MAGA Pundits Are Triggered That Superman Is an Immigrant

But he is an embodiment of America’s essential goodness and promise

“Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.” The origin myth of the greatest American superhero condensed to just eight words across four panels. Turn the page and see him, arms outstretched, red cape flowing, S-shield emblazoned on his chest, flying into the Sun. Superman!

These are the opening pages of All-Star Superman, a brilliant 12-part epic from comics scribe Grant Morrison that debuted in 2005 and wrapped up three years later. It is considered by many, myself included, to be the greatest Superman story ever told. What spurred me to revisit it, in addition to director James Gunn citing it as a major inspiration for his new Superman film, is that it’s precisely the kind of story that America needs right now. As the country surrenders to its darkest impulses, electing figures as cruel and corrupt as any comic book villain to wield the brutal powers of the state against immigrants, this counternarrative of an immigrant’s heroism and decency feels even more relevant now than when the first issue hit stands 20 years ago.

Superman as a Microcosm of America

To start with the obvious—and with a once unobjectionable aspect of the character that the current crop of right-wing commentators find deeply upsetting (more on that below)—Superman wasn’t born here. He is an immigrant, an alien, a refugee, a baby sent via rocketship from a dying planet to come crashing uninvited into the arms of America. His Kryptonian biology and the rays of our yellow sun would eventually make him stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s the benevolence of Smallville farmers Ma and Pa Kent that make him Superman. To take the story literally, America’s most iconic superhero spent his youth as an undocumented farm worker.

From the very beginning, the story of Superman—originally co-written by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both sons of Jewish immigrants—is the promise of America: no matter where you come from there is room for you here to become your greatest self. The fantastical hero they created together in Cleveland may have looked like a corn-fed Kansas farmboy—a Black or Jewish Superman wouldn’t have flown in 1938—but it’s no coincidence that he came from another world.

Siegel and Schuster sold the rights to Superman for a mere $130, setting him up to become less a rough-and-tumble outsider and more an establishment superhero. Yet this commercialized Superman still reliably stood up for diversity and the little guy, as seen in a 1949 schoolbook cover in which he beseeches children to regard any “talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race, or national origin” as un-American.

Superwoke?

This foundational value of Superman, considered anodyne for most of his history, is now triggering for the contemporary right. “Is Superman super woke?” asks a Fox News host, responding to Gunn’s completely unobjectionable statement noting Superman’s immigrant roots and capacity for basic human kindness. This is met with derisive laughter from her co-hosts, who liken Gunn to Harvey Weinstein and suggest that his comments are an attempt to create a “woke shield” for himself. Another co-host wonders if this means Gunn’s Superman will be from Uganda, with MS-13 insignia on his cape.

That segment is representative of the broader meltdown over Gunn’s comments across much of the right, with others confidently predicting that the film’s allegedly “woke” themes of empathy and tolerance will alienate audiences and cause it to flop. Julian Sanchez captured the essence of these sentiments well: “The American right has grown so corrosively hostile to virtue that the kind of moral messaging for kids that we used to consider so unobjectionable as to be borderline banal is now read as a kind of personal attack.”

That’s precisely what makes All-Star Superman an inspired choice for Gunn to draw from. I could go on for hours about all the things that make the comic uniquely great: the pitch-perfect characterization of the titular hero, the wonderfully detailed art of Frank Quitely, the meticulously plotted script that rewards repeated reading, the marriage of trippy and grandiose storytelling. Morrison’s Superman engages in all the feats of heroics and super-strength one would expect—but he’s also unfailingly kind. It’s illustrative of what’s at the heart of the series that, for all its brawls with monsters and adventures in space, the page most remembered by fans is one in which Superman drops what he’s doing to save an ordinary girl from jumping off a building.

Trumpian Supervillains

But what’s particularly striking now, read in the light of Trump’s second stint in office, is All-Star’s portrayal of the villains, who embody a distinctly Trumpian mixture of resentment and nihilism. The story’s first adversary is a literal human bomb sent to sabotage a mission of scientific discovery. Archnemesis Lex Luthor drips with envy of Superman, acutely diminished by the hero’s existence. “We all fall short of that sickening, inhuman perfection, that impossible ideal,” explains Luthor, justifying his attempts to murder the Kryptonian. Luthor is sure he could rule the world if only “some opportunistic alien vermin hadn’t decided to dump its trash here.”

Reflecting on the story after publication, Morrison recounted, years before Trump arrived on the political scene, that the key to understanding Luthor is his vanity; this is a character who, having lost his own hair, draws on eyebrows in subconscious imitation of Superman. “I felt that, brilliant as he is, Luthor is nowhere near as brilliant as he wants to be or thinks he is,” Morrison wrote in an appendix to the collected series. “For Luthor no praise, no success, no achievement is ever enough because there’s a big hungry hole in his soul. His need for acknowledgement and validation is superhuman in scale.”

