Men In Bright, Tight Clothing Work Covertly For The United Nations

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

The Robert Downey Iron Man movie certainly isn’t the first piece of American entertainment where a fictional superhero steps in to do what the military and politicians cannot.

From the UK Guardian :

Since they were born on the eve of the second world war, America’s superheroes have been enlisted for all sorts of undercover propaganda duties, from promoting patriotism, war bonds and recycling (even of comics themselves) to warning about health, drugs and landmines.

So it’s nothing new that Iron Man, the latest in Marvel’s pop-icon pantheon to hit the big screen, is coming to the rescue of the United Nations. In a specially customised comic book, Ol’ Shellhead and his costumed cohorts will battle that most terrible of supervillains, a tarnished public image, by demonstrating the UN’s positive, proactive roles. Will it work? It’s debatable: over the years these earnest, message-laden stories have not always been too effective as weapons of mass persuasion.

When it comes to propaganda, superheroes were probably at their most convincing in the early 40s, when they and their frequently Jewish creators and publishers, were tackling Hitler himself long before America entered the fray after Pearl Harbor. Seventy years ago this year, two young bespectacled Cleveland Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, saw their nerdish fantasies published on four-colour newsprint as Superman burst off the pages of the first Action Comics and sparked a battalion of imitators. Their Man Of Steel started out as a champion against corrupt employers and other scoundrels but he and other superheroes would soon find the perfect bad guys in the Nazis and the Japanese.

For the February 27 1940 issue of Look weekly, Siegel and Shuster were commissioned to create a two-page expose showing How Superman Would End The War. After he pummels Germany’s fortifications on the Siegfried Line, Superman grabs Hitler and Stalin and flies them to Geneva where they are found guilty of “unprovoked aggression against defenceless countries” by the League Of Nations, forerunner of the UN. This condemnation of the Nazis seems to have worked as propaganda. It reportedly infuriated Joseph Goebbels, himself a master propagandist, so much that he angrily proclaimed “Superman is Jewish!” in a meeting.

In his Look strip, Superman was restrained from giving the captive Fuhrer “a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw”. A year later, another Jewish partnership, New Yorkers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, unleashed their super-patriot Captain America, garbed in the stars and stripes flag, who finally gave Hitler that threatened punch on their first issue’s front cover. This was too much for some American Nazi sympathisers and opponents of their country entering the war. Simon and Kirby’s studio became the target of hate mail, obscene phone calls and sinister types lurking outside, until mayor Fiorello LaGuardia himself rang Simon to assure him of round-the-clock police protection, saying, “You boys over there are doing a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” Once the war was won, however, Captain America hung up his shield. Somehow his comeback as a 50s “commie basher” in the Cold War and Korea never caught on.

As for the UN, superheroes have come to its rescue before. In November 1967, The Justice League Of America featured the UN symbol on the cover of issue 57, in a very right-on plea for racial harmony called “Man, The Name is – Brother!” The UN even had their very own team of superheroes devised by Wally Wood for Tower Comics in the 60s. Called the THUNDER Agents (The Higher United Nations Defence Enforcement Reserves), they were led by Dynamo, dressed in the UN’s blue and white colours. Rather than relying on Marvel’s characters, the UN could have resurrected this team, but THUNDER Agents vanished after only 20 issues and only aging comic collectors remember them now.