Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

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  Superman’s archenemy Luthor didn’t arrive in the comic books till 1940. At first he was just another one of Jerry Siegel’s criminal masterminds, a type that had entered popular fiction with Poe’s Minister D in “The Purloined Letter” and then, because you can never have enough of a good thing, just kept coming back— Dr. Jack Quartz in the Nick Carter dime novels of the 1880s and ’90s, Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Moriarty, Dr. Fu Manchu, James Bond’s Hugo Drax and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

  Luthor is not only a criminal mastermind, he’s also a mad scientist, and several of those had also preceded him in the earliest Superman stories. But only one had had a recurring role to play, the wheelchair-bound bald-headed Ultra-Humanite, a name Jerry Siegel threw together probably from a handy thesaurus, using one-to-one synonyms for “super” and “man.” Ultra, who looked like the vampire in Nosferatu, came with typically grandiose schemes of world conquest, and usually dressed in a lab smock. He could transport himself mentally into another person’s body, including, in 1940, a woman’s, a movie star’s. At the end of that adventure the transgendered Ultra died in a volcano, and didn’t return.

  A few months later, in Action Comics number 23, Luthor showed up, Ultra’s match in gadgetry and goals, but without any physical handicap and sporting a full head of red hair in a bowl cut. When Siegel and Shuster’s Superman first meets Luthor and confronts him in a dirigible-lofted hideout, the villain has been inciting an armed conflict between two European nations as part of his greater plan to engulf the continent, then the whole world, in all-out warfare. Although he wears a red cassock and sits on a throne (like Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon), Luthor introduces himself to Superman as “Just an ordinary man—but with th’ brain of a super-genius.” You can’t tell whether he’s supposed to sound like a Bowery Boy or some chappie out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. I tend toward Wodehouse.

  Eventually, Luthor moves his criminal operation back to the States, to hideouts in the vicinity of Metropolis (mountaintop citadel, submersible lab). He shuts off the water supply to extort the city, employs narcotic incense to seize mental control of stockbrokers. By his fourth appearance in Action Comics, Luthor has managed to lose his red hair and become the familiar cueball-headed villain dressed sometimes in lab whites, other times in Capone/Soviet Politburo pinstripes. (Supposedly he was first drawn bald by accident, in one of the newspaper strips ghosted by Leo Novak, who might not have been following his appearances in comic books and may have mixed him up with the Ultra-Humanite. Joe Shuster supposedly decided bald was better.)

  During the early years of the series, Luthor developed a psychotic hatred for Superman. Eventually he became consumed more by a desire to kill him than to take over the world. His motive for such malevolence, whenever it was mentioned, was attributed to fury at Superman’s “meddling.” A fairly typical rant: “I’ll make him suffer for all the times he defeated me before. I’ll play with him like a cat with a mouse! I’ll humiliate him again and again until he begs for mercy. Then I’ll destroy him.”

  Not until the Weisinger years, beginning with a story published in Adventure Comics number 27 in 1960, did Luthor acquire a personal motive (and, for the first time, a first name: Lex. Lex Luthor). The tale introduces readers to a teenaged Luthor (son, we’re told, of a traveling salesman) who has moved to Smallville with a creepy celebrity fixation on the town’s famous Superboy. He and his hero meet and hit it off (quick-thinking Lex operates a bulldozer to get rid of a kryptonite meteor that has paralyzed Superboy in the middle of a cornfield). Once Superboy discovers that Lex is a “scientific genius,” he builds him a backyard laboratory, stocking it with “rare chemicals, some still unknown which [he] burrowed out of the ground, at super-speed.”

  Young Luthor isn’t going to waste time on high school science projects, naturally, and turns his attention to the development of a “kryptonite antidote,” a thank-you gift for his new best pal and benefactor. When Lex accidentally knocks over a flask and the lab goes up in flames, Superboy extinguishes the blaze “with a mighty super-puff of breath,” only to discover moments later that it also tipped an acid bottle against the antidote bottle, and the resultant fumes that Lex breathed in caused all of his hair to fall out. Luthor is enraged. “You were jealous of my genius!” He believes Superboy deliberately caused his baldness. Clearly, this supergenius hadn’t been wrapped too tightly from the start.

