by Tom De Haven
The small-s superman wasn’t only the stuff of purplish science fiction, it was also the stuff of university debates and debunkings (especially around biology and philosophy departments), the nudist movement, Bernarr Macfadden’s publishing empire—and Nazi politics. Nazi politics and National Socialist mythology. Triumph of the Will. Aryans. The 1936 “Hitler Olympics.” The Übermensch. The Master Race. And if the New Deal never had man’s perfectibility in mind, it nonetheless assumed his steady improvement. That the capital-S Superman was a product of that particular time and cultural tumult makes perfect sense. Siegel and Shuster were alive in the world, and it all just seeped in, all of that stuff. Had to have.
“What led me into conceiving Superman in the early thirties?” Jerry considered.
Listening to President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” … being unemployed and worried during the depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany … seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden … reading of gallant, crusading heroes in the pulps, and seeing equally crusading heroes on the screen in feature films and movie serials (often pitted against malevolent, grasping, ruthless madmen) I had the great urge to help … the despairing masses, somehow. How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer. (quoted in Weisinger, “I Flew”)
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Later he would pay for them, solicit them from other, often better writers, but in the beginning, and for the first few years, Jerry Siegel never ran out of ideas. Footing it from his place over to Joe’s (or, later, to the cramped office they rented for thirty bucks a month in downtown Cleveland), he could make up two, three Superman stories, often basing them on something he’d read five minutes earlier at breakfast in the Plain Dealer. A cave-in at a Tennessee coal mine, American arms dealers being wined and dined in Rome and Berlin, a sudden spike in traffic accidents attributed to shoddy car manufacturing. This is a job for Superman. That, too. And that.
At Joe’s, sometimes he’d act out scenes and situations, striking action poses, extemporizing dialogue—which overall was crummy but functional: “Gentlemen, it’s obvious you’ve been fighting only to promote the sale of munitions! Why not shake hands and make up?” Siegel’s civics lessons and presentation of global politics were at fifth- and sixth-grade thinking and reasoning levels, but that was perfect since his readers, for the most part, were fifth- and sixth-graders.
Jerry’s scripts kicked off with a melodramatic premise followed by short, rapid episodes strung together. But they were all basically about the same thing. They were all about having fun, rambunctious and boyish fun, while remaining selfless and pure and living out a passion. “My name is Superman,” he introduces himself one time during the first year of the newspaper strip, “and my hobby is making daydreams come true.” Such a kid. And such a kid thing to say.
“Jerry and I always felt the character was enjoying himself,” Shuster said. “He wasn’t taking himself seriously, it was always a lark” (Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids with Dreams,” 14).
Superman goes somewhere (banana republic, ballpark, prison, factory, slum, orphanage, movie set) and then either stops something (war, lynching, earthquake, sabotage, plague) or causes something to happen (peace treaty, urban renewal, restitution, acquittal). Whatever he does, he does philanthropically, often for just one poor soul in despair (having been swindled, wrongfully jailed, or driven by the powerful to the brink of suicide) but always, too, for the common good. He accepts no reward, modestly waves off any applause. “I like to help people when I see someone in a tough spot. I feel an irresistible urge to play guardian angel. I’m funny that way.”
As depicted in Action Comics number 1, the first thing he does, Superman’s inaugural public act, is to smash into the governor’s mansion to save an innocent woman scheduled to die in the electric chair. The second thing he does is deck a wife beater. From the beginning, as Mark Waid puts it, Superman was “as close as contemporary Western culture has yet come to envisioning a champion who is the epitome of unselfishness” (“Real Truth,” 10).
When Jerry Siegel composed every story, Superman functioned as a freelance do-gooder with the demeanor and gumption of a laughing caballero, a rabble-rouser devoted to ameliorating social ills with his fantastic powers. According to Marshall McLuhan, Superman was “ruthlessly efficient in carrying on a one-man crusade against crooks and anti-social forces. In neither case is there any appeal to the process of law. Justice is represented as an affair of personal strength alone” (“From the Mechanical Bride,” 105). Well, there was that, yes.10
He took it upon himself to raze urban slums and expose unsafe labor conditions, target crooked congressmen, crooked lobbyists, crooked factory owners. Racketeers of every ilk, from those fixing prize fights to those fomenting regional wars to sell munitions, provided Superman with his earliest adversaries … although, really, you wouldn’t call any of them well matched. He could pluck bad guys into the air and juggle them. Bunch of suits—what the hell could they do to him? He was incorruptible and anonymous, interested only in having a ball doing good. Could there be anything better?
In Superman number 5, cover-dated Summer 1940, all four stories are fundamentally gangster melodramas, no matter how many spiky, fiery, or gassy death traps get sprung: it’s Superman versus a slot-machine gang; an opportunistic politician; a gang of stock market manipulators; and a local drug lord who uses addicts to commit crimes. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, civic-minded reformers, at your service.
“We had a great deal of freedom,” Shuster said, “and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination—very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of because they were in such a rush to get things in before deadline. But later on we were restricted” (Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids with Dreams,” 18).
