by Tom De Haven
Poor George Reeves, immortalized, but as what? An Unsolved Tinseltown Mystery.
You can’t (or at least I can’t) watch any of those fifty-odd-year-old TV shows (which occasionally are still broadcast, usually in weekend “marathons,” although the complete run, all six seasons, naturally is available on DVD in handsome boxed sets) and not think, He’s the guy who killed himself. Or was murdered. You’re watching George Reeves as Clark Kent snap his head suddenly
to one side and pull off his horn-rimmed glasses preparatory to shucking his suit and becoming Superman; next second he’ll be in costume bounding through an open casement window, and you think, I wonder if he really killed himself. Or was murdered. It can’t be helped. He was Superman (he was Superman), and he died violently.
People—mostly aging boomers in their fifties and sixties for whom TV’s Adventures of Superman has survived as a treasured artifact of childhood—continue to visit his remains, in the Sunrise Corridor of the Pasadena Mausoleum at Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California. Still do. Former towel-caped children standing there thinking, I bet he was murdered. Thinking, He probably killed himself. Thinking, Poor George Reeves. Poor George Reeves.
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During the 1950s and ‘60s, seven monthly or bimonthly comic books featured Superman (or Superboy, a character DC had introduced in 1944).14 The editor of the sprawling line, the overseer, the auteur (I’m kidding, but not really) was Mort Weisinger, Bronx-born, morbidly obese Mortimer Weisinger—picky, petty, intimidating, overbearing, and monstrously cruel to the men (or, as he called them, the “idiots”) who wrote and drew for him. “It was my job,” he wrote after his retirement in a whining article for Parade magazine, “to plot his adventures, invent startling super-feats, create new villains, [and] manipulate his romantic life.” But it turns out, this schmo didn’t even like Superman! “To be honest, Superman gave me a hang-up. I resented basking in his reflected glory. I was jealous of him” (quoted in Weisinger, “I Flew”). And blamed him for his hypertension, his insomnia, his stomach ulcer, and the need to visit a psychiatrist twice a week.
Before he joined National Comics in 1941, Weisinger had edited Thrilling Wonder Stories, one of the lesser science fiction pulps of the era (and the one with the dubious distinction of featuring on its varnished cover each month a different big-headed Bug-Eyed Monster, situated usually in close, fondling proximity to a buxom Blue-Eyed Blonde).15 Before that, Weisinger had worked as a literary agent for the Solar Sales Agency, which he’d cofounded, representing dozens of pulp writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Leigh Bracket, Ray Bradbury, and Edmond Hamilton. And before that—much to his father’s consternation and dismissive contempt—he was a nebbishy science fiction nut, cranking out mimeoed fanzines, corresponding with other teenaged aficionados, starting clubs (and then pocketing the dues), sharing the passion, spreading the gospel. One of Weisinger’s correspondents in the mid-’30s was Jerry Siegel. Early science fiction fandom was a small community, but from its ranks eventually came some of the comic book field’s most significant editors, writers, and artists, carrying with them natural penchants for invention, monomania, sadism, masochism, deliberate malice, and feuds.
While television’s Adventures of Superman remained in production, and throughout its run as a top-rated show, Mort Wei-singer, in a commercial move counter to his own tastes, scaled back most of the science fiction elements in the comic books, bringing the stories closer in tone, and often in their plots, to the lighthearted trifles kids saw week after week on the small screen. But once the TV show ended in 1957, Weisinger organized and implemented (with, according to professional legend, the executive flair of Pol Pot) a series of radical changes to the Man of Steel that ushered in the most colorful and consequential era in the character’s history.
The Weisinger formula (devised to boost sales and amuse himself, not to revolutionize the way readers would ever after respond to and “consume” monthly comic books, although it did that as well) introduced some major new element—a premise, a concept, an affiliation—into the Superman series every six months or so, then braided each element throughout all of the titles. The intent was to widen, then widen again, Superman’s context, his identity, and to invest them both with a vibrant lore. It worked.
