Our Hero

by Tom De Haven

  Robinson went to the National Cartoonists Society (which for years had excluded comic book artists) looking for support. He got it. “We wrote a resolution. We held a press conference. I took it to the Magazine Guild and got a resolution backed by them. I wrote organizations around the world. We really orchestrated a whole national campaign—international campaign actually.” Celebrities such as Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut signed petitions.

  Still, Warner wouldn’t open talks. “They felt if they gave an inch,” said Robinson, “they would be subject to further and further litigation.” Time has proved them right.

  When the bad press continued, official company sentiment started to budge, a little. Warner’s Jay Emmett told the press, “We are not indifferent to their plight, and we intend to do something about it. Legally, nothing has to be done. Morally, I think something should be done” (quoted in Daniels, Superman, 139).

  When talks finally opened, Warner offered Siegel and Shuster each a ten thousand-dollar annual stipend for life, and medical insurance. Adams and Robinson, who had been designated negotiating agents, thought the offer nowhere near good enough. Back and forth it went. Warner raised the annual sum, to twenty thousand, with built-in cost-of-living increases. No, still not good enough. Finally Warner agreed to make provisions for the partners’ heirs, and everything all of a sudden looked promising. Then Robinson and Adams made a potentially deal-breaking demand: the Siegel and Shuster byline had to be reinstated. Warner said, Out of the question. No. In your dreams.

  At that point, Jerry Siegel, staying in New York and following the negotiations with increasing agitation, panicked. He was afraid he’d end up with nothing, again, and told Adams he could live without the credit. Joe would go along with anything Jerry wanted, he always had, and Jerry was willing to concede their credit. Adams begged him to reconsider, but Siegel was cracking. Just one more day, begged Adams. Jerry agreed, but just to one, one more day, one last try, and then they should just settle for the money and the health insurance.

  That night, as Gerard Jones tells the story in Men of Tomorrow, Adams called Jay Emmett at home, saying let’s end this craziness, come on, and they reached a deal: the Siegel and Shuster creator credit would be returned to the comic books and comic strips— to everything, except toys. And that included the new Superman movie.

  Done.

  On December 19, 1975, the agreement was formally made, then reported by Walter Cronkite on Christmas Eve: “Today, at least, truth, justice, and the American way have triumphed.”

  It would’ve been nice if they’d actually become rich, but at least now they’d be comfortable. Their byline—”Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster”—returned to the comic books in early 1976.

  Following Jerry’s death in 1996 (Joe Shuster died in 1992 and left no heirs), his widow and daughter restarted the old Superman copyright wars, and in August 2007, Judge Stephen Larson, of the Central District of California, issued an opinion giving to Siegel’s heirs ownership of the copyright to Superboy, a character DC Comics introduced in 1947 without permission from Siegel and Shuster.

  More recently, on March 26, 2008, Larson ruled that Jerry Siegel’s heirs were the sole owners, as well, of the original Superman material, of those first thirteen cut-and-pasted pages of story and cartoon art, published in Action Comics number 1. According to the New York Times, that means the family is now “entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character” (Cieply, “Ruling”). Determining what that means, exactly, and then apportioning profits, should keep lawyers busy for years to come as our own American Jarndyce and Jarndyce litigation creeps on and on and on.

  Jack Liebowitz, the company accountant who’d told Siegel and Shuster back in 1938 that it was “customary for all of our contributors to release all rights to us. This is the businesslike way of doing things,” died in 2000, aged one hundred.

