nazis become angrier about Joe Schuster making money from his pet project, than about the comic itself. They are upset that he is storing gold in the basement of a house in America, where Hitler will be kept out of the reading room, and Jewish children will live in union with God.  This was very upsetting to militant Nazis in Germany, apparently, if history is to be trusted.

All this because the Jewish genetic makeup is, according to unscientific diagrams, supposedly of deformity and mental illness and disease. And Superman proves this somehow, too well, to the Nazi mindset about comics and degenerate art and their ideal of freedom from Jews.

How does Superman prove Jewish mental illness to the Nazis? Somehow Superman stands for the Nazi freedom ideal in reverse of itself. It is the inverse image of the Superman that the German Nazis believed in, which was promulgated by their propaganda about Friedrich Nietzsche. 

The Nazis are battling themselves on many fronts. They are battling the inevitability of progress in any genetic makeup of those with mental illnesses, and they are battling the progress of the Jewish people. They are battling the entire Jewish extermination program also, because this program exceeds the boundaries of extremism, by quite a large degree. It is counter productive to kill the enemy based on ideals of fitness, because there is no absolute standard for human perfection. 

Humans are all imperfect. We all might as well have mental illnesses, and be Jewish. It doesn't matter. Perfection is not the point. Genetic goals are not the point. The ideal is fulfillment of our genetic makeup, in the mode of living, not the extermination of others who don't stack up to the genetic ideal of the moment. 

Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster were living that ideal, of personal fulfillment, and community activism and involvement. They were fulfilling their innate human potential, and the Nazis were trying to proclaim themselves the Superman. All this while two Jewish men made comics about it. In the end I suppose it makes all the difference in the world that these two added something more to our understanding of others in the world, rather than detract from it. Giving back instead of taking away human dignity and freedom, not to mention human lives, was a setback for Germany and the world.

Let's move forward and learn from these mistakes, never forgetting these lessons, because our children and our future generations will need to understand.