Superman builds on the hero’s complicated history with U.S. government

In an extremely contentious interview with her boyfriend/coworker Superman/Clark Kent (David Corenswet) in James Gunn’s 2025 reboot movie Superman, Lois Lane presses him about the fallout of his intervention in an overseas war between the aggressive country of Boravia and its weaker neighbor, Jarhanpur. “You seemingly acting as a representative of the United States will cause more problems around the world,” she notes.

He testily counters, “I wasn’t representing anybody except for me.”

Gunn’s version of the hero isn’t a traditional defender of “truth, justice, and the American way.” But that’s far from a radical spin on the character. Writers of Superman movies, comics, and TV shows have spent decades grappling with how closely the hero should be tied to the U.S. government. Superman is from an alien world, but he was raised in Kansas as Clark Kent. He’s been embraced as an American icon, appearing on U.S. postage stamps, and receiving commemorative statues in the city of Metropolis, Illinois and in Cleveland, the city where the character was created. Just as the date of his arrival on Earth has shifted from decade to decade to keep the story modern, his values and actions have changed along with the political climate.

The first Superman story was published in 1938, but the character quickly became narratively tied into America’s 1941 entry into World War II. Superman comics showed him fighting Nazis and pitching war bonds, and “the American way” was added to the list of causes he fights for, along with “truth and justice.” But at home, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster portrayed him as absolutely willing to challenge authority and take on powerful people in America, ranging from slum lords to Metropolis’ mayor to factory owners making shoddy cars.

Superman’s commercial success combined with the jingoism of the Cold War and the 1954 Comics Code Authority led to a more fantasy-focused version of the hero who mostly punched alien invaders or monsters in fights without a clear political message. The transition is clearest in the 1952-1958 Adventures of Superman TV series: Superman spent the first two seasons fighting gangsters and crime lords, but the later seasons toned down the violence and made the bad guys more cartoonish. That dynamic shifted again post-Watergate, though, as American faith in government was shaken. While Superman responds directly to a request from the president of the United States to fight General Zod in 1980’s Superman II, in 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, he defies both the United States and the Soviet Union with his plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

In Roger Stern and Tom Grummett 1991’s Action Comics Annual, Superman runs for president himself in an alternate future. That required changing some comic book lore so he wasn’t sent to Earth as a baby, but instead was born on U.S. soil from an artificial womb, so he could claim birthright citizenship. Mark Millar’s 2003 miniseries Superman: Red Son explores Superman’s Americanness by laying out how the Cold War might have played out differently if Superman’s rocket had landed in Ukraine instead of Kansas, and he became an agent of the Soviet Union. The conflict in Gunn’s Superman mirrors Superman’s intervention in Iran, in a 2011 arc that led to him renouncing his American citizenship so he would no longer be viewed as an instrument of the U.S. government.

Sometimes dubbed “the Big Blue Boy Scout” because of his wholesome all-American image, Superman is sometimes portrayed as having a strong respect for official government hierarchy and duly elected authority. He’s a patsy of the Reagan administration in Frank Miller’s 1986 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. After nearly killing himself stopping a nuke from hitting the U.S., he’s deployed to stop Batman from causing too much trouble. Superman fills a similar role in the end credits of Black Adam, where ruthless U.S. government operative Amanda Waller orders him to intimidate the anti-hero.

[Ed. note: The following contains spoilers for My Adventures with Superman, The Suicide Squad and Superman.]

Waller, introduced in DC Comics in 1986, regularly serves as a modern embodiment of America’s questionable ethics. She views Superman and other metahumans as a threat to her country’s authority, and she’s willing to use any means possible to even the playing field in case they need to be stopped. The version of Waller in My Adventures with Superman uses torture to get information about Superman, and sends increasingly powerful and unstable villains after the hero.

Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad is an indictment of America’s history of backing friendly dictators over democratically elected leftists in Latin America, with Waller sending in the eponymous team when a revolution in the South American nation of Corto Maltese endangers U.S. interests there. She’s more concerned about covering up the U.S. government’s secret experiments in the country than about saving the locals from havoc caused by mind-controlling alien invader Starro. Gunn is also critical of the U.S. government in Superman, where Superman takes it upon himself to intervene to stop American ally Boravia from invading Jarhanpur. The whole conflict turns out to have been generated by billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) in a plot to carve up Jarhanpur, designating half of it as a country he plans to rule. That plot would seem cartoonishly evil if it wasn’t for the fact that there are plans being floated to build a Trump Riviera and Elon Musk manufacturing zone in Gaza. Superman’s insistence on doing what is right rather than what the U.S. government says he should have led to allegations that Gunn’s version is too “woke.”

My Adventures with Superman celebrates people who stand up against their own government’s immoral orders. General Sam Lane goes rogue and abandons his work with Waller after deciding Superman’s not really a threat to earth, in part because his daughter, Lois, convinces him of Superman’s goodness. The ongoing Absolute Superman series goes even further, reimagining Superman as arriving on Earth as a teen rather than a baby. When Martha and Jonathan Kent take him in for a few weeks, Homeland Security raids their home for suspected terrorist activity and violation of immigration law. He’s forced to flee, and has spent the past five years as a stateless wandererer trying to protect the downtrodden after seeing how the leaders of both Earth and Krypton abandon their lower classes.

By the end of Gunn’s Superman, the hero hasn’t just intervened in an international conflict himself, but inspired other heroes to do the same. It’s a development that General Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) views with trepidation, an acknowledgement that the world is now full of superpowers who can cause regime change based on their own values, rather than submitting to the authority of any government. With Flag set to play a big role in Peacemaker season 2, and Luthor being shipped off to the Waller-controlled Belle Reve prison, the relationship between the U.S. government and Superman will likely continue to be tense in Gunn’s DC Universe.

This version of Superman is a true idealist — and Gunn, like other creators before him, implies that he’ll keep fighting for truth and justice even when that isn’t the American way.