Maybe it was Donenfeld or Liebowitz, or Whitney Ellsworth, the second editor of Action and Superman, but after a few years somebody at National Comics told Jerry Siegel, Enough already with the propaganda. Who do you think you are, Clifford Odets? Superman had become a valuable property. His image needed mainstreaming. After 1940 Siegel routinely submitted his scripts for editorial vetting, and by the time the United States entered World War II, Superman stories dealt less with—hardly at all with—social injustice, and more with daring daylight bank robberies; Superman’s never-ending battle against the forces of evil became a crusade against lone-wolf criminals and gangs of racketeers. He became a defender of the existing order and private property. The brief era of the activist Superman was over.
“In the hands of a corporation,” writes Ian Gordon, “Superman was more important as a business asset than as a fictional character. Once [National] recognized Superman’s status as a commodity, they defined and sold him as a product in all his incarnations. By 1941, Superman was not so much a character who helped sell comic books as a product that comic books sold” (Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 134).
When populism vanished, so did Superman’s sarcasm, his cocksureness, and an admirable capacity for moral outrage. In the beginning Superman offered his assistance, now the good citizens of Metropolis clamored for it, they expected it. Originally, civil authorities chased him as a hooligan, an outlaw—now they designated him an “honorary policeman” and charged him with things to do. (“Please and thanks.”) Superman was perpetually on call. He turned humorless, and just the tiniest bit bumbling, perhaps so as not to seem threatening. His most common expression became a forced smile of bemusement that could easily be decoded as a grimace. Only three years along in his career, Superman no longer seemed to be having so much fun. Heroing had become a job.
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There was so much work, too much work—every month, without letup, dozens of Superman pages, hundreds of panels, thousands of words in captions and dialogue. “When you forked over your dime for Superman,” write
s Ron Goulart, “you got four 13-page adventures of the Man of Steel plus assorted ads and filler material. The monthly Superman yarn in Action Comics also ran to 13 pages. So now, in a given year, Siegel and Shuster were responsible for 36 stories and 468 pages of artwork. On top of that, 18 covers showcasing the Man of Tomorrow were used each year. Not to mention over 300 dailies and 50 some Sunday pages for the newspaper strip. Promotional material was needed, too” (Foreword, 4).
Siegel and Shuster probably hadn’t counted on things becoming such a grind. To hit his deadlines, Jerry keep reusing the same premises and plot hooks, producing virtually the same stories over and over again. Joe’s solution was to cannibalize favorite compositions—for a time his right-facing single-bounding Superman turned up on every other page, each drawing almost identical—and to skimp on picture detail.
The board work stayed grueling, and Joe’s vision, always poor, kept worsening. Despite thick glasses, it became a struggle to draw. He was forced to hire some help. Wayne Boring, Paul Cassidy, Ed Dobrotka, John Sikela, Leo Novak, Dennis Neville, Ira Yarbrough, Sam Citron. They had names like major league baseball players, that initial lineup of Superman ghosts. Mostly they were young local guys, Clevelanders, but some came from out of town, out of state.
Once other cartoonists arrived, and Joe Shuster (eating candy bars all day long, now that his health-faddism was history) became essentially an expediter, the art director, Superman comics livened up pictorially. Character figures, especially Superman’s, looked more solid, solid but rubbery, too. All-around better rendered. Panel borders turned plastic, elastic, and could stretch out, or be stretched out by the tumult inside, reconfigured into gobsmacking shapes. Shuster’s ratty lines and minimal attention to backgrounds and props were replaced by crowded, voluptuous cartoons teeming with information. Siegel and Shuster “were very easy to work with,” said Cassidy, whose primary assignment was to draw the earliest newspaper strips. “They didn’t interfere in any way with how we interpreted the script. It was just at the beginning then, and I’m not sure they realized … what they had going on for them, that Superman was going to become as big a deal as it did” (quoted in Vance, “A Job,” 10).
There was a charming ordinariness, a primitivism to the pictures when Joe Shuster drew them. His was a guileless and low-budget storytelling, the comic-strip translation of a Warner
Brothers mean-streets melodrama: cheap and tawdry and rushed, but snappy and impromptu. It related itself and was convincing. After Shuster, and despite the professional polish and more creditable, more variable compositions, Superman never again seemed as integrated into his environment, or as spiritedly alive.
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The mythology of the superhero and the post-Depression re-industrialized wartime United States were made for each other. “Between 1941 and 1944,” writes Ian Gordon, “sales of comic books doubled from 10 million to 20 million copies a month despite paper shortages. Much of this increase can be attributed to the reading habits of servicemen” (Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 139).
At basic-training camps, 44 percent of inductees read comic books regularly—”regularly” defined as more than six a month— and 13 percent read them occasionally. Every other month, the army distributed at least one hundred thousand copies of Superman, or about 10 percent of the title’s circulation. Comic books were cheap (when they weren’t free), quick and easy to read, and eminently swappable, and they weighed next to nothing. But they also, Gordon suggests, may “have echoed pinups as reminders of home and like them given the individual soldier a reason to fight” (141).
