American comics: I drew Superman during the Great Depression

The green light wrapped Colin's consciousness and was constantly pulled.

There seemed to be countless figures changing in the light, laughing or wailing, arguing or fighting, these scenes were looming but extremely unreal.

When Colin opened his eyes again, the surrounding environment was completely different.

From the cold cement floor of the New York alley to the warm room.

"It is so..."

Looking at the scene in front of him, there was no unexpected expression on Colin's face.

In fact, Colin experienced this situation every day.

Once he closed his eyes, his consciousness would be pulled into another world by the light, and he would experience a completely different life as Colin Luper.

Colin did not doubt whether this so-called other world would be just a slightly special dream.

However, with his continuous attempts, it was finally confirmed.

All this is not just a dream he imagined, but a real world that actually exists.

"Who would have thought that even time travel has buy one get one free these days."

Colin complained more than once in his heart.

Frequently shuttling between the two worlds every day and night, even Colin, as a time traveler, gradually became confused.

So, in order to accurately distinguish the two worlds.

He called the world in front of him the positive world, a normal world without superheroes.

And the other world where superheroes exist but is completely different from his memory is called the anti-world.

Of course, this so-called positive and negative is just a definition given by Colin's subjective consciousness, and its purpose is simply to facilitate his own memory.

The dull pain from the chest brought Colin's thoughts back to reality.

He looked down and saw that the gunshot that was originally fatal turned into a slight bleeding wound on his chest. If it weren't for the pain caused by occasional movement, who would have thought that Colin had just experienced a shooting incident a few minutes ago.

"I just don't know what it will be like when I go back?"

He took out the bandage from the room with ease and simply treated the injured part.

Colin stood in front of the cupboard and skillfully tied his tie. Then he picked out a dark gray coat and put it on. He moved his arms in front of himself in the mirror to make sure that the bandage on the wound would not affect his normal movement. Then he picked up the bowler hat on the desk and put it on.

Rubbing his cold palms, Colin came to the door, stopped, hesitated for a moment, turned back to the desk, opened the drawer, took out an old-fashioned revolver from it and put it in his coat pocket.

Considering that he had just experienced a dangerous shooting incident not long ago, Colin felt it necessary to prepare some security before going out.

Even if the place where the incident happened was not the world in front of him.

But no one could guarantee that it was not, after all...

Suppressing the thoughts that emerged in his mind, Colin stood in front of the door and took a deep breath, stretched out his hand to press the bowler hat on his head, opened the door, and stepped out.

What came into view was the familiar and unfamiliar metropolis-New York.

Or New York in 1931.

…

New York in November, the wind is howling.

The shadow of the Great Depression has not yet dissipated. Walking on the road in the cold wind, you can see hurried pedestrians and homeless people with numb expressions everywhere. It is hard to imagine that just a few years ago, most of these homeless people still lived a glamorous life. Many of them were farmers, engineers, school principals and even bank presidents.

However, under the impact of the Great Depression, everything turned into nothing.

Thousands of Americans watched their life savings disappear in a few days.

According to the latest estimate of Fortune magazine in September, more than 34 million adult men, women and children were unemployed in the United States during the Great Depression (child labor was legal in this era), accounting for about 28% of the total population.

And it is a conservative estimate because it does not include 11 million rural farmers.

The unemployment of workers also affected the unemployment of farmers. In the end, neither side could afford the products of the other side.

It was as if they were caught in a vicious cycle.

The hard work of farmers was exchanged for seriously unequal rewards. A cartload of oats could not buy a pair of low-quality shoes; wheat planting lost $1.5 per acre; using corn as fuel was more cost-effective than selling it to buy coal; farmers could not make back the money they earned from feeding livestock, so they would rather throw them away than sell them; pouring milk into the Mississippi River.

Tens of thousands of people were driven out of their homes and lost their homes. In the same year, a large number of people died of famine and malnutrition during the Great Depression.

And all of this was just the most common scene during the Great Depression.

…

In the past, Colin's understanding of the Great Depression.

Most of it came from the records of various books and photos. It was difficult to resonate with it through a few black-and-white photos or simple texts.

Now that he was personally experiencing all of this, he truly understood the difficulties of the people in this era, especially those living during the Great Depression. Under the huge wave of unemployment, a stable job became a luxury. Many people worked hard all day and earned wages that were not even enough to buy a piece of bread.

Even such jobs often require enough luck to find, and they are not available every day.

Walking down the street, Colin has seen beggars more than once.

There are also ragged children, who look particularly thin due to long-term malnutrition. These children huddle beside their mothers, relying on their mothers' equally thin bodies to block the biting cold wind coming from all directions. The mother herself raised one hand to her mouth and looked into the distance, with sorrow in her eyes, a kind of lifeless and numbness without hope.

Seeing this scene, Colin's steps slowed down a bit.

He wanted to do something, but he felt powerless.

Because similar experiences of women were everywhere during the Great Depression.

This is not a single problem, but a social event that swept across the United States and even the entire West.

It was even later considered to be the most persistent, profound, and serious cyclical economic crisis in the history of capitalist economy.

Take a deep breath and withdraw your eyes from the ragged woman.

Colin turned and walked quickly out of the block, passing through a deserted street of shops, and finally stopped in front of an old house on the corner.

"The Courier Newspaper"

Looking up at the sign in front of the house, Colin straightened his hat and coughed.

Then he reached out and pushed open the door of the newspaper office.