  39

  For more than forty years, mainstream comic book culture, which refers almost exclusively to what’s happening, and is expected to happen, in the superhero titles published by DC and Marvel, has embraced and been enthralled by the notion of “integrated continuity,” which sounds like a term you’d find in Dilbert. Every angsty character in every title published by a particular company is connected somehow to virtually every other character in his or her home “universe.” Superheroes (or, in more current and less loaded terminology, “meta-humans”) constantly “cross over” into each other’s comic books and story lines, while practically on an annual basis some multi-issue “limited” series introduces a variety of major new “events,” catastrophic of course, into the different universes. All of this results in pretzel logic, slippery timelines, and narrative incoherence, then inevitably to yet another let’s-blow-everything-up-and-start-from-scratch comic book Armageddon (“Crisis on Infinite Earth,” “Countdown,” “Final Crisis,” “Civil War,” “Secret War,” “Secret Invasion”) involving the wholesale slaughter of costumed characters who either will be resurrected after a proper period of mourning (a year to eighteen months usually does it) or have their heroic mantles and noms de guerre assumed by somebody new. The New Atom! The New Iron Man! The New Captain America! To follow superhero comics these days, Superman titles included, is to make a commitment of time and concentration the equivalent of a second job. Which you’ll also need in reality to pay for all of the three-dollar comic books you have to buy just to keep up.

  I can’t make much sense of what’s going on in the Superman comic books these days. And God knows I’ve tried. But a story I’ll start reading in Action Comics continues over in Green Lantern, or Wonder Woman, then picks up again in Batman or Super-girl, but I didn’t get those, I didn’t know, and when I open the next issue of Action, everything and everybody has moved on, and a lot of new brightly costumed characters I don’t recognize are gathered on a strange space ship I’ve never seen before intoning gobbledygook about, oh, I don’t know, power stones. What the hell are power stones?

  The DC characters, the superheroes (each and every one a potential movie franchise) who wear sleek uniforms and fight crime and terrorism, celestial, interdimensional, and plain old terrestrial, when not realigning space and time, number in the many hundreds — and everybody knows everybody else! Hangs out with, is on the same team/league/society/legion with, feuds with, marries, kills-when-they’re-temporarily-insane, etc. Naturally, they all mix it up with one another’s supervillains, too.

  Superman doesn’t fare so well, I think, when he’s just one of countless supermen and -women who can be flung into a brick building or a black hole and come right back for more. Even in his own titles — down to just two monthlies now, Action Comics and Superman—he often seems lost, a bit of a wallflower, in the busy compositions. Three or four or five other just-as-well-put-together but younger-looking superfolk are always sharing the panel or page with him, in many cases wearing costumes that look Barney’s of New York to his L. L Bean.

  Right there, for me, is the problem. If Superman means something, some things, he does because he’s one of a kind. He works best, and does his best work, always has, as someone unique in the world: there is nothing else and nobody like him, not even remotely. “Superman is an abstraction that exists because of other abstractions,” Tom Crippen argues in the Comics Journal. “He exists because of ideas like most, fastest, best. There is some single grid of measurement underlying our sense of the universe, and Superman exists to represent its top rank” (“Big Red Feet,” 169). Right. So if Batman can outwit him and the Flash outrun him, and this year’s latest meta-human can make him seem like a boxer far past his prime—then, excuse me, but what exactly is the point?

  40

  How many different writers have taken a crack at writing Superman’s adventures? It has to number in the thousands. For the first year of the strip, at least, Jerry Siegel produced every script and story line. Gradually, other writers—Don Cameron, Bill Finger (the cocreator of Batman), Don Samachson, even the yo
ung Mort Weisinger—contributed to the series, either by selling ideas to Siegel or, later, by composing scripts themselves. Although he’s not credited, the scripts for those ponderously beautiful and threatening Fleischer animated cartoons from the early 1940s were written by a guy named Jay Morton, who actually coined the phrase “Fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” In his obituary it said he’d been proud of it, too. Well, sure. (Later in his career, Morton wrote for the Hanna-Barbera studio and played a part in creating Yogi Bear.)

  God knows how many writers contributed to the Superman radio program. George Lowther started as the show’s announcer, became its producer as well as a prolific provider of scripts, then went on to publish, in 1942, the first Superman prose novel. It was Lowther who changed Superman’s birth name from Jerry Siegel’s original Kal-L to Kal-el and his father’s name from Jor-L to Jor-el (later comic book writers would capitalize the e), which is why I’ve never put any credence into the argument that Siegel intended Superman to be a Jewish avatar, since the suffix “-el” in Hebrew means “sent by God.” All you can really argue is that George Lowther possibly meant Superman to be a Jewish avatar, and so what, right?

