by Tom De Haven
Even Saturday Night Live did a skit about it.
I feel like a big dope admitting this, but I was among those throngs of credulous Americans who lined up outside comic book shops on Wednesday afternoon, November 18, 1992, to buy a copy of the “death issue.” Which you could get either plain or deluxe, the deluxe edition sealed inside a black polybag stamped with a bleeding S. A black armband and the Daily Planet’s obituary were thoughtfully enclosed. What was I doing standing in a cold drizzle at a dying suburban strip mall, me and about fifty other guys — guys, all guys—ranging in age from fifteen to seventy, the majority of us obviously not regular comic book readers? (How do I know that? Because almost everyone looked around with amazed expressions — a whole store that sells nothing but comic books? Wow.) Willingly I’d become part of a minor but notable national moment.
Despite a lifelong passion-bordering-on-mania for cartooning, both the art and the profession, by the 1990s I’d lost interest in (and patience with) mainstream comic books, almost exclusively by then grim and violent superhero titles published by DC or Marvel or Dark Horse or Image. Superhero comics, the DC line in particular, had turned radically doomy in the wake of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, both published in 1986-87, and I didn’t like it much. The stuff managed to be both pitch-dark and garish. I disliked the glossy paper and the computer coloring, the digital lettering, the overdrawn and overdialogued panels overpopulated by absurdly yeasted physiques, and I especially disliked the self-important, dizzily convoluted continuities. The ambience was paramilitary, and the prevailing level of mental health among the so-called superheroes a fair equivalent of the mental health level of the supervillains, which was pathological.
I still was reading comics, still sought them out; I just had no use for the superhero stuff. And that included Superman. Still. Still, I’d felt … obliged—I’d felt obliged to see how it all turned out, after more than fifty years and tens of thousands of stories. It seemed a matter of respect.
Goofy, I know. I know it.
But I wasn’t the only one who felt that way and stood in line. On average, in 1992 individual Superman comic books (Action, The Adventures of Superman, Superman: The Man of Steel, and plain old Superman) sold roughly a hundred thousand copies apiece each month. Superman number 75 sold more than six million.
I bought just one copy (the regular version, not the deluxe), but a lot of people bought multiple copies, entire cartons of them, anticipating that the issue would accrue in value. Of course it never did. I’m guessing, and probably on the low side, but when, say, three million out of the six million copies sold were carefully preserved in archival bags with acid-free cardboard backing boards, how could it ever be worth anything? (Supply and demand? Remember supply and demand?)
Even so, it was a time when publishers partly created and then vigorously exploited a singular moment of capitalist lunacy, when new comic books, especially first and “pivotal” issues (a major character’s death, a marriage, a costume change) were considered a perfectly sound investment.
If first issues sold colossally, then maybe a final one might sell phenomenally. And if the death of a major series character could generate media attention (the demise of Batman’s second Robin in 1988 comes to mind), imagine the attention if the geez-they-really-did-it demise were that of the world’s most famous superhero. The Doomsday story line had all the earmarks of something planned carefully for maximum profit, a cynical all-points bulletin to fans and speculators alike: get out your wallets, boys.
In fact, it was an impromptu decision, virtually last-minute. Superman never was meant to stay dead, and his death happened at all only because an intended comic book “story arc” that culminated in the wedding of Lois Lane and Clark Kent (they’d become engaged in 1990, Superman number 50) all of a sudden had to be postponed, indefinitely.2
Turns out, it wasn’t Doomsday that killed Superman back in 1992; it was a television show then in production but not yet aired called Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Pitched as Moonlighting in Metropolis, the ABC series, to star Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane and Dean Cain as Clark Kent, would focus on romance, not adventure, and take Lois and Clark from competitive colleagues at the Daily Planet, to flirtatious rivals, to (assuming the ratings held) newlyweds. Until the TV people gave the go sign, the team of fifteen or sixteen writers and artists responsible for planning and getting out a new Superman comic book every week had to postpone the marriage.
