TikTok often does this cool thing where its users take older songs and give them entirely new life by pairing them with trending dances or even just random posts, making them go viral enough to make them real-world hits as well.

This often corresponds with songs’ use in movies or TV shows, such as Stranger Things revitalizing Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” That’s exactly what’s happening now with “Punkrocker,” a 2006 song by Swedish alt band Teddybears that features punk rock pioneer Iggy Pop.

The song owes its resurgence to James Gunn‘s Superman, which is flying high at the box office, and similarly restoring its titular hero to his former glory at the same time. And with its supercharged popularity, it was only a matter of time until “Punkrocker” made its way into Iggy’s setlist proper — which it did at Portland’s Project Pabst festival. Best of all, Gunn himself brought attention to the performance, posting the above YouTube and noting that it’s the first time Iggy Pop has performed the song — ever.

Over the past decade, Gunn’s earned a reputation for his pitch-perfect needle drops. In the case of “Punkrocker,” it appears in the closing credits of Superman, summarizing this version’s pop-punk ethos in a call-back to one of the film’s most resonant emotional beats, which arguably contains the film’s entire thesis. It’s a beautifully shot moment, and it’s very cool to see it already having some real-world impact.

You can watch the performance above.

James Gunn’s spent the past few weeks talking about why he agreed to do Superman, and he’s also taking time to address the awkward part: agreeing to do it at the apparent expense of Henry Cavill’s superhero comeback.

In 2022, the mid-credits scene for Black Adam none too subtly declared Cavill’s return and his team up (or fight) with Dwayne Johnson’s thunderous antihero. Nothing came of that, however, because as Gunn explained in a recent Happy Sad Confused episode, it was “never part of the equation.” As he told podcast host Josh Horowitz, Cavill’s announcement that he was coming back came the same day Gunn and co-DC Studios head Peter Safran closed their deal. Gunn “diplomatically” said someone at the time (read: Johnson) was making a play to lead DC’s movie slate, and we all know how that shook out.

The entire situation was “really unfortunate” to Cavill, said Gunn, who added he and Gunn later spoke with the actor to explain things, and they let him announce the bad news through his own channels as he requested. Despite how things shook out, Gunn stressed he’d be more than happy to bring Cavill into his DC universe as another character in “something”—but if there’s anything specific he thinks Cavill is perfect for, Gunn is keeping his mouth shut.

Likewise, he remains cagey on the next DC project he’s writing, which he promises will once again involve David Corenswet’s Superman. When pressed, Gunn stressed the hero is “very important” to the story, but it’s not a sequel or a teamup with Batman. Said project will be revealed “sooner rather than later,” so that’s something! Just don’t expect it in the next immediate week, since DC’s not bringing any movies with them to San Diego Comic-Con.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

Critics and fans are buzzing over James Gunn’s Superman starring David Corenswet. Jewish journalists and popular authors have expressed a particular interest in the upcoming film because Corenswet is half-Jewish. Gunn’s casting choice sparked celebration of Corenswet as a “Jewish superhero” and reenergized the widespread belief that Superman is secretly Jewish, but is he?

This perspective distorts the past and overlooks the evidence that Superman is a WASP—white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Historical analysis of the character’s makeup, the words of the industry’s Jewish craftsmen, and the media’s treatment of his creators shows that Superman was never intended to be understood as Jewish; in fact, the opposite. Marketplace expectations and cultural norms around race and the body in America explain why Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made the Man of Steel this way.

Superman’s alter ego glorifies this identity. Clark Kent celebrates WASP etymology with two British surnames. Superman may be an alien refugee from the planet Krypton, but upon arrival, he instantly transforms into an earthling with Anglo-Saxon ancestry.

The fantasy also embraces the myth of the frontier and the myth of the garden. Superman leaps like a grasshopper and lifts “tremendous weights” like an ant in the early comics. He is originally faster, and later, as the Max Fleischer animated cartoons declare, “More powerful than a locomotive,” the technology that conquered the West.

The 1950s television program narration repeats this phrase and proclaims that Superman “can change the course of mighty rivers.” Themed moccasins and the Krypto-Raygun solidified his pioneer spirit to consumers. George Lowther’s 1942 Superman novel canonized the Kents as heartland farmers.

His body exemplifies Anglo-Saxon manhood. Superman is a broad-shouldered, sleek-nosed, steel-jawed hunk with sapphire eyes. Apart from his blue-black hair, the Man of Steel displays the Aryan or Nordic ideal. Superman’s slim body and picturesque face are not Jewish, but Gentile.

When Siegel and Shuster conceived Superman in the 1930s, antisemitism was so prevalent that Jewish heroes were essentially unthinkable. How Writers Perpetuate Stereotypes, a pamphlet from 1945, secretly funded by the American Jewish Committee, documented the financial incentive and expectation of an Anglo-Saxon hero. “‘We are interested in circulation primarily,’” an unnamed representative of the comic book industry told Columbia University researchers. “‘Can you imagine a hero named Cohen?’”

