(illustration credit 1.1)
Back to the cover: Look at the black-haired man dressed in a tight-fitting blue and red outfit with a cape trailing behind him as he moves left to right across the drawing’s equator line. The bright shield design on his chest contained an S (gules on a field or, as they say down at the heraldry society). The man is captured in motion, poised on the toes of his left foot, almost taking flight as he weightlessly hefts an olive green car above his head. Using both hands, he hammers the vehicle to fragments against a conveniently placed rocky outcrop in what appears to be a desert landscape. In the bottom left corner, a man with a blue business suit runs off the frame, clutching his head like Edvard Munch’s Screamer, his face a cartoon of gibbering existential terror, like a man driven to the city limits of sanity by what he has just witnessed. Above his head, another man, wearing a conservative brown two-piece, can be seen racing north to the first man’s west. A third, equally terrified, character crouches on his hands and knees, jacketless, gaping at the feet of the superhuman vandal. His abject posture displays his whimpering submission to the ultimate alpha male. There is no fourth man: His place in the lower right corner is taken by a bouncing whitewall tire torn loose from its axle. Like the bug-eyed bad guys, it too is trying its best to get away from the destructive muscleman.
In any other hands but Superman’s, the green roadster on that inaugural cover would boast proudly of America’s technological superiority and the wonders of mass manufacturing. Imagine the oozing ad copy: “luxurious whitewall tire trim makes it seem like you’re driving on whipped cream,” and black-and-white newsreel cars in mind-boggling procession, rolling off the automated belts at Ford. But this was August 1938. Production lines were making laborers redundant across the entire developed world while Charlie Chaplin’s poignant film masterpiece Modern Times articulated in pantomime the silent cry of the little fellow, the authentic man, not to be forgotten above the relentless din of the factory floor.
Superman made his position plain: He was a hero of the people. The original Superman was a bold humanist response to Depression-era fears of runaway scientific advance and soulless industrialism. We would see this early incarnation wrestling giant trains to a standstill, overturning tanks, or bench-pressing construction cranes. Superman rewrote folk hero John Henry’s brave, futile battle with the steam hammer to have a happy ending. He made explicit the fantasies of power and agency that kept the little fellow trudging along toward another sunset fade-out. He was Charlie’s tramp character, with the same burning hatred of injustice and bullies, but instead of guile and charm, Superman had the strength of fifty men, and nothing could hurt him. If the dystopian nightmare visions of the age foresaw a dehumanized, mechanized world, Superman offered another possibility: an image of a fiercely human tomorrow that delivered the spectacle of triumphant individualism exercising its sovereignty over the implacable forces of industrial oppression. It’s no surprise that he was a big hit with the oppressed. He was as resolutely lowbrow, as pro-poor, as any savior born in a pigsty.
Returning to the cover again, notice how the composition is based around a barely hidden X shape, which gives the drawing its solid framework and graphic appeal. This subliminal X suggests the intriguing unknown, and that’s exactly what Superman was when Action Comics no. 1 was published: the caped enigma at the eye of a Pop Art storm. He stands at the center of the compass, master of the four elements and the cardinal directions. In Haitian voodoo, the crossroads is the gateway of the loa (or spirit) Legba, another manifestation of the “god” known variously as Mercury, Thoth, Ganesh, Odin, or Ogma. Like these others, Legba is a gatekeeper and guards the boundary where the human and divine worlds make contact. It makes perfect sense for Superman to inhabit the same nexus.
As a compositional crossbar, the X composition allowed Shuster to set a number of elements in a spinning motion that highlighted his central figure. There are moving people with expressions on their faces, car parts, and very bright colors, but layered over the firm brace of the X, they form a second, spiral arrangement that drags our eye up and around on a perceptual Ferris wheel, eliciting frantic questions as it compels our minds to motion:
Why is this running man so scared?
What’s this car doing up here?
Why is it being smashed against a rock?
What is the man on his knees looking at?