Remind you of anyone? If All-Star had been written today, that toxic combination of vanity, xenophobia, contempt for morality, and simmering inadequacy would land with all the subtlety of Superman punching a giant robot. Donald Trump, at 76 years old, may be selling NFTs (limited edition digital cards) portraying himself as Superman, pulling open his shirt to reveal a T-shaped insignia and shooting laser beams from his eyes, crassly attempting to appropriate his glory. But he is really more like a bombastic Luthor paired with none of the intelligence. You see it in the ridiculous hair and makeup, the political career that began with spreading birther conspiracy theories about the nation’s first Black president, the lies about the size of his inauguration crowd, the repeated claims that “I alone can fix it,” his envy of foreign dictators and strongmen, the false promises to make America great again by kicking out the immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of this country” and the “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin.”

Elon Musk, another icon of the new right who similarly overestimates his own brilliance and craves fawning adulation, could use his intellect and riches to better the world but chooses instead to demonize immigrants and rip humanitarian aid from sick and starving children. That’s a very Luthor-esque character arc—although Musk creating his own AI and promising that it will “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge,” only for it to declare itself “MechaHitler” and go on an antisemitic rampage, is too over the top even for Lex.

Intriguingly, All-Star has its own Musk-like figure in Leo Quintum, a multizillionaire superscientist with a research base on the moon, unlimited financial credit, and ambitions to take humanity to the stars. Unlike Musk, however, Quintum is genuinely motivated to help humanity.

In that aforementioned 2008 interview looking back on the comic, Morrison expressed disappointment that readers expected Quintum to turn heel. “It was interesting to me how so many people expected Quintum to turn out bad at the end. It shows how conditioned we are in our miserable, self–loathing, suspicious society to expect the worst of everyone, rather than hope for the best.” Quintum represents the ideal of scientific enlightenment. If Luthor is the type of genius whose envy and inadequacy drive him to evil when faced with a Superman, Quintum is the kind to be elevated and inspired by such a figure.

The plot of All-Star is set in motion with Luthor’s sabotage of Quintum’s mission to the sun. Superman saves the day, as he always does, but at the price of overloading his own cells with solar radiation. The result, as Luthor masterminded all along, is a terminal diagnosis, and Superman is finally forced to confront his own mortality. The question at the center of the story becomes: What would happen to humanity in a world without Superman?

Each character has their own answer. Quintum promises to find a way to save him. Luthor, deluded as always, tells himself that he will finally become the great man he was meant to be. And Superman ... well, his approach to the question is revealed in the 10th part of the story, a single comic book so brilliant, beautiful, and moving that I dare not spoil it for you here.

Of course, we ourselves live in a world without a Superman. No Man of Steel is coming to foil our villains’ plans. We’re in this alone. We’re also in this together, connected by our shared humanity. What we do is up to us.

The deeper meaning of Morrison’s project, expressed most explicitly in All-Star but encompassing a much larger body of work, is that superheroes were created to inspire us, their stories as real as those of any other gods. As 15th-century humanist Pico Della Mirandola, one of several historic figures to make a cameo in the series, explains the idea in-story, “Imitation is man’s nature and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.” Or as Morrison writes in Supergods:

Superman—so unashamedly special, so absolutely individual that he wore his own initial as a badge—reaffirmed human dignity looking ahead to another time. ... In Superman, some of the loftiest aspirations of our species came hurtling down from imagination’s bright heaven to collide with the lowest form of entertainment, and from their union something powerful and resonant was born, albeit in its underwear. He was brave. He was clever. He never gave up and he never let anyone down. He stood up for the weak and knew how to see off bullies of all kinds. He couldn’t be hurt or killed by the bad guys, hard as they might try. He didn’t get sick. He was fiercely loyal to his friends and to his adopted world. He was Apollo, the sun god, the unbeatable supreme self, the personal greatness of which we all know we’re capable. He was the righteous inner authority and lover of justice that blazed behind the starched-shirt front of hierarchical conformity.

Is it any wonder that the contemporary right’s response to such a hero is sneering contempt even as its Dear Leader, who revels in brutalizing the weak and vulnerable, tries to borrow his glory? For all the sloganeering about Making America Great Again, the Trumpian right’s vision of society is fundamentally regressive and insular—not an attempt to recapture the best of America’s past but an attempt to inaugurate an America bereft of everything that made it great in the first place.

The MAGA vision of America is a country too incapacitated to build more housing, aid the world’s poor, fund breakthrough science to cure diseases, welcome immigrants, or provide due process. Trump and the MAGA movement offer an invitation to indulge our worst selves and our lowest impulses: to demand mass deportation, pose in front of foreign torture prisons, sell gimmicky merch celebrating an inhumane detention camp, sic heavily armed masked thugs on immigrants who came here in search of a better life, and reinterpret empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

I have no wish to reduce a timeless work of art to a mere instrument with which to score political points, but I’ve also been reading comics long enough to have an idea of what Superman would have to say about the nativist poison emanating from this White House. That big red “S” is more than just a corporate logo—it’s a reminder that the most powerful man in the universe is nothing special without kindness and that we are stronger than we think. However hopeless things may feel right now, we’ve faced worse and gotten through it.

Siegel and Shuster, as sons of immigrant families, knew better than to look backward to an imagined lost era when America was great; they dreamed instead of a Man of Tomorrow who became super. His “never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way,” to quote the motto from the 1950s TV show, was always best understood as a battle delineated not by borders or blood-and-soil but by optimism, progress, and ideas. If that benevolent ethos is intolerable to today’s conservatives, we liberals can be glad to have a Superman on our side.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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