After he took over supervising the full line of Superman comics in the early fifties, the first significant textural changes Mort Weisinger introduced concerned Lois Lane. Maybe hoping to pick up some new female readers, the ones who bought Archies and romance comics, he replaced the fearless and often foolhardy big-city reporter with an irritating newsroom pea brain whose only concerns were uncovering Superman’s secret identity and then (sigh) marrying him. It may have been misogynist, but it was also Shakespearean the way so many stories during Weisinger’s first years as king of the realm revolved around disguise, trickery, and matrimony—although in his Superman comics, matrimony seemed more akin to a game of schoolyard tag than a lifetime partnership.
Just as on television the no-nonsense Phyllis Coates version of Lois Lane (“Always such a headstrong girl,” as she’s described by Perry White in the first season) gave way to the pleasantly bubbleheaded Noel Neill version, the original Lois Lane as created by Jerry Siegel and then carried on by Siegel’s comic book successors became the Mort Weisinger Lois, a Cold War-era female nuisance and wife-wannabe.16
The kind of Lois Lane stories Weisinger demanded from his writers (all of them male: Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman, Robert Bernstein, Bill Finger, and Alvin Schwartz) were fluffy little sitcoms. She’s a nurse, she’s an ingénue, a factory girl, a pop star. A princess. A jailbird. A blonde bombshell. She’s Mrs. Superman! (It’s a dream! It’s an Imaginary Story!) She’s crying, she’s raging, she’s trying to make Superman jealous. She’s trying to make him jealous. She’s feeling jealous. She’s jealous. She’s trying to make Superman jealous.
And so it went.
Since 1938 each six-, eight-, nine-, twelve-, or thirteen-page Superman comic book story had been a discrete and isolated event. Nothing that occurred in any one adventure affected what happened in the next, and the permanent cast, since the days of Siegel and Shuster’s authorship, had stayed amazingly small.17 There was Lois Lane, there were Jimmy Olsen and Perry White, there was Luthor the mad scientist, there was Mr. Mxyzptlk, there were the Prankster, the Toyman, and J. Wilbur Wolfingham (a blatant W. C. Fields rip-off), and that was about it for regulars and semiregulars. Oh. And little Susie Tompkins, the eight-year-old fibbing brat.
Under Weisinger, Superman comics acquired a repertory company that eventually numbered in the many hundreds. Beginning around the time of the character’s twentieth anniversary in 1958, and working in close (many would claim meddling, maddening, overbearing, bullying) collaboration with his small stable of freelance writers, he also devised a preposterous yet consistent series history and culture that allowed for the steady production of well-plotted stories triggered by motivations subtler than greed and the will to power, and an emotional range considerably wider and more enriched than aggression, frustration, and triumph. Gradually, the permanent cast members were endowed with charged and significant memories, which readers were expected (and only too happy) to share.
The comic books in Weisinger’s bailiwick evolved into a benign, optimistic, unboundedly “wholesome” science fiction series for children, with more and more of Superman’s allies and adversaries (almost everyone superpowered and dressed in tights) dropping in from the far future or, more likely, some distant planet. And of all the planets in the universe the one that most interested Mort Weisinger, to the point of obsession, was Krypton.
The Man of Steel, for two decades a guy who’d seemed never to wonder, even a tiny bit, about the world of his birth (who, for that matter, hadn’t even known its name till 1948; readers did, of course, but he didn’t), now found himself habitually crashing the time barrier in reverse and traveling there—spectrally in one story, corporally in the next—to familiarize himself with
Krypton, its flora and fauna, its geography and civilization before it exploded. Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, in The Comic Book Heroes, their history of the “Silver Age” of superhero comics, describe the Weisingered Krypton as “a wonderland of robot factories, jewel mountains, sky palaces, fire-falls, scarlet jungles, interplanetary zoos, jet taxis, fire-breathing dogs, scientific tribunals, and even anti-gravity swimming pools” (24).
Usually, and despite the planet’s often-stated immensity, Superman managed, on just about every visit, to bump into his parents, Jor-El and Lara, as either young lovers or young marrieds; occasionally he’d even have a peek at himself as the short-pants-wearing toddler, Kal-El. And always—with the realization that Krypton was doomed and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it—he would suffer the agony of helplessness, of insufficiency: survivor’s guilt.
