Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

  Although Superman stories rarely dealt directly with World War II, DC Comics flaunted his patriotism in other ways, as demonstrated by this 1943 War Bonds certificate (from the collection of Harry Matetsky, © DC Comics)

  I’m picking a World War II-era comic book, here, at random. Superman number 27, March-April 1944. Three twelve-page stories, one eleven-pager. Each story carries the “by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” credit in an oval floating directly under the logo on the title page. But I’m reading this particular issue as it has been reprinted on slick paper in a hardcover “DC Archives Edition”— Superman Archives volume 7, which gives the old comics a Godiva finish and costs $50 (well, $49.99) — and in this deluxe presentation there’s a table of contents, so I know that all four stories actually were scripted by Don Cameron, a former newspaper reporter and pulp novelist from Detroit. The art is mostly if not entirely drawn by a longtime hand at the Shuster studio in Cleveland named Ed Dobrotka. (You can almost always tell Dobrotka’s stuff from the broad Slavic faces of his characters and his perfectly rendered, but never-quite-in-correct-perspective big red S).

  In the lead story, Toyman (a villain Cameron created) snatches Lois Lane and seals her inside a glass cylinder “immersed in a vat of acid.” To rescue her, Superman must struggle through a “passage of many perils,” but it’s nothing he can’t handle and hasn’t seen before: just your typical needle-sharp spikes, high-tension electric current, and “white-hot flames of oxyacetylene flame.” In the second story, Clark and Lois take shelter from a storm in the North Woods and listen as a lumberjack spins a tall tale about the time Paul Bunyan met Superman. In the third story, Superman assists a millionaire rube who’s been fleeced by a criminal gang that uses homing pigeons to pick pockets. In the last story Superman comes to the aid of a reckless WASP investor tricked by a con man. All in all, a safe budget of boy’s adventure stories. Although packed with stunts (Superman stopping a subway, tearing open a vault, tumbling automobiles), the stories are noticeably less impromptu, better structured than Jerry Siegel’s. Cameron was a superior craftsman, but nowhere near as exuberant. Reading the comic book you would never know there was a world war going on, with still no end in sight.

  Probably it was a wise editorial decision, shutting out current events. Sales indicated that it was. During the war, Superman magazine, published bimonthly, sold one and a half million copies per issue, and the monthly Action Comics only slightly less.

  After the war it was a different story.

  19

  Once they came home, stowed their duffels, and resumed civilian life, ex-soldiers who had pored over and passed along Superman comic books on destroyers and in barracks—and who, according to Les Daniels, had found “special resonance during wartime” in “the idea of the superhero who gave up his ordinary life to put on a uniform and battle the bad guy”—were done with them (DC Comics, 64). There were careers now, and marriages, college and children and home buying, and if the ex-GIs still had time to read, they read something like Fortune or Look or a Mickey Spillane paperback.

  The children who had discovered Superman, the first fans, who had been nine-, ten-, eleven-year-olds in the late thirties and had grabbed each new issue of Action Comics as soon as it appeared—they were in high school now, or had graduated, and had outgrown their childhood hero. If they still wanted to read comic books, and millions did, there was always the true-crime and horror, science fiction, war, and romance stuff taking up rack space in candy stores and drugstores by the late forties, postwar genres geared toward “mature readers.” Such as themselves.

  And thanks to the Great Depression, fewer nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old replacements were around in 1946, ’47, ’48 to spend allowance and grass-cutting money on Superman and Action. Fewer preteens, but, thanks to the erupting baby boom, a lot more—millions and millions and millions more—infants and toddlers.

  During the war, overall circulation of comic books had tripled. More than one hundred titles had been sold at a combined rate of twenty million copies a month. As much as eighty percent of reading material available to soldiers and sailors in the European and Pacific theaters had consisted of comic books. After the war, though, sales crashed. But it wasn’t too long before they climbed right back up. By 1949 the number of comic books purchased monthly exceeded one hundred million copies, and it remained at that level or slightly higher through the middle 1950s.