Knowing what we do of Superman today, we can assume that the fleeing, frightened men are gangsters of some kind. Readers in 1938 simply had no idea what was going on. Undoubtedly, action would be involved, but the first glimpse of Superman was deliberately ambiguous. The men we’ve taken for granted as fleeing gangsters could as easily be ordinary passersby running from a grimacing power thug in some kind of Russian ballet dancer kit. There’s no stolen loot spilling from swag bags, no blue five o’clock shadows, cheap suits, or even weapons to identify the fleeing men as anything other than innocent onlookers. Based on first appearances alone, this gaudy muscleman could be friend or foe, and the only way to answer a multitude of questions is to read on.
But there’s a further innovation to notice, another clever trick to lure us inside. The cover image is a snapshot from the climax of a story we’ve yet to see. By the time the world catches up to Superman, he’s concluding an adventure we’ve already missed! Only by reading the story inside can we put the image in context.
That first, untitled Superman adventure opened explosively on a freeze-frame of frantic action. Siegel dumped conventional story setups and cut literally to the chase in a bravura first panel that rearranged the conventional action-story arc in a startling way. The caption box read, “A TIRELESS FIGURE RACES THRU THE NIGHT. SECONDS COUNT … DELAY MEANS FORFEIT FOR AN INNOCENT LIFE,” to accompany a Joe Shuster image of Superman leaping through the air with a tied and gagged blond woman under his arm. The image is as confident, muscular, and redolent of threat as Superman himself.
By the second panel, we’ve reached “the Governor’s estate,” and Superman is already sprinting across the lawn, calling back over his shoulder to the bondaged blonde in the foreground, whom he’s dumped by a tree. “MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE! I HAVEN’T TIME TO ATTEND TO IT.” We don’t know who this girl is, although Superman’s gruff demeanor implies that she must be a bad egg—unless, as the cover is willing to imply, the star of the strip is the villain.
Already we are compelled through the narrative at Superman’s speed and required to focus on the most significant, most intense elements of every scene as if with supersenses. The only solution is to be swept up in the high-velocity slipstream of his streaming red cape, one breathless step behind him.
When the governor’s dressing-gowned butler refused to open the door to the well-built stranger in the skintight suit, Superman smashed it down, sprinted up the stairs with the butler held screaming above his head, then tore a locked steel door off its hinges to reach the terrified (and clearly security-conscious) official within. The butler, in the meantime, had recovered his wits enough to seize a pistol. “PUT THAT TOY AWAY,” Superman warned, advancing with a clenched fist. The butler fired, only to discover the muscular hero’s immunity to bullets, which bounced harmlessly off his brawny, monogrammed chest.
This virtuoso kinetic overture alone would be worth ten cents from the pocket of any fantasy-starved reader of the Depression. But Siegel and Shuster were not yet done. They still had a masterstroke to play. Just when we think we have this incredible Superman concept figured out, after witnessing the Man of Steel’s prodigious strength and determination, we are treated to Clark Kent—the man behind the S—a man with a job, a boss, and girl trouble. Clark the nerd, the nebbish, the bespectacled, mild-mannered shadow self of the confident Man of Steel. The boys had struck a primal mother lode.
Hercules was always Hercules. Agamemnon and Perseus were heroes from the moment they leapt out of bed in the morning until the end of a long battle-crazed day, but Superman was secretly someone else. Clark was the soul, the t
ranscendent element in the Superman equation. Clark Kent is what made him endure. In Clark, Siegel had created the ultimate reader identification figure: misunderstood, put-upon, denied respect in spite of his obvious talents as a newspaperman at Metropolis’s Daily Planet. As both Siegel and Shuster had learned, to their cost, some girls preferred bounding heroic warriors to skinny men who wrote or drew pretty pictures. But Clark Kent was more than the ultimate nerd fantasy; everyone could identify with him. We’ve all felt clumsy and misunderstood, once or twice, or more often, in our lives. Just as everyone suspects the existence of an inner Superman—an angelic, perfect self who personifies only our best moods and deeds—there is something of Clark in all of us.