Whether Mort Weisinger and his virtually all-Jewish cadre of creative talent were consciously using the Krypton adventures of the late 1950s and early 1960s as metaphors for the European Holocaust of the 1940s is anybody’s guess (they never said, not that anyone ever asked), but there’s no denying that, individually and cumulatively, those stories’ subtext added a pathos to the character. “The realization that not even all his powers could give him back what he loved most in life,” write Jacobs and Jones, “raised him from a mere costumed crime fighter to something close to a tragic figure. Weisinger had discovered that Superman grew more heroic as he grew less powerful” (24).
In depicting, for the first time, Superman as an alien, as an immigrant, as a survivor, and in presenting those attributes as consequential and defining, the comic books, heretofore homely and slapdash things, developed a coherence and an inviting, elevated meaningfulness that very young readers responded to as they responded to parables and fairy tales.
Weisinger took seriously his grade school clientele: he offered letters pages in all of the Superman titles (“Metropolis Mailbag,” “Smallville Mailsack,” “Letters to Lois,” “Jimmy Olsen’s Pen Pals”), permitting fans to compliment, criticize, and vent— and, thanks to the now-inconceivable practice of printing home addresses, to correspond with one another, as science fiction fans of the ’3os and ’4os had done. According to Mark Waid, Weisinger, who lived on suburban Long Island, also “regularly solicited story ideas from neighborhood children, so if one clamored to see Superman as a fireman, Weisinger found a way to make Superman an honorary smoke-eater. If another wanted to see him as a millionaire, well, any number of contrivances could saddle Superman with an inherited fortune” (Introduction, 8).
Once the planet Krypton was no longer merely the source of lethal meteorites but a kind of heaven, heaven as the home place (“a paradise of happiness,” is how Superman himself once referred to it), Mort Weisinger’s series (like Father Knows Best, like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, like Leave It to Beaver, like practically every successful television comedy of the period— organized itself around a grand new theme of family and kinship. In 1955 Superman (actually his teenaged self, Superboy) was reunited with his long-lost childhood pet, a bone-white spaniel (or was he a beagle?) named Krypto.
In The Great Superman Book, an insanely exhaustive encyclopedia, Michael Fleisher explains that “as the hour of Krypton’s doom drew ever closer, Superman’s father Jor-El, nursing the faint hope that [he] … might yet save his son, launched Krypto into outer space in a tiny rocket as a final trial run, intending for the dog-carrying rocket to return safely.” But when a meteorite knocked the prototype out of orbit, Krypto drifted for years through space, “ultimately to arrive on Earth, where, like any native of Krypton, [he] acquired super-powers … and was happily reunited with his beloved master” (315). Thereafter, Krypto sported a yellow dog collar and a bright red cape.
Then, in 1958, while clashing with a green-skinned adversary called Brainiac, Superman discovered—stowed away in the space pirate’s flying saucer—an intact and thriving Kryptonian city (the capital of the planet, no less) reduced (via something called a “hyper-force ray”) to the size of a Revell model kit and preserved inside of a watercooler bottle. Brainiac had hijacked Kandor some years prior to the planet’s destruction and kept it ever since as a trophy.
Krypto was one thing—but this! This was big. This was monumental. Kandor changed everything. Any kid could see that. (I was nine when the story appeared, and I sure could.) Superman was no longer the sole survivor of Krypton but merely one of millions. Millions! And that wasn’t all. He suddenly had a mission (with attendant yearnings) separate from that of protecting (mere) earthlings. After dispensing with Brainiac, Superman transported the bottled city back to Earth, then to the North Pole for safekeeping in his Fortress of Solitude, the coolest boy’s bedroom ever, introduced into the series by Weisinger only a month earlier. There, he took a solemn vow “to find a way to restore it to normal size and live with my people again … someday.”
I wanted to live in Kandor myself; who cared if you were the size of a flea when you had an artificial sun to keep every day bright and toasty, monorails, rocket cars, and “tireless robot farmhands” to raise all the crops? That place was way better than Disneyland.
After Kandor, the Kryptonians (Caucasians all, the adult males generally resembling Victor Mature; the women, Loretta Young), just kept coming, and Superman comics became an Ellis Island for immigrants and refugees from the lost planet. In 1959 Superman’s cute blonde teenaged cousin, Kara Zor-El (a dishy mix of Sandra Dee and Tuesday Weld), showed up.