  The “origin” of the Superman-Luthor feud, reiterated for decades in stories and footnotes throughout the Superman series, is, you must admit, pretty fruity, but for its intended audience of ten-year-olds it had logic and power: blamed for something you didn’t do! And in 1960, a completely bald head wasn’t quite the macho thing it is now. Yul Brynner. Who else? So, if you were ten, you could see how Luthor might hate Superboy for turning him into a freak, even if he didn’t do it on purpose.

  Probably it was a coincidence—or at least done unconsciously— but during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wayne Boring, DC’s chief Superman artist, drew Lex Luthor with more and more physical bulk and increasingly deeper scowls till he came to resemble a thuggish (or more thuggish) Mort Weisinger. If Weisinger had noticed, he most likely would have been amused. He savored his reputation as a bully, as a barking heavy straight out of gangster movies — a reputation only enhanced one day in 1966 when he summoned Boring to his office and fired him after almost thirty years of uninterrupted service to the company and the character. “Do you need a kick in the stomach,” asked Weisinger, “to know when you’re not wanted?” (quoted in Duin and Richardson, Comics Between the Panels, 56). You couldn’t make this guy up, you could not. Maybe Damon Runyon could.

  This wasn’t the first betrayal in Boring’s long career on Superman. As related by Steve Duin and Mike Richardson in Comics Between the Panels, “When Shuster and Jerry Siegel finally sued DC [in 1946-47] over the ownership of the character, Boring wound up in the thick of the fight. ‘Jerry hired a lawyer, the lousiest lawyer I’ve ever seen,’ Boring told Richard Prachter. Because Boring was drawing Siegel’s character, Siegel sued him for abrogation of contract and told him he was fired. ‘Why Siegel’s lawyer advised him to do that, I don’t know,’ Boring said. Jack Liebowitz at DC vetoed Boring’s dismissal; DC figured only DC could fire Wayne Boring” (56). Which it did, strikingly so, two decades later.

  According to Lynn Wooley, Weisinger had decided “to put Superman in more ‘situation’ stories rather than in stories involving crime and super villains,” and had come to feel that Boring’s iconic muscleman, the company standard for twenty years, was wrong for the new style. It projected strength, unassailability— but sensitivity? Not so much. The “emotional stories featured no villains at all,” says Wooley, “but rather had Superman return to Krypton to fall in love with a beautiful Kryptonian woman— or, meeting up with another beautiful girl who turned out to be a mermaid—or reliving his college days and how he outwitted a wily professor who was on to his secret identity—or, various Weisinger ‘imaginary’ stories about ‘what ifs’ in Superman’s life. This was a natural evolution for a god-like hero who had no real peers among his adversaries” (“’Twixt Joe and Kurt,” 29).

  Wooley’s argument makes sense: Weisinger’s new type of Superman stories did, indeed, focus more on emotional events, their plots pivoting on situational premises rather than crime or adventure. But the odd thing is, each story she mentions that typified the “new intimacy” was, in fact, illustrated by Wayne Boring. Maybe her point is that Weisinger was disappointed at how Boring had done them. Which is conceivable. As I’ve mentioned, the characters Boring drew rarely if ever looked at each other, a sizable problem in melodramas of doomed romance.

  After Boring got the boot (right in the solar plexus), Curt Swan took over as Weisinger’s primary Superman artist. Swan’s regular-guy version of the Man of Steel, like Boring’s granitic one before him, would remain the house style for a solid twenty years. And there are still plenty of people—the comedian Jerry Seinfeld a
mong them—who insist Swan’s Superman is the definitive one.