Page 3 introduced Daily Star reporter Kent on his way to work, where a phone tip sent him in pursuit of an alleged wife beater, but it was Superman who arrived on the scene. He found the bully threatening his victim with a belt looped in his meaty fist. He smacked the brute against the wall, cracking the plaster, and yelled, “YOU’RE NOT FIGHTING A WOMAN NOW!” whereupon the bully fainted, allowing Superman to switch back to his Kent identity in time for the police to arrive.
There was still one more foundation stone to lay in the Superman template. Page 5 now, and the pivotal player in an absorbing ménage à trois that would fascinate readers for decades arrived in an oddly understated introductory panel. Back at the office, Kent introduced us to cool, dismissive Lois Lane, his rival on the news beat, with the words “W-WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A—ER—DATE TONIGHT, LOIS?” Her first words defined her for the ages: “I SUPPOSE I’LL GIVE YOU A BREAK … FOR A CHANGE.” On the date, Kent managed half a lopsided dance, but before long he and Lois were menaced by Butch Matson, a gorilla-like mobster. Clark quivered and quavered, but Lois, without hesitation, slapped Matson a hard one, and warned him to back off. As her taxi pulled away, she turned her withering scorn on the meek, undeserving Kent, there on the sidewalk. “YOU ASKED ME EARLIER IN THE EVENING WHY I AVOID YOU. I’LL TELL YOU WHY NOW: YOU’RE A SPINELESS, UNBEARABLE COWARD.”
Considering that Clark was an ace crime reporter for a respected newspaper and with a good apartment in the city, it was hard to believe Lois would hold him in such low regard, but the stories made it hard to disagree with her as Kent fabricated excuse after elaborate excuse to conceal his true identity. Clark complained of nausea or headaches every time his sensitive ears picked up a police alert and Superman was needed. As a justification for this subterfuge, he made constant dark references to underworld enemies who would be able to strike at him through his loved ones if they knew who he was. He had created a total disguise, a persona so much the reverse of his true Superman self, it would throw off any snoop and allow him a taste of normal life.
By the time the first Superman story concluded, thirteen pages after its breathtaking opening scene, our hero had apprehended no fewer than five lawbreakers and taken a moment to root out corruption in the US Senate. Every new reveal made both the individual story and the overall concept seem even more exciting. It gave the medium a character innovation to call its own. He gave the world the first superhero. Thirteen pages—unlucky for the enemies of the oppressed.
The superhero concept caught on immediately with the public. The Superman Fan Club soon had hundreds of thousands of members, like some benign Hitlerjugend or sci-fi Scout movement. By 1941, he was the star of Action Comics; had his own Superman title; was in World’s Finest Comics; and was popping in and out of All Star Comics, another series. At the same time, he was making the mighty leap to other media, which helped to spread his fame and provided what would become a vital life for him beyond the comic page. He embedded Superman in the consciousness of the whole country—the whole world: he was on the radio, syndicated across the funny pages of every major US newspaper, and selling stamps, greetings cards, coloring books, bubble gum, board games, and war bonds.
Early comic books used a four-color printing process in which alchemic, elemental red, yellow, blue, and black were combined to create a processed spectrum. Superman, of course, was the first character to take full advantage of the new technology, and these fundamental building blocks of the comic-book universe gave superhero comics a luminous, spectral radiance that had never been seen before in a democratic, popular form. For readers accustomed to the black-and-white images of cinema, newspaper photographs, and pulp illustrations, the comics must have seemed hallucinatory, as potent as dreams. That Siegel and his fellows borrowed an earnest sheen of naturalism from movies and newsreel footage made the candid surrealism of the superhero books even more alluring. They were folk art for the restless new century, a genuine American magic realism forty years before that term set literary circles alight.
The innovative rapid-editing style of Siegel and Shuster stories brought new speed and life to the form. It meant that the space between a country mansion and a city block could disappear into the white gutter between panels. A journey of miles, sliced to nothing by Superman’s leap. To follow the hero across the frames was to experience a dislocation in time that suggested both superhuman perception and impossible velocity. Unlike the composed and formal newspaper strips, which were comics’ only rival as imaginative color entertainment, the early superhero comics had a driving left-to-right forward momentum, the work of young pioneers defining the form. It was a kind of animation but slowed down into a sequence of freeze-frames that required the reader to fill in the gaps between pictures.