And where did she suddenly come from? Well, it seems that— as she told Superman—when Krypton exploded, “by sheer luck,” a large urban neighborhood in Argo City had been “hurled away intact with people on it.” Not only that, “a large bubble of air” came along with it. This unlikely Kryptonian archipelago survived for decades, just floating around in outer space, until it too suffered a cataclysm and Kara’s father (Superman’s uncle) sent her to earth in a blue leotard and miniskirt. And a bright red cape.
Dubbed Supergirl, she was promptly handed a brown wig and a secret identity (Linda Lee) and sent to live in a rural orphanage until Superman determined she was ready—sufficiently mature — to make her presence known on earth. (Gee thanks, cuz.)
Next came the Phantom Zone, a spectral dimension that served as a penitentiary for Krypton’s most dangerous convicts. Existing there in a permanent ethereal state, they had managed to survive the planet’s destruction. And now, of course, the very worst of them (murderous reprobates with names reminiscent of license plates or prescription drugs: Jax-Ur, Than-Ol, Vakox) started busting out of disembodied bondage every few months and going after the Man of Steel. (The Phantom Zone was one of the few elements from the Weisinger-era package, or, in fan-speak, “mythos,” that found its way into the 1970s Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve.)
For six or seven years, roughly from the rise of Elvis Presley through the death of John F. Kennedy, Krypton and everything Kryptonian (including a supercat, a supermonkey, and various invidious isotopes of kryptonite—red, white, blue, and gold) defined and propelled the Superman series. The celestial immigrant of yesteryear had been transformed into (so to speak) a naturalized American citizen whose extended family—kinsmen, black sheep, poor relations—keeps showing up, in dribs and drabs and droves, from the Old Country. Small wonder the guy spent more and more time at the Fortress of Solitude, dusting trophies, working out in his supergym (although whatever for?) and “painting Martian landscapes as observed by [his] telescopic vision.” Maybe it was better when he’d been the sole survivor? Nah. (But maybe sometimes.)
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Discussing the science fiction that characterized Weisinger’s Superman comics (in Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero), Danny Fingeroth observes that it “had a feel that harked back to the past. [His] stable of artists were all competent, even gifted, but their work had a sensibility reminiscent of the future seen in the pulps of the ’20s and ’30s” (83).
Did
it ever. All of the resplendent cityscapes—whether in Kandor, on Krypton, or on Earth in the thirtieth century—were obviously inspired by the architectural and dioramic visions of “tomorrow” on display two decades earlier at the 1939 World’s Fair, and the rocketry, gadgetry, and haberdashery, not to mention the never-ending parade of Bug-Eyed Monsters, seemed recycled from the illustrations young Mort Weisinger had thrilled to in magazines like Astounding and Super Science and then later purchased himself for Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Narratives, too, were closely modeled upon Depression-era pulp formulas. Premises and stakes were clear, plotting was tight, endings were neat, humor was absent, dialogue was functional and flat. Men were manly, and women, in general, icky nuisances. (They were also noticeably slender and modestly endowed, in striking contrast to their zany voluptuousness in contemporary superhero comic books.)
Weisinger started his career as both a writer and editor of magazine prose fiction (as had most editors at DC Comics before 1970), and he usually privileged the word—in dialogue, in captions, even, as time went on, in expository footnotes—over the picture. (In The Krypton Companion, a fan’s history of “Silver Age” [fifties and early sixties] Superman comics, Will Murray writes that since Weisinger was creating a product for kids, he “felt the need to explain every abrupt change of scenery or to recap a villain like Brainiac’s origin every time he appeared” [13].) While Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Bernard Kriegstein, Harvey Kurtzman, C. C. Beck, Carl Barks, and others toiling as cartoonists for DC’s competitors created stories with pictures, pictures in temporal sequence (setup, development, payoff), Weisinger’s principal artists—Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, and Curt Swan—operated more like old-fashioned magazine and book illustrators, producing unshowy clear-line drawings that identified a story’s key moments. Time was arrested, marked, but rarely generated. The result was legible, uncluttered exposition, and frozen, no-fizz Polaroid storytelling.18