  Just about the only titles not selling as the Cold War began were the ones that featured weird crime fighters, superpowered or just snazzily costumed. They were like a craze when it’s over; they were a craze when it’s over. The Charleston, contract bridge, knock-knock jokes. Superheroes. Dozen of them disappeared (Green Lantern, Doll Man, the Atom, the Sandman, Hawkman …), but not the original, not the first. Not Superman. He kept chugging along. And once the first boomers—males, anyhow—learned to read, his comic books started selling millions of copies again every month.

  20

  Superman survived the change of taste and shifting demographics that produced the great peacetime superhero rout, and then— after the pop psychologist Frederic Wertham convincingly argued a flawed cause-and-effect relationship between comics reading and juvenile delinquency in his best-selling book Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954—he survived scapegoating anti-comic book PTA crusades, Sunday sermons, and congressional hearings. According to Wertham, comic books incited children to violence, sadism, drug addiction, and chronic masturbation. It made no sense—logical, sociological, or statistical—but that’s what he wrote, that’s what he proselytized. And he was an authority—the man had a Ph.D. Wertham became the comic book industry’s real-life supervillain. So what if he opened a free mental health clinic in Harlem and palled around with Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, the guy almost killed comic books.

  He tried branding Superman a Strong Leader figure, intrinsically fascistic, dangerous, and antidemocratic: “We should, I suppose, be thankful that [Superman’s ‘S’] is not an ‘SS’” (quoted in Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 273). But his slurs never stuck.12 Americans would have none of it. Batman, okay: possibly that whole situation with Robin was a little suspect, but Superman? Superman was a visitor from another planet, yeah—but strange? What was strange about him? He embodied our values, celebrated our holidays, cherished our traditions. Superman was all right. Superman was—if not us, exactly, then ours. Superman, by then, was ours. He was finned cars and a smoking gross national product, he was the interstate highway system, he was Cinerama. He was big, larger than life, and he was American.

  In the comic books of the 1950s, he grew stronger and stronger, displaying more talents, powers, and abilities. Super-memory, super-ventriloquism, super-typewriting, super-hypnosis. Super-sensitive nostrils. The same guy who used only to leap tall buildings in a single bound could fly out into space now (holding his “powerful vacuum breath”) and pulverize an asteroid, ignite a sun with his heat vision. The guy who used to eavesdrop at high windows, cupping an ear to overhear criminal conversations inside, could now detect a cry for help from half a world away, the rumble of a rock slide on the Annapurna range. “Invulnerability, strength and speed that would put a platoon of gods to shame— and these were only the more noticeable of Superman’s powers,” said Dennis O’Neil, who was to take over scripting Superman comics early in the 1970s.

  In April of 1939, he acquired x-ray vision with which he could look at the far end of the cosmos and, in 1959, he “projected [it] across the time barrier” to locate an ape trapped in prehistory; microscopic vision; “supersensory vision,” which enabled him to see in total darkness; and “heat vision,” which functioned like an extremely powerful laser beam that he used on one occasion to melt a meteor hundreds of thousands of miles away. … Even his breath became incredible.

  In 1939, he could “hold his breath for hours underwater;” in 1941, he blew out a raging fire; in 1947, he sucked back an escaping rocket; and in 1959, he extinguished a star with a single mighty puff. (
“Man of Steel,” 51)

  Because suspense had become impossible, slapstick comedy was ratcheted up till the world’s mightiest hero was slinging bad puns on every other page or playing awkward straight man to Lois Lane’s insufferable niece Suzy. “Superman covers, once the stamping-ground of boundless action,” writes Jim Steranko, “began looking like vaudeville blackouts as Superman defrosted Lois’ icebox, got a haircut with scissors breaking on every strand, performed as a one-man band, blew the candles out on a birthday cake and (who can forget this classic of the action cover) yelping with pain as Lois dropped a biscuit on his foot” (History of Comics, 41).

  The stories, meanwhile, slanted for younger and younger readers (simpler words, fewer words, shorter stories, clearer pictures), became a monotonous record of nuttier stunts. Although Superman had started out as a fighter, says Tom Crippen, by the postwar years, he

  was branching out into high-speed assembly of dinosaur bones. Pretty soon the fights had reduced themselves to rounds of “light taps” received by men wearing hats. Superman had found his vocation. He did things like read all the Metropolis municipal archives at once, or transport industrial sites. In 1951, he started making coal into diamonds. Superman’s role in life [was] to engage in fussy interventions with incredible physical reality … always imitating a factory or contriving work around physical setups that [depended] on him as lynchpin: plug that volcano with that iceberg! (“Big Red Feet,” 171)

  He was Can-Do America’s paradigmatic Can-Do Guy. Superman could do everything, and do it all better and faster. Even if sometimes it really wasn’t worth doing, was show-offy.