Shuster’s artwork was basic. Those sturdy black-and-white ink lines of the early comics were there to ensure that nothing was lost in the crude reproduction process. Any kind of fine detail, shading, and nuance would simply vanish in the finished printed edition. Drawing was also streamlined to a shorthand in order to meet punishing delivery dates.
But it’s still possible to find depths in Shuster’s drawing. I can’t help but see in these handmade fantasies the poignant products of young minds dreaming better tomorrows. The depth of engaged meditation, the focus that goes into writing and drawing even the crudest of the comics, emerges through the least-assured line. The pages are the result of human hours, and the glory and confusion of what it means to be here now—on a coffee and pills jag at four in the morning with a story to hand in by lunchtime—shines from between the lines of the lowliest eight-pager.
After all those years, the frustrated false starts and countless rejections, Siegel and Shuster had struck gold. Naturally, the obvious thing to do would be to sell all the rights to National Comics (later to become DC) for the sum of $130. Yes. Stop for a moment and consider that sum in light of the mega-fortune that Superman has made for his corporate masters since then.
If you listen to the right voices, you’ll hear and believe what I heard and believed growing up in this business, and it won’t be long before a dark and evil fairy tale unfolds: the grim cautionary fable of two innocent seventeen-year-old boys seduced by the forked tongues of cartoon fat-cat capitalists and top-hatted bloodsuckers. In this Hollywood tragedy, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are depicted as doe-eyed ingénues in a world of razor-toothed predators.
The truth, as ever, is less dramatic. The deal was done in 1938, before Superman boomed. Siegel and Shuster were both twenty-three when they sold the copyright to Superman. They had worked together for several years in the cutthroat world of pulp periodical publishing, and, like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers, they were creating a product to sell. Superman was a foot in the door, a potential break that might put them in demand as big-time pop content providers. Superman was a sacrifice to the gods of commercial success. If my own understanding of the creative mind carries any weight, I’d suspect that both Siegel and Shuster imagined they’d create other, better characters.
But by 1946, they realized how much money their creation was raking in. They sued National, unsuccessfully, and then tried to repeat Superman’s success with the unendearing, short-lived Funnyman (a crime-fighting clown). Siegel was also responsible for the gruesomely vindictive avenging supergh
ost the Spectre and cyborg hero Robotman. He would even write that quintessential British superhero strip The Spider, but the relative obscurity of those perfectly well-conceived characters tells its own story. Jerry Siegel failed to create any more features with the primal impact of Superman, but he and Joe Shuster had done something spectacular—established the rules and foundations upon which new universes could be built.
(In 1975, in the face of mounting bad publicity, Warner Bros. [DC’s parent company] finally awarded Siegel and Shuster each a $20,000 per year compensation along with an assured creator credit on every subsequent Superman comic, TV show, movie, or game. I’m sure it helped, but as an example of how far the business has come, today a prolific and popular comics writer could make the same amount in a week. Legal battles between the Siegel estate and DC over the ownership of Superman continue to this day.)
And of course, once they had sold the rights and Superman started to thrive in other media, Siegel and Shuster were no longer sole arbiters of their brainchild’s destiny. The radio writers had added new essential elements to the lore, such as the killer space mineral kryptonite. On the comics side a team of studio assistants helped keep the furnace fed. Superman needed the power of ten men, and more, to supply the demand for his incredible feats. Set free of his creators, he was to change radically and constantly over the next seven decades, to keep up with—or, in some cases predict—seismic shifts in fashion, politics, and audience demographics. Superman now had a metamorphic, elastic quality that would allow him to survive. Forty years later, with a big-budget Superman movie on the way in 1978, Siegel was employed as a clerk and Shuster was partially blind in a California nursing home. As for Superman, he hadn’t aged a single day. Whatever those boys made, it was made to last: stronger, faster, fitter, and more durable than any human being.
Supergods Page 2