“Two years after its ban, Superman continues to haunt the minds of our children, our adolescents and even the majority of Spanish adults. The proof is that of 150 children aged nine to twelve and from different social classes, asked if they had ever read an episode of Superman, only two answered negatively. Furthermore, when we showed 50 twelve- to thirteen-year-old children different vignettes from this periodical, most of the children remembered the episode perfectly as if no time had passed; Superman is, therefore, still in force in Spain and it is possible that he will never die.”
Thus began the report that the Institute of Public Opinion, precursor of the current Center for Sociological Research (CIS), commissioned on the popular superhero in 1966, two years after the General Press Directorate of the Ministry of Information and Tourism prohibited the edition. , sale and dissemination of popular comics considering that they had a bad influence on children and adolescents. In fact, before its ban, each of its titles passed through the hands of censorship, which had eliminated or modified many of its cartoons as “terrifying,” “irreligious,” “erotic,” “accepting magic,” “violent.” ” or “absurd”, according to the same report.
Superman, who had arrived in Spain in 1940 as Ciclone following the example of Italy – where he burst from the planet Krypton as Ciclone – took years to become a mass idol, although he achieved it at the pace of the influence of popular culture. American influence spread throughout Europe at the end of World War II. Hispano Americana de Ediciones, based in Barcelona, ??was in charge of translating and adapting the adventures of a man with superpowers who hid under the personality of journalist Carlos Sanz, from the newspaper La Jornada, where the curious reporter Luisa Lane also worked.
The success of the great international superhero among post-war children and young people was parallel to that of a genre that was revitalized with other national heroes such as Flechas y Pelayos, Chicos, Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín, El Guerrero del Antifaz, El Jabato or El Coyote . A pattern that both Superman and Batman, who debuted as Wings of Steel, deviated from. This is how both the Children’s Press Advisory Board and the Information Commission on Children’s and Youth Publications saw it, dominated by the religious sectors of the regime, which led Manuel Fraga to ban both comics upon assuming the ministry for attacking morality.
But the fame of Superman had made a deep impression and the fact that it was published in Spanish in Mexico and Argentina soon meant that the comic continued to circulate clandestinely and that in big cities it was relatively easy to find it, sometimes in publications mutilated to overcome the ban, such as revealed the study carried out two years after it stopped being published in Spain.
The IOP study, carried out by its Psychological Consultancy, confirmed after analyzing 203 Superman comics published in Spain between 1958 and 1964 that the superhero really questioned the religious morality rooted in Spain. “This conception of God as a simple ultraphysical and ultrabiological power is extraordinarily dangerous for a society whose theological premises correspond to that of the God of Love,” says the study, which scrutinizes the mythological origins of the superhero and relates it to Nietzsche’s superman. “Heinz Politzer has said of Superman that he is ‘the legitimate, but dark, son of the Hitler era and the atomic bomb’, and Luis Gasea affirms, for his part, that ‘he is the incarnation of the Aryan myth to American taste’” , explains the study.
The report also criticizes Superman for his lack of humanity, “limited to a few physical features and a few modes of behavior” and for presenting “a very marked misogyny.” “Supermán is not only an innocent comic from an erotic point of view, but it is even anti-erotic, which affects the opposite extreme. The protagonist’s relationships with Luisa reveal such terror on the part of the superman towards an authentically sexual bond, let alone a conjugal one, that in the long run they must have an unfavorable influence on the sexological formation of the child and the boy,” the text states.
The IOP psychological report also indicates the existence of an Electra complex in Luisa. “This complex not only explains the curiosity of her attractive secretary, but also Superman’s frigidity towards her. The Superman-Luisa relationships are presented on a father-daughter level; It is, therefore, the horror of incest that separates Superman not only from sexual contact with his collaborator, but from a revelation of his divine nature,” the analysis continues.
As for moral qualities, experts consider that although Superman embodies goodness, it is a “police-type” goodness. “He limits himself to undoing wrongs and alleviating grievances, although he lacks the burning humanity of a Don Quixote of La Mancha,” states a study that goes on to point out the most marked stereotypes in comics, such as marriage as slavery and youth as thoughtless and presumptuous
“The hero Superman is a very degraded divine archetype. Its publication is not suitable for children under fourteen years of age due to the large number of harmful stereotypes it contains, for not presenting a hero who acts as an identification objective, for its pseudoscientific fantasy, which prevents adequate training and information at the level of the child’s psyche, and for its grammatical errors,” the study concludes.