  At the same time, as Thomas Andrae puts it, Superman was transformed into a “vapid establishmentarian … which the public, ironically, came to accept as the ‘real’ Superman. A Superman dedicated, it seemed, to showing all of his young new readers”— the great majority of them only recently weaned from Dick and Jane — “the many benefits of a law-abiding life, a Superman who scrupulously followed the rules and vigorously protected the status quo” (“From Menace to Messiah,” 132). Jerry Siegel’s original New Deal Democrat had switched allegiance and was now, quietly but indisputably, an Eisenhower super-Republican.

  In the Cold War America of hydrogen bombs, stratofortress bombers, nuclear submarines, and Univac computers, Superman had more raw power than was good for him, or than he (or his writers) knew what to do with. Well, he could always break the time barrier again, or memorize the complete archives of the Daily Planet. Well, he could always break the time barrier again, or memorize the entire Metropolis telephone book. Well, he could always break the time barrier again …

  21

  The same year Siegel and Shuster were dumped and their byline vanished, 1948, Sam Katzman, a producer at Columbia Pictures best known for his Bowery Boys featurettes, brought out the first live-action Superman motion picture: a schlocky fifteen-chapter serial jointly directed by Spencer Gordon Bennett and Tommy Carr.

  It starred Kirk Alyn, an ex-hoofer and a veteran of minor-studio quickies who bore a natural resemblance to Joe Shuster’s original character: average height, average weight, Black Irish good looks. A regular guy. Alyn wore no significant padding under his costume, which bagged slightly on his frame (elbows, waist, knees), but looked comfortable, something you might actually wear if you spent much of your time racing locomotives and deflecting death rays.

  Despite robotic acting, a shabby overall look, the tendency to shoot daylight scenes in blinding glare, and some undistinguished gouache animation (for the flying sequences), Katzman’s Superman played in first-run theaters, “at night as well as matinees,” according to James Vance, “the first cliffhanger to enjoy such popularity since the original Flash Gordon twelve years before” (“Superman,” 11). It also earned more money than any other movie serial. Ten years on, ten years after Action Comics number 1, Superman still had major chops. A sequel (featuring Lyle Talbot in a skullcap as Luthor the mad scientist) was thrown together and released in 1950, Atom Man vs. Superman. In both pictures Kirk Alyn made for a near-perfect incarnation of the Joe Shuster-era Superman, and he played the character with the pluck and boyishness, if not the anarchic swagger, of Jerry Siegel’s earliest vision.

  Kirk Alyn, an uncanny incarnation of Joe Shuster’s original Man of Steel, played the title role in two successful Columbia Pictures Superman serials in the late 1940s (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)

  Meanwhile, over in the comic books and the newspaper strip, Superman presented a vastly different appearance and mien. There, he’d bulked up, become monumental—the revisionist contribution of a veteran cartoonist named Wayne Boring, who had always felt (maybe because he’d gone to art school) that Joe Shuster’s original version was too squat and too short to be properly heroic.

  Boring had been Shuster’s first assistant, hired after responding to an ad in Writer’s Digest. He’d arrived in Cleveland from Norfolk, Virginia, around 1939 and started out drawing backgrounds. Pretty soon he moved into foreground storytelling, penciling and inking everything except Superman’s head. At the studio Joe Shuster had insisted upon inking every single one till he finally got too busy, and his eyesight became too poor, even to maintain that last consistency and hands-on connection.

  When Boring was offered the job drawing the Superman newspaper strip, he left Shuster’s employ and moved to New York, and from then on was paid directly by National Comics, which quietly had begun grooming a cadre of house artists and script writers capable of producing Superman stories, just in case. By the end of the Second World War, Boring’s radically reconstituted Superman—older-looking, barrel-chested, a towering nine-heads-high (Shuster’s barely had been six) halfback-and-a-half with a bland-and-patrician face, became the defining look— the company standard.