  Until the end of World War II, the number of writers who provided Superman with something to do probably adds up to no more than a couple of dozen, if that many; then it quickly explodes into higher math. Writers for the movie serials, for the George Reeves TV series, for coloring books, children’s records, Saturday morning cartoons, for paperback novels, bubble-gum cards, the Broadway musical, the Christopher Reeve movies, for episodes of Lois and Clark, for the Superboy TV show that aired between 1988 and 1992, for the WB’s animated Superman cartoons of the late 1990s, for Smallville. For computer games. Arithmetic workbooks. Several thousand writers creating tens of thousands of stories featuring hundreds of thousands of feats and saves about an imaginary character who’s been around and famous since 1938.

  But it’s like I told those telephone interviewers who called me when Superman Returns was coming out. No matter how many writers have written his adventures, or how often he’s been updated or “retro-configured,” more than seventy years later Superman remains fundamentally the same creation that emerged that first long day (maybe it was in the summer of 1934, maybe it wasn’t) at the Shuster family apartment in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Certain qualities of Superman are immutable. Change any of them, somehow they change back. Give him talents and powers, and inclinations, that aren’t, somehow, him, and one day they’re just … gone. For a period during the 1940s, Superman could walk through walls, become invisible, and hypnotize anyone. Then he couldn’t, and didn’t—because he wouldn’t. In the second Christopher Reeve film, Superman could simply will away his powers (for the love of Lois Lane, ordinary human being), and was saddled as well with some fairy-tale attribute called the Kiss of Forgetfulness. Kiss of Forgetfulness. Forget this, buddy. And we never heard of it again.

  Producer Jon Peters spent a good chunk of the 1990s developing a new Superman movie in which Superman a) couldn’t fly, b) was a master of martial arts, and c) Goodwilled away his familiar red, blue, and yellow uniform in favor of a shiny new black leather one. Nicolas Cage was set to play the character. Tim Burton was interested in directing. Several scripts and millions of dollars later, the whole enterprise collapsed. Cage had a son and named him Kal-El, but he never played his kid’s namesake. “Sometimes,” writes Les Daniels, “Superman seems more powerful than anyone who works to create his adventures” (Superman, 138).

  41

  Do you know what a tulpa is? The word is Tibetan, and refers to a “being”—nothing about “legendary” in the definition—”cre-ated by the imagination of another man;” a sentient being who comes into existence solely by the sheer force of another’s will and willed belief (Schwartz, Unlikely Prophet, 10). As I understand it, a tulpa is kind of like a golem, but not really. He’s not made of anything, like mud, he just appears out of thin air, and I gather once that happens, he’s not yours to command. Or she. There could be female tulpas, I guess. Not that I’m an expert.

  I first came upon the word and its definition in a charming but deeply peculiar memoir by Alvin Schwartz called An Unlikely Prophet, published in 1997. The subtitle is Revelations on the Path Without Form, and the book claims to be the true account of the author’s journey to spiritual enlightenment under the tutelage of a giant Tibetan tulpa named Mr. Thongdon, who shows up one day on a bicycle at Schwartz’s house in Westchester County.

  The only reason I picked up and read the book, I admit, is Schwartz’s connection to Superman. For sixteen years, beginning in 1942, he was one of the half-dozen principal writers for Superman comic books and comic strips—he even created Bizarro, that chiseled and chalky-white imperfect copy of Superman whose permanence in our popular culture not to mention our vocabulary seems pretty much assured. (“How bizarro.” The Bizarro daily newspaper cartoon. Bizarro Jerry on Seinfeld. Bizarro has even appeared on a baseball cover of Sports Illustrated.) After quitting the comics business in 1958, Schwartz went on to a career writing “philosophical novels,” feature films, and documentaries.