New York Daily News reporter Pete Hamill realized the disconnect between Superman’s Jewish inventors and their handiwork in 1977. He referred to Christopher Reeve’s upcoming portrayal of Superman in Richard Donner’s 1978 film as “Supergoy”, and identified the character as Protestant. “And when I looked at Reeve again it all came clear to me,” he wrote. “Metropolis was Protestant. The city was invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster almost 40 years ago, but it was Protestant. And Superman/Clark Kent was a terminal Protestant.”

Hamill even grumbled at Superman’s “perfection” without making the racial connection: “He had pounds of muscle. He had a straight nose, a good chin, blue hair.”

Jewish cartoonist Will Eisner also communicated this uncomfortable truth. In 1989, Eisner told The Jewish News that he and his contemporaries created “‘Aryan characters … with non-Jewish names like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent and … Denny Colt’” and “‘were trying to ‘pass’” with their fiction. Eisner again admitted to Comic Book Marketplace in 2004 that “the characters we made were Gentile.” Amending his initial description of racial identity, he declared, “All the characters that were created by Jewish cartoonists were WASPs.”

Journalist Jeff Salamon boasted that “the world’s most famous muscle Jew” has “blue eyes and the cutest little nose.” The caped wonder, he announced, is “a Greco-Aryan icon.” Salamon may have claimed Superman as Jewish, but his 1992 description in The Village Voice hinted at the deeper and more interesting but fraught history of Jewish comic book creators portraying the Anglo ideal.

The revered straight nose and square chin that Superman and virtually all other superheroes flaunt can be called WASPface.

Siegel and Shuster controlled their Cleveland art studio tightly to ensure Superman had this countenance. “Nobody but Shuster … is allowed to draw Superman’s facial expressions,” The Saturday Evening Post reported in 1941. Paul Henry Cassidy, one of their ghost artists, corroborated this rule the following year in his University of Wisconsin at Madison master’s thesis on the cartooning profession. He explains that his “work included inking everything except the faces of the principal characters of the SUPERMAN strip.”

Race science regarded the square jaw as the “manly look” and the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon power. It displayed the opposite image of the antisemitic stereotype of a hooked nose. In the 1940s and 1950s, psychologist and physician William H. Sheldon found proof for his pseudoscience in the heads and faces of comic strip heroes, even mentioning Superman by name. Sheldon associates their physiognomy with “the Viking kings and Greek gods.”

WASPs constituted the racial standard, and Superman’s Jewish creators projected the prototypical image of the “all-American” hero, who is not a “universal” everyman figure.

The popular press deemed the Man of Steel’s architects unfit to design and represent such a specimen. The Saturday Evening Post smeared Siegel as a “plump” young man with a candy bar addiction while his “pitcher-eared” creative partner looked “like an undernourished, bewildered schoolboy of sixteen.”

Liberty blasted their frames the same year: “Neither of this heaven-joined pair could be said to be models of their dream man’s magnificent physical perfection.” The feature pummeled Superman’s author as “stubby” and “spindly” and his artist as “a magnificently unmuscled runt.” The New Yorker described Shuster’s height and visage as the antithesis of his hero. “He’s a short, round-faced man,” the magazine said in 1948. The body-shaming language in these articles emasculated Superman’s creators and expressed an underlying antisemitism.

Clayton “Bud” Collyer, a WASP and Sunday school teacher, received more favorable treatment. The Saturday Evening Post proclaimed that Superman’s radio actor was the only employee “who approaches the physical and spiritual ideal” of the fictional champion.

When stationed at Fort Meade in 1943, Siegel insinuated Superman’s racial composition. He told a fellow soldier that his “brainchild” was his physical opposite: “I tried to do a strip on someone as unlike myself as possible—the result, Superman.”

Superman’s writer desired Anglo-Saxon features, which symbolized not just beauty but manhood and authority in the cultural imagination. Siegel writes in his unpublished 1978 memoir, “I hadn’t asked for the face or physique I was born with. I had not sculpted my nose, or fashioned my chin, or decided how broad my shoulders would be, or how tall I would become.”

Jewish cartoonists may have invented the superhero genre, but they did not resemble their creations. Selling superheroes to mainstream America required venerating Anglo-Saxonism. To carve out a good living, Siegel and Shuster reinforced a racial hierarchy that marginalized themselves.

Claiming Superman as Jewish is more about the present than the past. This perennial impulse expresses a hunger to overturn the conventional representation of Jewish men as brainy, quirky, and unmanly. It is time to demand that popular entertainment produce distinctly heroic Jewish characters. Otherwise, people will continue to seek out Jewishness where it does not exist, as with Superman.