  Described by his daughter as resembling someone straight out of A Prairie Home Companion (“‘You know, Lutheran. Scandinavian good guy that would never impose his will on anybody’” quoted in Zeno, Curt Swan, 52]), Swan began to freelance for DC Comics in 1946, illustrating some of the first Superboy adventures. By 1954 he was penciling (he never inked his own work) the occasional Superman story and all of the stories, three eight-pagers per issue, for the then-new Jimmy Olsen bimonthly, launched to cash in on the character’s television popularity and in which Superman invariably appeared. Although Swan never drew his Jimmy Olsen to resemble Jack Larson, he did model his first-pass Superman on George Reeves.

  Later on, once Weisinger had brought him onto the Action and Superman titles, Swan abandoned the Reeves resemblance, instead basing the look of his Superman on Johnny Weissmuller and his Clark Kent on Alex Raymond’s comic-strip private eye Rip Kirby. “Mort Weisinger told me early on to soften the jaw that Wayne Boring had put on Superman,” he wrote in a brief memoir that appeared in Superman at Fifty. “I guess it had been Wayne’s way of showing strength and power. Mort wanted the drawing to be more illustrative and less cartoony, maybe a little more handsome” (Swan, “Drawing Superman,” 43). Superman’s hairline began to recede, fractionally and steadily over the months and then years of Swan’s tenure, but that might have been the artist’s own autobiographical contribution.

  Like everyone else who worked for Mort Weisinger, Curt Swan came in for his full share of verbal abuse. He once quit and took a job at an ad agency after connecting the migraine headaches that floored him to his humiliating experiences with Weisinger. Swan eventually returned to DC because comic books offered a better income (it must have been a really small ad agency) and realized that if he ever hoped to be rid of his headaches, he would have to stand up to Weisinger the bully. “He was a very sick, insecure man,” Swan said. “Most people were cowed by his presence. Eventually I had no fear of Mort and I would chew his ass out” (quoted in Duin and Richardson, Comics Between the Panels, 431).

  With that ogre you had to, it was the only way. You needed to put down your foot when he demanded another (the fourth? the fifth?) round of corrections or revisions. You had to raise your voice. Stick up for yourself. If you didn’t, you were super-mincemeat. Some of Weisinger’s contributors could stand up to him and some couldn’t. Otto Binder, creator of Brainiac, Kandor, Supergirl, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the Bizarro World, by far the most inventive and reliable of the Superman writers at the time, could not; rather than continue to work for Weisinger, he quit the field in 1960.

  Don Cameron, who had scripted Superman stories since the 1940s, once became so enraged that he tried to push Weisinger out of his office window, nine stories above Lexington Avenue. “I gladly would have started the fund to hire a good defense lawyer,” Murray Boltinoff, another DC editor, quipped about the famous assault (quoted in Duin and Richardson, Comics Between the Panels, 463).

  The horror stories still told about Weisinger are legion. You’d pitch him a story and he’d call it crap, then kick you out and hand over your idea to the next writer who showed up. He’d ridicule your tie, your suit, your shoes if they were scuffed. He’d send a writer, any writer, every writer, home on the subway to revise a script—again!—again! This is dreck! This is worse! Do it over. You moron! You idiot! Mort Weisinger was a mean son of a bitch, no getting around it. Focused, populist, visionary; hurtful, ornery, egotistical. The John Ford of comic books.

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  Weisinger claimed he’d first started trying to quit the Superman grind around 1965. Times had changed—alarmingly for a political reactionary like himself who had railed in the past against pinkos and commie symps on the DC payroll. The future just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. He felt out of touch. As Will Murray observes, writers of letters to the editor who previously had “challenged logical lapses or crowed over boo-boos that had gotten past Weisinger [now] wondered why Superman wasn’t solving social ills or dealing with the seemingly endless stalemate in Vietnam” (“Superman’s Editor,” 13). But Superman didn’t do social problems. At least that’s not how Weisinger understood him. Or wanted him.

