Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

  Famous Funnies and its inevitable imitators—Popular Comics, Tip Top Comics, King Comics—were chunky stapled sixty-four-page pamphlets with glossy covers that reprinted months-old Sunday color comics like “Mutt and Jeff” and “Dick Tracy.” They sold well enough—Eastern Color lost four thousand dollars on the first issue but was netting thirty thousand per by the twelfth—that several enterprising publishers risked producing “original material” comic books full of unimaginative “Dick Tracy” and “Mutt and Jeff” knockoffs. Seemed you could make a little bit of money, providing you kept your costs low. Which was done — although it meant crappy art produced on the fly by boozehound cartoonists, third-rate illustrators, or untrained and inexperienced young men, still teenagers in many cases, willing to work cheap.

  “The early comic book originals were, for the most part, awful,” wrote Ted White in his essay “The Spawn of M. C. Gaines.” “It must also be said that comic book publishers were, all in all, a thieving, grasping lot. Not to dwell too long upon the point, they were crooks. In many instances they were men with a good deal of money, recently earned during Prohibition, who were seeking legitimate businesses into which they might safely move. Comics … seemed like a good bet” (21).

  Working as an editor at the McClure features syndicate in 1937 was a nineteen-year-old whiz kid named Sheldon Mayer, enthusiastic, funny, and crazy about the comics. He was also a delightfully deft and fluid cartoonist, who contributed humor strips he both wrote and drew to some of the earliest comic books. Mayer’s boss was Max Gaines, who had moved to McClure after leaving Eastern Color.

  One day, Mayer spotted an unsolicited submission titled “Superman” in the slush pile. At that point Siegel and Shuster were still hoping to sell their creation (by then nearly four years old) as a syndicated comic strip. It was amateurish and nutty— and Mayer loved what he saw. There was an exuberance about “Superman” that made competence seem beside the point, and he urged Max Gaines to have a look. But like virtually every other syndicate editor in the country by then, Gaines could not imagine such a thing catching on with newspaper readers, it was just too … juvenile. For a syndicate to take a chance on a new strip, its appeal needed to cross, or show potential to cross, generations and amuse the “whole family.” Nonetheless, he had to admit the concept was strong.

  “By this time, Gaines was printing [National’s] comic books on McClure presses,” and was aware that a new title called Action Comics had been scheduled, writes R. C. Harvey in The Art of the Comic Book. “If the syndicate didn’t want the [Superman] strip, he did: if he could persuade [National] to use it in the new comic book, printing that book would keep the presses rolling” (18). In most versions of the “discovery” story, Gaines sent Mayer to show the strip to Vincent Sullivan, Action’s editor.

  Sullivan decided that it was different enough to warrant a try-out, and on the tenth of January 1938, he typed a brief letter to Siegel and Shuster, who were not unknown to him. For the past couple of years they’d been contributing other, more conventional strips to National—swashbucklers and hardboiled detective stuff, for the most part. “I have on hand several features … in connection with the new magazine that is still in the embryonic stage,” Sullivan wrote. “The one … I like best and the one that seems to fit in the proposed schedule is that ‘Superman.’ From the drawing I can readily see that Joe Shuster was the person who handled the pen-and-ink end of the job.” I imagine Shuster was tickled by that. Identified by his style! “With all the work Joe is doing now, would it be possible for him to still turn out thirteen pages of this new feature?” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 31). Would it be possible? Come, now.

  6

  Although Action Comics number 1 is dated June 1938, given the way that periodicals, the cheapest ones at least, were distributed back then, it probably appeared on sidewalk newsstands and in drugstore spinner racks sometime around late April, early May.

  On the cover Superman (who is not identified there as Superman) has the build of an acrobat, not a Frigidaire—the bulk would come later. Joe Shuster draws him hoisting a green four-door turtle-back touring sedan—hoisting it high, tipping it down, smashing it against … what is that, a boulder? He’s demolishing the fender, the grille, and the front end. One of the hood panels has torn free, and a wheel, separated from its axle, bounces away. A conical headlamp pops into the air like an ejected cartridge. The sky behind the scene (or perhaps it’s supposed to be a dramatic burst, as on cereal boxes) is buttery yellow. The landscape is chocolate-brown, treeless, desolate. Where could this be, this undulating plain? Death Valley? Mars? And then you wonder: Where’s the road? If there’s a car, shouldn’t there also be a road? Is the absence deliberate? Subtraction with a purpose, simplification for dramatic effect? Or just lazy corner-cutting? The drawing does look a bit rushed—like something made in the wee hours at a kitchen table that wobbled despite an improvised shim, a job that had to be finished by morning, and was, although just barely.

