Eugene (AP) — Superhero stories arose in a country wracked by economic disaster and headed into a world war.

University of Oregon Englishg professor Ben Saunders was involved with the new “Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero” show that recently opened on the UO campus.

 Superman first appeared in 1938 in that first issue of Action Comics, which was one of a handful of comics then on the market.

Most people think of superheroes like Superman as a kind of modern pantheon, the equivalent of Greek gods. That’s too simple, Saunders says.

“That tends to overlook the specific historical circumstances in which superheroes arise,” he says. “They arrive on the scene in the late 1930s at a time when the country is going through some very interesting self examination.”

Franklin Roosevelt was president and was under attack for his New Deal social programs. And the country was involved in a fierce debate about whether to enter the war in Europe.

“It’s at that moment that Superman appears,” Saunders says. “Initially he is about the most aggressive version of a New Deal Democrat that you’ll ever get. In the first year of Superman, he doesn’t have any super villains. He fights the oil companies. He fights corrupt senators in bed with arms dealers. He fights for better housing in the ghettos. He fights against automobile manufacturers for producing unsafe vehicles. He’s Ralph Nader on steroids.”

American comic books grew out a melding of newspaper comic strips and the pulp fiction of the 1920s. Pulp characters such as Tarzan and Buck Rogers morphed into newspaper comic strips by the late 1920s. By the late 1930s, a couple of companies had begun reprinting newspaper comics without the newspaper attached.

“And then Superman happens,” Saunders said. “And within a year and a half there were 27 comic book companies in the country. And they were almost all printing original material, most of that fronted by a superhero. It was a $20 million-a-year industry.”

Almost all of the comic books were produced in New York and New Jersey. The writers and artists were first- and second-generation immigrants, many from Eastern Europe and many of them Jewish, Saunders said.

The secret identity employed by so many superheroes might be a metaphor for cultural assimilation of the immigrant comic book creators, the professor suggests.

And their ethnic background might explain the superheroes’ immediate opposition to fascism.

“Superheroes get involved in the war very early on,” Saunders says. “Though Superman, by and large, kept out of the war until after Pearl Harbor. That was a decision on the part of the owners, not the creators. The owners said there were still too many isolationist parents and you might lose their nickels.”

But a year before Pearl Harbor, the flag-draped Captain America, a creation of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, was on the cover of a comic book, punching Adolf Hitler in the face.

Kirby was a pen name and later the legal name of Jacob Kurtzberg, the son of an Austrian Jewish immigrant. The Hitler-punching issue enraged American Nazi organizations, and it spurred New York to give police protection to its publisher, Timely Comics (which would later become Marvel). The issue sold almost a million copies.