Which left a huge gap in the comics’ plot line that needed plug ging. When some wise guy in the group facetiously suggested, “Let’s kill him,” heads snapped up, eyes narrowed, and from that point on it just snowballed. A gimmick, sure—but one intended to last for only about six months. Then Superman would return from the dead.
Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher in the ABC television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, 1993-97 (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)
It was just one of those things, a fluke, that Superman’s death drew so much attention—”I can’t believe that people went for it as hard as they did,” said Mike Carlin, the Superman line’s editor in chief, sounding like Orson Welles after War of the Worlds—but once the attention became a full-blown event, the creative team exploited it. “All we could do was try to keep up with it, and that’s what we did.” There were weeks of funeral preparations, dramatized in other comic books in the DC “universe,” then eulogies and expressions of disbelief by a humbled superherodom-at-large. Then burial in a crypt in Metropolis’s version of Central Park.
“We did eight issues of Superman’s funeral, where he was literally a dead body,” said Carlin, “and we thought that was the most daring part of the whole plan. There was a strong analogy for how we felt, which was that Superman was being taken for granted. We wanted to remind people that some of the values that Superman stands for are still important” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 168).
Between the real-world election of Bill Clinton and the massive explosion that rocked the foundation of the World Trade Center, Superman died and was buried. Then, sometime between that first terrorist attack on the Trade Center and the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, his body disappeared from his casket. (That revelation was the “big event” of the five-hundredth issue of The Adventures of Superman.) Finally in October 1993 (the same month Lois and Clark premiered on television), the Man of Steel returned (thanks to some nifty Kryptonian technology warehoused at the Fortress of Solitude), sporting long rock-star hair but otherwise none the worse (or wiser) for temporarily shuffling off this mortal coil.
3
The morning after I’d read the Death of Superman collection in Maine, I Googled for the rumors, reactions, and public phenomenon originally surrounding it. Op-ed pieces and editorials, even a column by Frank Rich in the New York Times, drew the same conclusion: that Superman had become obsolete in both the gloomy, relativist precincts of modern comic books and the caustic, sneering “post-heroic” world of the expiring twentieth century. Like vinyl records, rotary phones, and electric typewriters, he was yesterday, the day before yesterday, and no longer needed. May he rest in peace.
There was anger, cynicism, nostalgia, grief, satisfaction, even snarkiness, and everybody, it seemed, viewed Superman’s death as a metaphor for … something. It meant the end of wholesomeness, the end (yet again!) of our innocence. It exemplified corporate arrogance and self-regard, the primacy of profit. It marked the happy disappearance of still another outdated symbol of the white male status quo. It symbolized the annihilation (and either it was a crying shame, or about time) of the national platitude that Americans, like Superman, do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because of any expectation of reward. It said something, something or other, about the decline of America the superpower.3
Apparently Superman still mattered in 1992. Significantly. Even though he mattered most for not mattering.
But now here it
was 2006 and the Man of Steel was still around, still in narratives, still marketed; a new movie, a hit TV series, the comic books. Web sites, discussion boards, pop songs, gimme caps, postage stamps, key chains, cuff links, roller coasters, T-shirts. (Is there one dresser drawer in one bedroom in all of the United States of America that doesn’t contain at least one Superman T-shirt?) It was, and remains, impressive how much Superman iconography, how much Superman stuff, we can register every day either directly or peripherally.
After I’d come home from Maine and after Superman Returns ended its theatrical run, I gradually realized that, without intending to, I’d started keeping track of Superman, of Superman’s presence in the world.
Sufjan Stevens’s “Metropolis” playing on a friend’s docked iPod got me started counting Superman songs. By Three Doors Down, Laurie Anderson, the Spin Doctors, Bon Jovi, the Kinks, Eric Clapton, B. B. King, R.E.M., Crash Test Dummies, Alanis Morissette, Barbra Streisand. There are (I know because I’ve since checked) nearly four hundred pop songs about, or mentioning, Superman … by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Donovan, Don McLean, Jim Croce, Five for Fighting, Iggy Pop …
At a mall kiosk one afternoon I stopped to buy a battery and there was a yard-wide black velvet card displaying a variety of Superman watches, junky to jeweled, in the showcase.