  But all in all, an effective composition. Because once Shuster directs our attention to the figure of Superman, dead center, we look precisely where he wants us to, and see everything in a deftly predetermined narrative sequence. The diagonal that defines Superman, the single rising line, begins at his left boot heel. Our eyes follow the curve — calf, knee, thigh, torso, arm, clenched fist—to the top of the sedan, then look sharply down the roof to the hood and the crumpled fender. From there, our glance ricochets back across Superman to the panicky Munch-like figure in the lower left-hand corner, then bounces straight up. The diagonal created by the running man’s outstretched right arm and the flipped-up tail of his sport jacket sweeps our attention back across the picture plane (and across Superman too, bolstering his centrality: by now it’s the third time we’ve registered him) to the crawling man, whose curved back, the curved line of his back, redirects it over to the tire frozen in midair. Our eyes rest there for just a moment before our imaginations automatically complete the action: the tire drops to the ground. Whump.

  Not bad for a myopic twenty-three-year-old whose art training consisted of a couple of classes in high school and some drawing lessons that cost him ten cents each. Joe Shuster never was a great draftsman, or even a good one, but the artistry in cartooning rarely is conveyed through draftsmanship, and is almost never about it. He drew well enough to get the job done, to put across an idea—a vivid instant, a violent action—with minimal lines and scarcely a flourish. (“Slickness, thank God, was beyond his means,” Jules Feiffer once quipped [Great Comic Book Heroes, 20].) Shuster absorbed his influences, primarily pulp magazine illustrations and newspaper comic strips, then adapted them to his skill level and developed the baseline rubrics of superhero imagery, the core poses, postures, and gestural shorthand. That said, if comic books hadn’t come along, it’s a safe bet he would have ended up a frustrated wannabe, not a professional cartoonist.

  Action Comics number 1, spring 1938—the first appearance of Superman. Art by Joe Shuster (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)

  But comic books did come along.

  7

  Filled with hopeless cartooning printed in garish color usually out of register, those first original comic books are macabre things to look at today. The stuff (you hate to say it, but it’s true) is lamebrained, but it’s deliriously weird, too, spooky, a species of outsider art with an aesthetic separate from/antipodal to that which prevailed at the time in newspaper comics.

  For decades American cartooning was socially and professionally a matter of the swells and the bums: the well-paid newspaper stripmen and magazine gag cartoonists versus the straitened comic book hacks. In the early 1950s, when comic books were under investigation by Congress, members of the former gladly lined up to testify to the invidiousness of the latter. The profession’s two camps were also by and large divided by region, class, ethnicity, and religion: midwestern small-town educated WASPs versus East Coast urban Jews with high school diplomas, if that.

  In its level
of craft—everything from composition to modeling to coherence—the earliest comic book art isn’t more accomplished than the stuff you find in pornographic Tijuana Bibles, drawn and published around the same time, and in many cases it’s far inferior. The guys who created the big-phallused knockoffs of Jiggs and Dagwood often had a lot more panache, and a better command of simple anatomy, than the guys knocking out cowboy and jungle stories and zany science fiction for the first comic books.

  Later on, formalists like Jack Kirby, Lou Fine, and Will Eisner would finesse the haphazard strategies of comic book drawing, but not until the 1940s. At the outset it was chaos, as violent and willfully transgressive as punk music would be forty years in the future. Sometimes you can’t tell what you’re looking at—is that a grizzly bear or the Rock of Gibraltar? Other times the clarity is so stark the image registers before the mind knows it. The figures and props are flat, emblematic, and ugly, direct from the id to the page, and the dialogue is fantastic, asinine, hilarious, like Richard Foreman’s Dadaesque incantations. Everything is dreamy, dreamlike, otherworldly, so fucking crazy.