Joe Shuster was rejected for military service because of poor eyesight, and in the comics so was Clark Kent after he accidentally used X-ray vision during his physical exam and read an eye chart in another room down the hall. (Credit where credit is due: that brilliant, even legendary, bit of narrative weaseling, reiterated in dozens of stories later on, was the brainchild of a National Comics editor named Jack Schiff.) But Jerry Siegel was drafted, in 1943. By then a local hero in Cleveland, he’d been sworn into the armed forces with great fanfare (at any rate, upon a parade float) during the city’s Fourth of July celebration. Ordered to report to the service newspaper Stars and Stripes, he remained stateside, in Georgia, for the duration of the war.
Upon leaving the army in 1945, Siegel discovered that his and Joe Shuster’s combined annual Superman income—accrued from the comic books and the newspaper strip, plus any merchandising “bonuses” Jack Liebowitz chose to give them, everything—had slipped to forty-six thousand dollars. A drop, he would claim, of roughly sixty thousand.
During his two years away, Siegel had written only the occasional Superman script. Most had been contributed by slumming pulp-fiction (primarily science fiction) writers who charted the course for Siegel’s creation, taking, he felt, money from his wallet.
It could make Jerry Siegel nauseous, the chagrin he felt at having signed away his property rights to Superman. His and Joe’s. Liebowitz had bested them both, and Siegel’s pride was hurt, bruised. He griped about it to anyone who’d listen. He was a monoglot, his language complaint. His condition was victim-hood. He could get on people’s nerves, even those who sympathized.
Siegel had a difficult time after the war. He left his wife Bela (the terrible-tempered former girl next door) and their four-year-old son, Michael. After they were divorced, he started paying alimony, child support: he needed more money. At last—in 1947, with just one year remaining in their ten-year contract with National—Siegel wrote a testy letter to Jack Liebowitz demanding for Joe and himself five million dollars in back compensation (a figure more or less plucked out of thin air) and a significantly larger cut of all future Superman revenues. When he was brushed aside—Liebowitz tended toward condescension and tart lecturing—Jerry Siegel, with Joe Shuster’s nervous assent, hired an attorney, an old army buddy named Albert Zugsmith.
After that came the calamitous lawsuit.
Separated from National Comics following a decade of contractual employment, ten years of good to fabulous incomes — outplayed, their bluff called, their lawsuit a debacle — Siegel and Shuster must have felt scared, in free fall. (And maybe like schmucks.) Now what? They needed to create something new, but what could match Superman?
On the basis of their names, their reputation, their still-remembered byline, they sold a new strip called Funnyman, to comic books and for newspaper syndication. This time they retained copyright, moot ultimately and something of a bad joke.
Within a year their painfully unfunny and ghost-drawn feature about a superpowered clown had disappeared, and the partners, dispirited and facing middle age, decided to call it a day. Jerry Siegel got married again, to Joanne Kovacs, moved to New York City, and continued writing comics, only not for National, placing work with almost every other publisher in the field. For a couple of years he edited a line of notoriously awful comic books (which he’d created) for Ziff-Davis. No matter what he did, though, or where he landed, or who he worked for, it always ended suddenly or badly and left Siegel no better off financially and looking around for the next thing. The next bone.
Joe Shuster stayed behind in Cleveland, no longer drawing, no longer able to. And when he was no longer able to support himself, he moved in with his brother.11
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National Comics “used the Second World War to make Superman not only a defender of virtue and wholesomeness,” writes Ian Gordon, “but synonymous with American democracy. All six 1941 Superman comic books contained war-related stories about saboteurs, terrorists, and fifth columnists” (Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 137).
As time passed and the war dragged on, Superman’s patriotism was expressed more subtly, expressed but not flaunted, and usually on the covers of his comic books, rarely inside. While dozens of formulaic comic book heroes, all of them Superman facsimiles of one kind or another (come-laters like Captain Marvel, the Human Torch, Spy Smasher, and the Flash), took on the Nazis and the bucktoothed “Nips
” every issue, the Man of Steel pretty much stayed out of the war. Kept to the cheerleading sidelines. “The American armed forces,” he tells Lois Lane in a newspaper strip from 1942, “are powerful enough to smash their treacherous foes without the aid of Superman.” (Nice try.)
Superman couldn’t very well defeat the Axis powers single-handedly in his comic books, not when American soldiers (avid readers in most cases) were still fighting in Europe and the Pacific, so it’s easy to see why National decided to position and play him the way they did. Except for some flag-waving dialogue and periodic salutes to the armed forces, Superman ignored the conflict, and Metropolis, his adopted home, became like a neutral principality.
The city did, however, become increasingly vulnerable to serious havoc (although minor in comparison to the wholesale destruction in today’s superhero comics and movies) created by the first wave of (apolitical, civilian, native-born) “supervillains” and mad scientists with round bald heads. The city was also prey to the anarchist—the Dadaist—shenanigans of Mr. Mxyzptlk (originally spelled Mxyztplk), a derbied Bugs Bunny of an imp from the Fifth Dimension (and thus, strictly speaking, an alien, though nonetheless apolitical and civilian). None of the wartime villains (with the notable exception of Luthor, a Jerry Siegel creation) were especially malevolent, or even terribly menacing, and they grew less menacing month after month as Superman kept getting bigger, stronger, smarter.