On a rainy morning I gratefully took a lift from a guy I know— and he had Superman floor mats in his Audi!
At the park on a beautiful autumn Sunday, a wrinkled old Vietnamese man was hawking two-foot-tall Superman balloons; at the State Fair of Virginia, more than half of the game booths had prize shelves crammed with soft Superman dolls.
In the refrigerator case at the back of a convenience store, close to the beer and malt liquor, I came upon Superman Super Power Adult Energy Supplement in sixteen-ounce silver cans with stylish black graphics. (Yes, I bought one, and yes, it was horrible.)
At Hallmark: Superman gift bags, birthday cards, anniversary cards, graduation cards. And a “collectible” Superman Christmas tree ornament. Two. Three. Three different Christmas tree ornaments.
At Barnes and Noble: a Superman phonics book, a dozen paperbacks reprinting recent comic book stories, a half-dozen Smallville novels, a hardbound collection of 1940s-era Superman newspaper strips.
At an independent bookstore: a 2002 collection of poems by Bryan D. Dietrich about Superman, Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor called Krypton Nights. Winner of the 2001 Paris Review Prize. (“Home from a hard day’s Armageddon / slipping out of spandex and into spectacles.”)
Standing on a ladder power-washing my neighbor’s house is a long-haired young guy with droopy jeans, and his boxer shorts are patterned with the Superman crest.
My grown daughter, home from California for the Christmas holidays, is watching a Seinfeld rerun—and there’s that Superman magnet on Jerry’s refrigerator.
I’m reading in the New York Times about a young choreographer who has created a dance for Mikhail Baryshnikov. It’s called “Leap to Tall,” because, she explains, Baryshnikov is “‘a Superman’” to her, and like Superman, he leaps “‘to tall buildings.’” Incredibly, she has misquoted the famous mantra (“able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”), but my point is, she made the reference (quoted in Sulcas, “Reflections”).
A graduate student finally returns a stack of David Mamet paperbacks he borrowed from me more than a year ago; idly I flip open one of the books—to an essay I’d never noticed before entitled “Kryptonite: A Psychological Appreciation.” (“I enjoyed the Superman comics as a boy. I enjoyed their very dullness and predictability. The story never varied, and, even as a child, I remembered thinking, ‘What a dull fantasy.’ But I enjoyed them” [Some Freaks, 176].)
Driving past a stock car raceway, I notice an old blue Pontiac junker idling outside the gates and chuffing greasy exhaust; “Man of Steel” is sprayed across both passenger-side doors in red and yellow paint.
On the eleven o’clock news a sullen and heavily armed child-soldier somewhere in Africa is wearing a ball cap embroidered with the Superman patch.
All right, I’ll stop.
But it just went on like that. Every day, something Superman hit me in the face. But is Superman’s ubiquity just that—ubiq-uity? Saturation marketing? Or is there more to it? You wear a Superman T-shirt because … ? A Superman wristwatch because … ? A Superman belt buckle? Associating ourselves, accessorizing ourselves, with Superman and Superman imagery does what for us, to us, exactly? Does it have any meaning? It must, I decided. We use him as a metaphor, as shorthand, as self-projection—boasting, seriously or ironically, I’m Damn Good. I don’t know how many small Superman S-logos I’ve seen tattooed on people’s shoulders, men and women. One day on the beach I counted four.
