A couple of young men named Shuster and Siegel created the first of the modern version of the savior that Jews in ancient times suggested would one day come. Christians following them adopted THE Christ in the person of the martyred Jesus of Nazareth.

Rabbi David Young of Temple Sinai of North Dade outlined the history of the Comic Book explosion since the creation of SUPERMAN whose persona is from the Planet Krypton  but whose super powers were hidden in the mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent in Kansas here on earth.  R. Young expounded on the creation of the first and the many subsequent groups of related heroes in “Comics” in which “Good” and “Evil” were so forcefully depicted.  You could not mistake the bad guys from the good ones.  I always thought the uniforms were unnecessary but they were colorful and immediately you could distinguish the good from the bad.

These superheroes, golems and saviors are the stuff from which dreams are made.  Wishful thinking sometimes creates the solution to problems caused by the bad guys just in the nick of time.  The imaginations of the writers and artists involved in the Comic Book industry never want for reasons to trot out their creations to save the populace of some great metropolis where the underworld is constantly thinking of ways of taking over the hapless denizens on the streets above.

There are plenty of real villains who operate right under our noses and we are capable of giving up control over our own lives hoping for succor by the appearance of the man on the white horse brandishing a sword slaying the bestial enemies of right thinking people.  These are images right out of the Old Testament. Heroes found there have protagonists in the Babylonian Gilgamesh and followed by Greek and Roman examples from ancient poems and histories.  They provided the non-Jewish world with heroes who came to conquer and not save the world.  They created empires but supplied the human bodies of the Angels and giants (Nephilim) that existed in the minds of those who wrote the stories of the Bible. There is a definite division between the imagined and who and what created our history.

In times of trouble people wish for saviors, even those made out of mud like the Golem of Rabbi Lowe of Prague in the MiddleAges.  Here is your hero.  Believe in him and you will be saved.  This is just another version of the Ancient Hebrew Messiah who never came for the Jews but who was adopted by the Christians. In watching the development of the superheroes in Comic Books you can see how a creature of mud became a costume wearing impervious savior who comes to help time after time – for there never is a dearth of the bad guys to go around.