  But whenever he said he was quitting, Jack Liebowitz just gave him another big raise and sent him back to work.19 In 1970, though, Liebowitz himself was preparing to move on—the former accountant, now a fabulously wealthy man of business, a philanthropist with his name all over the place in New York City and on Long Island, had been offered a seat on the board of directors of Warner Communications, which now owned DC Comics — and Mort Weisinger’s resignation as the uncontested Superman czar at last was accepted. He was only fifty-five, but “suddenly,” according to Murray Boltinoff, “he was a poor old man, really sick.” Weisinger weighed three hundred pounds, give or take, his breathing was labored, his digestion was shot, and he had heart troubles. “Which,” said Boltinoff, “proved he had a heart anyway. A lot of people doubted that” (quoted in Duin and Richardson, Comics Between the Panels, 464).

  As Weisinger reckoned things, he had edited more than two thousand Superman stories — each one specifically written and drawn to entertain a readership of nine-, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds. But so had almost every other comic book story (whether about a superhero, a billionaire duck, Gene Autry, Jerry Lewis, or a company of U. S. soldiers still fighting World War II) published in the United States since the establishment of the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The postage-stamp-sized official seal of approval printed large on the cover (upper right-hand corner) guaranteed the contents to be as morally unobjectionable as a seed catalog.

  Because of the code, which the industry established to regulate (read: save) itself following the Wertham attacks and the nightmarish U. S. Senate investigations, comic books were scoured not only of violence and gore, “salacious illustrations and suggestive posture,” but of anything, anything at all, that didn’t corroborate every hypothetical rock-ribbed Main Streeter’s ideals of prudence or commendable conduct, or adequately “emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.” Crime was to be punished, authority and authority figures were to be depicted favorably, “slang should be discouraged and whenever possible good grammar … employed.” Characters even had to be “depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society” (“Code”). (Masks, capes, leotards, and utility belts all fit the bill.) “That meant,” writes Gerard Jones, “that comics could show even less than TV, and every one of them would have to be aimed at kids” (Men of Tomorrow, 278).

  So?

  Although the first comics I read were syndicated newspaper strips, by the age of eight I’d already developed a parallel and often stronger passion for comic books: not so much because they were produced specifically for me and my kind, but because they were things I could choose for myself, stopping after school into one, or all, of my neighborhood candy stores. I could select, discriminate, make value judgments depending upon the cover. I could evaluate, determine favorites. That seemed important, an important pleasure to indulge and develop. A skill.

  Before I started revisiting Superman comics to write about them, there were at least a dozen stories I read during the late

  1950s, early ’60s that I still distinctly remembered (the memories, I admit, more beguiling than treasured, but still, beguilement is not too shabby a pleasure) and could tick off without trouble, among them the first Bizarro story (in Superboy number 68), the first Kandor story (Action number 122), the arrival of the mermaid Lori Lemaris, Clark Kent’s college sweetheart (Superman number 129), of Titano the superape (Superman number 138), of Metallo and of Supergirl (both in Action number 252).

  While I bought a lot of comic books as a kid that weren’t Superman titles (or DC titles for that matter), and while I preferred Flash and Green Lantern and The Atom for their sleek illustration-based art and faster plots, I always picked up and read (maybe not first, but always on the day of purchase) ev
ery title in the Superman line whenever a new one appeared in a spinner rack.

  If I were sick in bed with measles or the mumps, those were the comics I’d ask someone to bring home for me: they gave the most solace. Superman’s world was comfortable and comforting, and in its own loony but legitimate way, ethically articulate. “Of all the superheroes, Superman made the biggest impression,” the graphic designer Arlen Schumer has written in a memoir about growing up fatherless in the 1950s. “I barely knew how to read, but I could ‘read’ Superman! Through him, I understood the difference between right and wrong—what it meant to be a hero. If moral instruction and inspiration are what fathers are supposed to provide, then Superman was my de facto father” (Silver Age, 176).20

  Growing up in circumstances similar to Schumer’s (absent dad), I felt pretty much the same way. Superman didn’t take me out to ball games at Yankee Stadium or show me how to build an operating Ferris wheel from an erector set, but he was a reliable presence in my life, and an example.

  Weisinger’s Superman may well have been, as David Mamet wrote, “a dull fantasy” in many respects, but it was a consistent fantasy, you could live inside of it, it made sense. To a ten-year-old it could sometimes make profound sense.