That autumn, already several years ago now, I found myself recalling how I’d answered all of those does-he-still-matter questions back in May and June — and decided, corny or not, that I’d said exactly what I meant. As dispirited as I felt in 2006 about our politics and culture, and as deeply pessimistic, I could not dismiss—could not diss—Superman. He wasn’t to blame! Nor could I use my own cranky bad faith, my own small contribution to the national malaise, to deny something I felt to be true: Superman does matter. Even in the twenty-first century. He still mattered to me—why else would I have jumped at the chance to write a novel about him when the special projects editor at DC Comics floated the idea? I can’t imagine being even slightly tempted by a comparable offer to write about any other famous fictional character. But Superman, Superman I could not turn down. Because he resonated. He still mattered.
But whenever I mentioned Superman, or somebody mentioned Superman to me in the context of either my novel or Bryan Singer’s movie, what I’d usually hear was this: “I never was that big on Superman. I was never a Superman guy.”
No? Well, I was, and I had the Superman posters, statues and toys, mugs, banks, and cookie jars in my home and university offices to prove it. For me it’s always been Superman. I’ve always been a Superman Guy.
I put away my unfinished novel, again, to work on this essay. It seemed logical to begin with the first comic books and from there track the character and his gathering significance over time. But despite being a carrier of the completist gene, the DNA responsible for such loony behavior as collecting every Frank Sinatra recording, or tracking down first editions by John O’Hara (and not just the fiction, mind you, but the plays and the essays and the dyspeptic newspaper columns), I couldn’t read every Superman comic book and newspaper strip, watch every Superman cartoon and TV program, or listen to every Superman radio broadcast—even though, incredibly, almost all of it is commercially available. Just sampling the stuff consumed the better part of two years. There’s so much! I think it’s safe to say that no other fictional character in the world has been portrayed—drawn, acted, chronicled, parodied, and bootlegged—as often, or in as many media and venues, as Superman. Think about it.
Thanks to the work of comics historians and the recollections and anecdotes of comic book professionals, over the course of those two years I became more, much more, familiar with, and interested in, the story of Superman as a commodity. The commercial (trademarked, copyrighted, licensed) exploitation of Superman, and the plain old exploitation (Sign here. And here.) of his two hapless creators, is a story at least as compelling and pertinent, and American, as the story of how and why the character achieved and maintained special cultural significance. Superman the icon and Superman the commodity. He matters because he is both of those things. A large-hearted fictional character. And a property worth billions. Our hero.
5
The credit appears now whenever Superman’s name, or the character of Superman, is used in dramatic or narrative media, comic books to movies to PlayStation games: “Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.” But from 1948 through 1975, it was absent— banished—from everything Superman-related, initially struck after Siegel and Shuster sued unsuccessfully in the state of N
ew York to get back ownership of their famous creation. Superman, it was the court’s opinion, belonged to the company that purchased all rights to him for $130. A deal’s a deal, fellas. Following that, Siegel and Shuster—as punishment for their ingratitude and presumption—were fired by National (today’s DC) Comics, and their byline was disappeared. Who created Superman? Nobody.
For $130 the company secured ownership of Superman in perpetuity, but what it actually bought sometime in February of 1938 was thirteen pages of story and cartoon art for a planned new monthly periodical to be called Action Comics.
Before Action number 1, before Superman arrived on Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, comic books were negligible things in the Darwinian world of New York publishing and national magazine distribution. By 1933, 7½-by-10-inch pamphlets featuring recycled newspaper comic strips were published regularly by Eastern Color Printing Company, but as promotional premiums given away to customers by retailers and manufacturers—Procter and Gamble, Kinney Shoes, Canada Dry, Gulf Oil, Wheatena. These thirty-two-page freebies proved so popular, writes M. Thomas Inge in Comics as Culture, that M. C. (Max) Gaines, a salesman at Eastern Color, “believed that young readers might pay at least ten cents for such books, just as they purchased the ‘Big Little Books’ which also traded on popular comic strip characters. Early in 1934, Eastern Color printed 35,000 copies of Famous Funnies, Series 1. … They sold out immediately in America’s chain stores, so in May the first monthly comic magazine under the same title began” (140).