I’m reading Michael Schumacher’s Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. One day, Siegal and Schuster’s Superman submission came in to the Eisner-Eiger shop. It had been making the rounds. Pretty crude, it was another costumed hero – a genre Eisner felt inherently childish. Even then he hoped the field could be elevated to adult sensibilities.
What really put him off was the name. The Nazis were rising, and throwing the “Aryan Superman” term around a lot. A Jew, Eisner found it somewhat offensive, or at least a name with unpleasant associations.
I don’t imagine too many publishers would be keen to launch a hero called The Jihadist today, even though it means, literally, “the struggler.”