  While his adventures with Mr. Thongdon are delightful and funny and convincing (on the page, at least), what I found most rewarding in An Unlikely Prophet were Schwartz’s tales of the Golden Age comic book business and his insights into the stubborn character of Superman. Schwartz claims that Superman has acquired “a kind of reality” that controls his writers and editors “without their realizing it” (4). No matter how anyone, or any company (or for that matter, any media platform) decides to change him, reorganizing Superman’s nature and physical appearance or replacing his old baggage with new, it will never entirely take. Some of it might, but not all of it, and probably not much. Spurious versions, fundamentally wrongheaded premises, can, and often do, prevail from time to time, but eventually the character, Superman himself, Tulpa Superman, will—somehow, somehow—resist and reverse the meddling, reconstituting himself in the world as he means to be.

  “It wasn’t I, or any of the other writers or the editors … who directed Superman’s destinies,” writes Schwartz. “Superman directed his own destinies. All of us were merely pawns” (5). Schwartz describes a ride he took once in a taxicab with the tulpa Superman, and he presents it as fact. But even if you don’t buy that (you don’t?), it’s still a pretty good metaphor for how the character hews to certain conditions and boundaries; beyond this point, he will not go. Or this point, either. Or that one. That one looks interesting, though. Let me go beyond that point. Yes! (But maybe no.)

  Not only can’t you tug on Superman’s cape, you can’t make him act in ways that contradict his nature. His fixed integrity is something Alvin Schwartz came to believe was real, as real as this book you’re reading, and accounts for his abandonment of comics: “Like most others,” he writes, “I found Weisinger difficult to deal with. But I endured until one day he insisted that I write a story in which Superman finds some way to transfer his powers to Lois Lane. I didn’t want to do that story. I thought such a plot was out of character. In a deeper sense I thought certain quintessential elements of Superman’s reality, as I understood it, would be compromised if he could transfer his powers so capriciously. So I wrote the story under protest. And then I left. The charm was broken. I never wrote comics again” (5).

  But exactly what are those “certain quintessential elements of Superman’s reality”? Jerry Siegel’s earliest Superman didn’t fly; he was a jumper, a mighty leaper of tall buildings. It wasn’t until the character appeared on radio that he took off and flew. And forever after, in every medium, he has flown. Superman flies. It wasn’t an original attribute, and obviously it was unnecessary to be accepted. But added later, perhaps even by mistake, flight seemed instantly better, and both its simplicity and romance made it a keeper, a dominant trait.

  We think now that Superman’s midwestern youth is an integral part of his makeup and appeal, maybe eve
n part of his appeal problem. He’s from corny-in-August Kansas. He grew up on a farm. He’s “from” Kansas the way Davy Crockett was “from” Tennessee, but it wasn’t until the late 1940s that Clark Kent’s heartland upbringing even entered the story. Smallville itself was not invented till later still, and for a long time not identified as being located in any particular region of the country. But like flight, a rootsy rural childhood seemed right, and what’s more rootsy and rural, and what says “home place” better in our collective national fantasy, Dorothy, than the state of Kansas? It all resonated, and by repetition became part of the canon. Most things don’t, but some things stick.

  How powerful Superman is, and the limits of his strength are things that have never been fixed, either, but just keep being adjusted, up or down. Siegel’s (and the Fleischers’ animated) Superman existed comfortably with the strength of, say, ten men; he was always being sent rolling and tumbling or buried underneath building debris; he was marvelous, astounding, but still vulnerable. He’d often get a little … groggy, even wobbly kneed. No way could that guy go flying off into outer space.

  But during the Mort Weisinger era, Superman not only could fly into space, he could fly at the speed of light to distant galaxies, maybe ignite a dying star or twenty while he was there, or visit some weird dimension of purple super-geniuses in jumpsuits. A character like that doesn’t have time for cops-and-robbers stuff. Anyhow, in those years he couldn’t even punch a bank robber, he’d knock the guy’s head right off.

  As different writers came and went, Superman’s powers and abilities multiplied and then decreased, multiplied and then decreased. It still goes on. Whenever he has lost his human scale, plunged too far in the direction of godhood, eventually down go the powers. When they become too limited, too limiting, they’re amped up. Checks and balances. Mystically applied, if you believe Alvin Schwartz.