  Both Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were born in 1914, the sons of struggling Jewish immigrants. Joe’s father—who had moved the family from Toronto to Cleveland when Joe was nine or ten— earned a precarious living as a tailor. Jerry’s father, a haberdasher, died of a massive heart attack precipitated by a late-afternoon holdup of his shop in 1929. When it happened, Jerry was fifteen, youngest in the family, the mama’s boy. Unlike his five siblings, he wasn’t forced to go out and find a job. He stayed in school and could always wheedle a little change from his mother to buy some magazines.

  In his reading Jerry gravitated toward the junky and the sensational, specifically to the kooky expansiveness of the science fiction pulp-paper magazines. Amazing Stories. Astounding Science Fiction. Science Wonder Stories. Anything with robots, or spindle-towered cities of the future. Spacemen with fishbowl helmets and knobby ray guns. He loved that stuff. Tentacled monsters, giant malevolent brains. He just loved it.

  So did Joe Shuster. He read the same pulps Siegel did, but he read and collected bodybuilding magazines, too, picking up used copies of both kinds at a back-issues shop. He worked out with barbells, could somersault nimbly, and was a bit of a health faddist, interested in, and often trying, the things he read about in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine, things like fasting and wheat germ and the Milk Diet.

  While Shuster enjoyed sketching from life, he preferred “drawing funny,” taking inspiration (and often swiping characters, props, gags, and compositions) from some of the best-known purveyors of the boisterous and hyperbolic “bigfoot” style of newspaper cartooning—the configurations and marks he found in Fred Opper’s Happy Hooligan and Billy De Beck’s Barney Google, Rube Goldberg’s Boob McNutt, Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs, and Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre. But he also delighted in (though he could never hope to imitate) the slick illustrative work in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Harold Foster’s Tarzan, and especially Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.

  “It was a very imaginative strip and it even had a touch of science fiction in it,” Shuster recalled during an interview in 1992, near the end of his life. “McCay’s depiction of the city of the future, the planets, all the things I loved. That was among the things that turned me on to fantasy and science fiction” (Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids with Dreams,” 8).

  They met, Siegel and Shuster, at Cleveland’s Glenville High School during the fall of 1931. “It was,” said Jerry, “like the right chemicals coming together” (8). Movies, pulps, the daily and Sunday comics. Radio serials, cereal box premiums. That was the stuff they both loved. Plus, they both wore eyeglasses (Joe’s considerably thicker, his vision significantly poorer), and neither played ball. They didn’t date much. They didn’t date, period. Zero dates.

  Joe Shuster was sweet-faced and mild. The kind of neighborhood kid older people in a neighborhood often describe as “too solemn.” Joe’s cousin, the comedian Frank Shuster (Wayne and Shuster? The Ed Sullivan Show?), recalled that while “Joe believed in lifting weights and making himself strong … he was never one for actual activity. He looked like the stereotypical 90-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face” (quoted in Mietkiewicz, “When Superman Worked at the Star”).

  Jerry was plodding and sluggish, a most unphysical boy—although if he got excited about something, a new writer or a new movie, he could become animated raving about it. He liked the Shadow and Tarzan and Doc Savage—Doc Savage, the “Man of Bronze,” as he was dubbed in his monthly adventure magazine, a character who maintained a secret arctic headquarters dubbed the “fortress of solitude.”

  Jerry also liked a novel by Philip Wylie titled Gladiator. Originally published in 1930, Wylie’s book, part science fiction, part misanthropic screed, concerns a midwestern boy named Hugo Danner who is given super powers chemically by his daft father, a college biology teacher. The boy grows up performing miracles — ripping open bank vaults, repelling bullets, and leaping unimaginable distances. Jerry Siegel liked the book so much he wrote a glowing review of it for his high school newspaper.4

  Nights in his bedroom, Siegel banged out original jungle stories and intergalactic epics on a big, clacking typewriter. Joe illustrated some of them on butcher paper or the back of discontinued wallpaper, rolls he’d scavenged from the trash behind paint stores. Sometimes he drew directly on mimeograph masters, arranging his pictures to fit around Jerry’s badly typed prose, and they ran off several dozen purple copies.

