Death or Glory Becomes Just Another Story

So, I watched the new SUPERMAN movie while laid-up with my dental woes. I don’t have much to say about it, because the movie also doesn’t have much to say about anything in particular. (My quick review is that if you’re nostalgic for the 70s movies, you will probably enjoy David Corenswet’s sweetly fidelic tribute to Christopher Reeve’s performance as much as I did; the film itself is cute enough, but I remain annoyed that they used a CGI dog for Krypto. Gimme a real dog!) 

SUPERMAN is a modern superhero film, which means it’s gonna have at least one cloying needledrop to remind the audience that they are supposed to experience emotional catharsis through art. (Some writers try to do that with their writing, but hell, if I had access to music licensing money, I might get froggy with it too.) The song is the Teddybears' Punk Rocker, and its tenuous relation to the plot of the movie is as follows: 

• Superman is a Nice Boy, and he wants to be Good. 
• The people of Metropolis agree that Superman is Good, until Lex Luthor convinces them that Superman is Bad. 
• Superman remains Good. At the end of the film, he is still Good and everyone is proud of him for that. 
• Superman calls himself a punk rocker earlier in the movie. And since he is Good, being a punk rocker is Good in the DC universe. 

Speaking of punk, do you know what’s actually punk? It’s telling right-wing monsters to go fuck themselves. DC might think it’s cool for Superman to be a punk rocker, but they did not hesitate to fire a trans woman for doing something admirably punk rock this week. There isn’t really anything more punk than publicly expressing your relief that a cruel fascist bigot has died. And yet, it cost Gretchen Felker-Martin her job with DC. I guess Superman is allowed to be a punk rocker, but Felker-Martin needs to toe the company line.

DC have always been corporate cowards, but this particular instance is astounding in its cravenness. They’re even offering refunds to people who bought the first issue of Red Hood, as if merely glancing at Felker-Martin’s prose is so injurious to one’s morals that readers deserve compensation.

Why is this stupid? Well, comics are made by plenty of people who say and do controversial things without losing their ability to work in the industry. Frank Miller has a longstanding association with DC and Marvel, writing flagship characters like Daredevil and Batman; he also has a long-established history of regurgitating reprehensibly violent right-wing propaganda every time young people irritate him somehow. And that’s just at the big two! You can hardly throw a rock in the comics industry without hitting someone who has said or done some nasty shit during the course of their career. Hell, Dave Sim is still bitching about getting canceled, and he’s been putting out misogynist garbage since the 70s. There’s plenty of room in the comics industry for assholes, so what makes Felker-Martin such a unique case that this kind of censorship is merited?

The obvious answer is probably the correct one: Charlie Kirk was a fascist mouthpiece, Gretchen Felker-Martin is a controversial trans woman, and Americans live in a country run by a handful of hateful bigots who love fascism and hate trans people. This means that the hegemonic forces of our society are going all-in on pretending that Kirk was a brave speaker of truths instead of the nasty-minded hate-generating windbag he actually was, mostly in an effort to normalize him and turn him into a martyr. Gretchen Felker-Martin is an easy pawn to sacrifice toward this goal.

I have no proof of any of this, of course, and no concrete idea why a company eager to call its flagship character a punk rocker is also eager to slurp boot leather. What I do know is that DC exists to generate money, and it has to continue to function in this fascist political climate. For collaborators, business continues without interference. For enemies of the president, not so much. 

But is it really OK to joke about someone's death? As a reminder, here are some of the things that Charlie Kirk has said about women like Gretchen Felker-Martin. (I strongly recommend not clicking these links, but they are included for citation purposes.)

“A man who calls himself trans is wearing 'woman face,' no different than I would wear Black face trying to be a Black person. It's assuming an identity that isn't yours.” 

“These people are sick[…] I blame the decline of the American man. Someone should have just taken care of it, the way we did in the 1950s and 60s.”

“The one issue I think is so against our senses, so against natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender issue [...] you hear that, [DEADNAME]? You’re an abomination to God!”

If you can read that litany of ichorous hate and still come away performatively shocked that Felker-Martin indulged herself with a joke at this man's expense, you're either being shockingly inhumane or purposefully obtuse. You are denying a trans person the right to use gallows humor to express reasonable anger about the terrifying climate we live in. You are asking trans people to pretend like we aren't all dealing with more harassment, more abuse, more violence and danger ever since the dudes who worship Kirk got the cultural green light to start hunting us for sport.

If you are asking trans people to be evenhanded and serene about their own genocide at all times, you are holding us to an impossible standard because you want us to fail. You are either cruel or you're stupid, and the exact nature of your flaw doesn't matter to me. You're being a dick. Fix your heart or die. 

Anyways. Why does the company that owns Superman get to call him punk rock when it makes business decisions at the whims of a right-wing oligarchy? Perhaps the issue here is that we as a society need to have a conversation about what punk rock actually is. Much like the term “trade” has been pulverized by Drag Race fans, the idea of punk has become shorthand for doing literally anything that somebody else doesn’t like. We have right-wing conservative dipshits claiming to be the new punks, despite the fact that they were the ones who beat the shit out of queers with safety pins through their noses back in the day, and they seem all-too-eager to get back to it now. 

To look to our punk elders for guidance, there’s a Clash song I’m fond of called Death or Glory. It’s a song about what happens when punks give up their ideals for money and comfort. There’s a verse I think about a lot these days: 

Every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock 'n' roll

Grabs the mic to tell me he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this and it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns will later join the church

Like any other anarchist art movement, punk is vulnerable to commodification and misunderstanding. It’s easy enough to say that Superman is a punk, because you can say that anything means anything if you have enough money. But if Superman is also the face of DC, the fascist collaborators who fired Gretchen Felker-Martin, they should be more honest about what that symbol stands for. You can't be a punk if you kiss the president's ass. You can't stand for hope if you serve the politics of despair. And if Superman really wants to be a punk rock champion of justice that serves the downtrodden, sticking up for trans folks is an obvious place to start.

EDITED 09/12/2025 to note that Daredevil is a Marvel property, not DC. I mixed them up. My bad.