A couple of weeks ago, on Smallville, Clark Kent started doing activist stuff because he fell in love with an young woman of Native American descent. Superman, an activist? Many may find this surprising, but Superman was not always the boy scout one thinks him today. I do believe that the early Superman was very much a character of quite a bit of moral flexibility, even occasionally killing or threatening to kill criminals unless they confessed. Until about the middle of 1942, he was a hunted criminal, most notably for his urban renewal efforts, destroying massive tracts of slums, which he blamed for the violence therein.
Suddenly, in the middle of World War II, it all changed. By the end of 1943, he finds killing morally repugnant. One suspects that in grappling with the Nazis, he came face to face with the enormity of poor moral thinking taken to its extremes. This of course came too late for Joe Gatson and J. T. Curtis, but they were criminals anyway, so who cared?
11:59:04 PM 
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