  Jerry often dropped by the Shuster family’s apartment on late afternoons, and the two guys would just hang around talking about—whatever. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as Zorro, the current storyline in Buck Rogers, maybe some new intrigue or personality clash at the school newspaper (to which Joe also contributed), and then, more and more frequently as time passed, talking— with gathering excitement and seriousness—about how they ought to create a comic strip together, why not? Something they could sell and that could run every day of the week in hundreds of newspapers. With Jerry writing and Joe drawing—no fooling around, they could make a fortune. It was worth trying. What could they lose?

  Over the next three, four years, throughout high school and continuing afterward, the two collaborated constantly. “[Joe’s] family had financial problems, and his apartment … didn’t have heat,” Siegel remembered. “Joe would be working often wearing gloves and several sweaters and a jacket or two—he was working under that handicap on top of his vision problems” (Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids with Dreams,” 15).

  For each separate comic strip, Jerry scripted a few weeks’ worth of daily sequences—panel descriptions, captions, and dialogue. Joe penciled, inked, and lettered them. “[Jerry] would describe each scene and the shot used,” Joe recalled. “Long shot, medium, close-up, overhead shot. It was marvelous” (18).

  One strip they created was about a caveman (à la Alley Oop). One starred Laurel and Hardy; another, an imaginary Hollywood ingénue. And then, in 1934— probably in 1934 (a few accounts insist it was considerably later)—they created “Superman,” about a human-looking alien baby who comes to Earth in a rocket ship and grows up to become the world’s greatest hero, but for some reason decides to go about his business wearing tights, trunks, high boots, and a cape, and to maintain a separate identity as a self-effacing newspaper reporter named Clark Kent. Clark, Siegel would say, from Clark Gable, Kent from Kent Taylor, two of his favorite movie actors. (Although it’s possible he swiped the first half of it from Doc—real name: Clark—Savage.) “When all the thoughts were coming to me,” Siegel once said, “the concept came … that Superman could have a dual identity, and that in one of his identities he could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do” (19). It seemed to have slipped Jerry’s mind that his partner was even more unassuming than he was. And also wore glasses.

  “The truth,” wrote Jules Feiffer in Th
e Great Comic Book Heroes, “may be that Kent existed not for the purposes of the story but for the reader. He is Superman’s opinion of the rest of us, a pointed caricature of what we the non-criminal element really look like.” (A sentiment reiterated by Quentin Tarantino and put, practically verbatim, into the mouth of David Carradine in Kill Bill, Vol. 2.) “His fake identity was our real one. That’s why we loved him so. For if that wasn’t really us, if there was no Clark Kents, only lots of glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities—what a hell of an improved world it would have been” (19).

  In the realm of Superman fandom, Internet and otherwise, a perpetual controversy rages about which persona, Superman or Clark Kent, is the “real” guy. Which is the ego and which the alter? In Siegel’s version, the version that lasted with and without him for more than four decades, there was never any question it was Superman, Superman was the bona fide and Kent the invention, the disguise, the put-on. John Byrne’s 1986 comic book reboot of the character, however, made Clark Kent the bona fide and Superman a professional role, a career, like quarterback, trombonist, dental hygienist. In recent years, depending on who’s been writing the monthly comics, it has flip-flopped. The Richard Donner/Richard Lester/Bryan Singer movies have sided with Siegel, Smallville with Byrne. (In our time of Homeland Security, the whole business of assuming and maintaining a “secret identity” seems impossible, anachronistic; Batman at least wears gloves. And in a culture of celebrity worship, the very idea that anyone would want not to be recognized as famous 24/7 seems cheesy and inauthentic, counterintuitive.)

  The original “Superman” strip was a hodgepodge of elements freely borrowed from science fiction (Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series, John W. Campbell’s novel The Mightiest Machine, and of course Philip Wylie’s Gladiator); from the adventure pulps (Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Shadow, Doc Savage); and from the funny papers (Popeye, the Phantom, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon). But it was a synthesis, too, artless and sincere, something … different; something, as the illustrator Jim Steranko points out (in his modestly titled Steranko History of Comics), that “embodied and amalgamated three separate and distinct themes: the visitor from another planet, the superhuman being, and the dual identity” (37).