  Somehow the new physique managed to convey, simultaneously, gravitas and easygoing goofiness. Power and passivity. Shuster’s Superman jumped around like a cricket; Boring’s, sculptural and iconic, mostly posed. Boring’s Superman was part Charles Atlas, part Li’l Abner, and part Burne Hogarth’s Sunday-supplement Tarzan. He seemed to jog through the air, one leg jutting forward, the other bent back at the knee. As a kid reading that stuff, I thought it made it seem as though Superman had just one leg and a stump, like the war vets I’d see around my hometown. Joe Shuster’s feisty regular-guy original, Superman as lug, was replaced by a muscle-bound version with a face that rarely smiled, essentially had just two expressions (stern and surprised), and in profile looked like George Washington’s.

  Wayne Boring introduced a weighty grandeur to Superman’s mise-en-scene (his futuristic Metropolis skyline was crisp and convincing, a little awesome), but his storytelling lacked drama, because in the scenes that he staged and drew almost no one actually looks at anyone else. Characters are blocked standing at weird, ungainly angles to one another. They chatter or intone or threaten maniacally below their carefully placed speech balloons, but don’t make direct eye contact. And because they don’t, everyone seems just slightly … oh, I don’t know—autistic. (Boring—or else his usual inker, Stan Kaye—also managed to make Lois Lane seem cross-eyed, or blind.) Boring’s heroes and villains appear self-conscious, preening; arranged together in a composition, each remains isolated. A chill pervades the panels, and there’s an unnatural solidity to his figures, a bulk reminiscent of kinky Richard Lindner paintings and 1950s pen-and-ink motorcycle-men porn. But maybe that’s just me.

  22

  Robert Joffee Maxwell went to work for National Comics in 1939, hired by Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz to take charge of “Superman, Inc.,” an in-house franchise set up to license the character’s name and likeness for toys and novelties and apparel, whatever conceivably might benefit from Superman’s connection to a product manufactured, processed, packaged, bottled, or canned. For as long as there had been newspaper comic strips, since the mid-1890s, there had been comic-strip character merchandise—Yellow Kid gravy bowls, Buster Brown shoes, Dick Tracy pot-metal prowl car
s with screaming sirens—so why not merchandise featuring comic book characters? Or at least one comic book character in particular.

  There was immediate interest, followed by a small batch of authorized products: Superman billfolds, puppets, sweatshirts, greeting cards, beanies. Maxwell believed that there was potential for much more, and with greater returns, if he could arrange to get Superman regular exposure on coast-to-coast radio—which in 1940 meant soap operas during the day; kids’ serials in the late afternoon; dramas, comedies, quiz shows, and musical variety programs throughout the evening, with signoffs and silence as early as 10 P.M.

  It was the perfect moment to pitch Superman because radio programs featuring comic-strip characters had multiplied throughout the late thirties. Nearly all of the major newspaper strips (Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Blondie, The Gumps …) and a large number of second- and third-tier strips (Smilin’ Jack, Red Ryder, Brick Bradford …) had been adapted successfully to the broadcast medium. Superman would fit right in.

  Working with a publicist named Allen Ducovny, Maxwell had four audition episodes written and recorded in New York City, hoping to interest a sponsor. Hecker’s Oats, out of Buffalo, signed on, but when none of the major networks agreed to carry The Adventures of Superman, the company purchased airtime itself on regional stations, just ten at first, distributing the prerecorded series on sixteen-inch “electrical transmission” disks.

  Almost all of Superman’s signature boilerplate (“Faster than a speeding bullet … More powerful than a locomotive” … “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane,” etc.) started on radio, as did many of the most durable elements of the mythology—a newspaper called the Daily Planet (in Siegel’s early scripts it was called the Daily Star, a tip of the hat to Joe Shuster’s original hometown newspaper, the Toronto Star); an editor named Perry White; an office boy, later a cub reporter, named Jimmy Olsen, and kryptonite, deadly bright-green kryptonite. It was on radio, too, that Superman quit leaping all of those tall buildings and started flying over them instead (Tollin, Smithsonian Historical Performances, 8, 16).