It’s been too long since I’ve looked in on Superman versus Bigots, so how about I head back to 1941 and find a nice basic one where he fights, well, not Nazis exactly, but a pretty clear stand-in for them.
“The Dukalian Spy Ring”
SUMMARY
Issue: Superman #10, June, 1941
Lois and Clark are sent to cover a sports exhibition with athletes representing the nation Dukalia competing against Americans. Dukalia, we’re told, is a country that is not currently friendly, and our intrepid reporters immediately feel the hostility coming off the foreign competitors. Also, they see in the crowd a man named Lang who was famously recently discharged from the US Navy “for conduct unbecoming an officer.”
The Dukalian consul, Karl Wolff, makes a speech about how his guys are way better than Americans. Superman can’t handle this trash talk so he bursts onto the scene and shoves the Dukalians around a bit. He throws the shot-putter, he grabs the pole vault champ and jumps with him over the thing with him in his hands. That sort of stuff. Then the Man of Steel goes for Wolff himself, shoving his guards out of the way, and sticks him at the top of a flagpole.
With the Dukalians embarrassed, Clark returns to Lois and they discuss how odd it was to see Lang at the demonstration. They split up to investigate. Lois’s soon finds Lang’s hotel room and rents the room next to his so she can climb the window ledge to break in.
She almost falls, but catches herself and proves that she doesn’t always need Superman to save her. Inside she is captured by Lang and a Dukalian goon. Hopefully Superman can save her! Fortunately Lois is taken alive, so she gets to hear Lang declare that he hates America because they dismissed him from the Navy, which is why he’s selling his great new invention to their enemies.
Then we switch to Clark’s side of the investigation. He trails Lang to the waterfront, hears him speaking to the Dukalian consul Wolff on the phone and then board a strange submarine that vanishes even from Superman’s senses.
Having lost Lang’s trail but connected him to the Dukalians, Superman goes to the Dukalian consulate and breaks in. Some guards try to kill him, but neither hydrocyanic gas nor bullets are enough to do it.
Superman then leaves the consulate (having accomplished nothing there as far as I can tell) and he follows Wolff’s car back to the waterfront. There, he gets into his Clark garb and lets himself be taken prisoner and be reunited with Lois.
Soon we learn that the invention that Lang is selling to the Dukalians is the submarine he used earlier. It’s partially made of transparent plastic and moves really fast, which doesn’t sound like much but hey it escaped Superman’s telescopic vision so it must be good. Also it flies.
Then it turns out that Lang was never really a traitor! The whole thing was a con to catch the Dukalian spies! But then it turns out that Wolff knew that and came prepared to double-cross Lang and steal the sky-sub! And now he’s going to use it to destroy the Panama Canal!
Wolff doesn’t see any reason to keep the prisoners alive (Lang being secretly a good guy means it makes sense they hadn’t killed Lois) and the Dukalians make the mistake of trying to execute Clark first by sticking him in a torpedo tube and sending him into the sea. That makes it easy for him to get into the Superman outfit, after which it doesn’t take much for Superman to save the day, using the bombs that would have been used in the canal to blow up a Dukalian freighter.
SUPERMAN VS BIGOTS
These guys are not called Nazis, but these guys are Nazis. Dukalia is a placeholder for Nazi Germany in more than enough ways: They’re an unfriendly nation seemingly mostly made up of Aryan people. It isn’t ever shown close-up, but they have a symbol made up of a circle containing a crosslike shape (it makes me think of a telephone pole) all right angles like a swastika. The consul is named “Karl Wolff” for goodness sake.
I can’t say why they decided to use a fictional country in a story that came out a few months after Captain America made his debut by fighting actual Nazis and punching Hitler in the face on the cover of his first comic (this is also well after the How Superman Would Win The War story). Maybe there was some level of plausible deniability they wanted as they criticized a nation they were not yet at war with, but it could also be that they just thought this would be more fun. Using fictional nations to satirize real ones is a perfectly valid technique. No matter the name used in the comic, these guys are clearly Nazis.
I’ve written in this series before about how when Superman fought Nazis in this era, it was usually just as “enemies of America” rather than as racists specifically. This story is mostly that, but there is a bit near the beginning when Wolff gives his speech about the superiority of his people:
So we have these Nazis come out and declare their inherent greatness, then Superman shows up to make them look foolish. But when you think of these guys as actual Nazis, then showing how much better at jumping Superman is than they are feels pretty hollow. If someone says “my race and nationality is superior to yours” then rebutting “nuh uh, my nation has this one guy who is even better” is just playing the same game as them. The whole scene at the sports exhibition is there as excuse to show some bite-sized Superman feats, and I can’t help but assume the 1936 Olympics were part of the inspiration, but at least there it wasn’t a fictional man beating the Germans at sports. Superman isn’t real so saying he’s better than Nazis doesn’t do much.
Oh well, at least the rest of the issue is about Superman beating the Nazis at war stuff. That would mostly be better if not for one morbidly fascinating aspect: this 1941 story has Superman surviving a gas attack by Nazis. I don’t doubt that the Nazis had gassed people before this, but surely nobody creating this story could be aware of how that would become such a part of the depraved evil they’d do in the following years. Superman could laugh it off, but a lot of people would not be able to.
I chose this story because I thought it’d be an easy one, but I’ve dug myself into a pretty deep hole here. Have I accidentally discovered a story that proves how ineffective it is to tell stories of Superman vs Bigots? Does it show that you’re either just comparing propaganda or doing something that has no benefit in the actual world?
No, I can’t think that. This story is not the whole popular culture war effort. It’s one volley in the Never-Ending Battle for the minds of its audience. No one story for children about a flying submarine is going to immediately end racism, but maybe it made some ten-year-old think Nazis were bad and that’s a start. As long as we keep teaching that lesson, we’re not down yet.
OTHER STUFF
- It would not be out of place in this era for Superman to blow up the Dukalian freighter with all hands aboard at the end of the story, but the dialogue makes it clear that the crew abandoned ship and Lang called for the Coast Guard to come get them.
- As far as I can tell Dukalia has never appeared again in a DC comic, not even some Roy Thomas WWII tale.
- The other stories in Superman #10 include one where Superman faces off against Luthor, one with a crooked talent agent to be brought to justice, and one with a different spy ring (seemingly not Nazis) using a hypnotist called Righab Bey.