“superheroes are inherently fascist” is a weird as hell thing to say about a genre invented whole cloth by a bunch of poor Jewish kids freshly back from the war who filled their weekends fist-fighting the white supremacists sending them hate mail

Jack Kirby created Captain America knowing he was probably about to be drafted and made sure to bank a bunch of material about beating the shit out of Nazis to be printed once he was shipped overseas

I really like The Boys and Kripke and Moore is obviously a genius; I just would caution against the “inherently” meme that the subsequent discourse attaches to these concepts...the genre has a history rooted in anti-fascist propaganda that ought to be properly digested.

that IS wild - and I would go further and say that it is a fundamental betrayal of the character. My point is exactly that: the fascist elements that have become the hallmark is not INHERENT; there is, and was, another way. https://twitter.com/gregkarber/status/1317615844629737472

(Grant Morrison has written at length about how we might recoup the socialist core of Superman in SUPERGODS, and his comic run with young Clark in jeans beating up bourgeois landlords takes us a lot in this direction - highly suggest checking both out)

Morrison for example reads the cover of Action Comics #1 as a socialist manifesto: a fantasy of destroying the Ford car whose assembly lines have devalued the human in an age of mechanization and industrialization.

I guess the TLDR is that I just don’t wanna throw out a resistance literature bc it has been co-opted by the superstructure it was designed to critique.

I think Moore and Kripke’s points are salient, but I don’t want to abandon a whole literary technology and genre to cynicism.