by Tom De Haven
Hired by DC Comics in 1986 to restart the Superman saga from scratch, John Byrne—a Canadian-born cartoonist who’d come to prominence during the late seventies as the artist and coplotter of Marvel’s X-Men—rejiggered Krypton to make it a planet populated by scientifically advanced emotional empties.28 According to the first issue of his six-issue Man of Steel miniseries, Superman’s asexual parents sent an artificially inseminated embryo, not an infant, to Earth. This gestating baby-in-a-rocket-ship is not Kryptonian, since he’s actually “born” on earth. Clark Kent is the real guy. He’s no alien, he’s an earthling. An American, a rural Kansan kid who develops incredible abilities upon reaching puberty. In essence, Byrne was redesigning Clark Kent as an all-American boy struggling with the “otherness” of adolescence and deliberately “creating” the persona of Superman for his part-time altruistic career. Man of Steel, which decreed that every Superman story produced anywhere before that moment no longer counted, is at heart a coming-of-age romance about a self-assured baby-boomer named Clark Kent …
… who is also Superman.
In Byrne’s version, the Kents were still alive in Clark’s adulthood, there never had been a Superboy, and Lex Luthor was not a mad scientist but a megalomaniacal capitalist, the corrupt CEO of LexCorp. Clark Kent grew up to be a real hunk with an Ivy League polish (where’d he get that?) who could hold his own in a Me Generation/Reagan Age workplace. And he was a best-selling novelist as well as an investigative journalist. Lois Lane became a martial arts-savvy no-nonsense Steven Spielberg kind of a heroine, positioned to fall in love gradually with Clark, not the Man of Steel.
Seventeen years later, in 2003, DC Comics decided to give the Superman saga yet another official reboot, and that time hired Mark Waid to write it for artist Lenil Francis Yu to illustrate.
In the proposal for Superman: Birthright that he submitted to DC Comics, Waid argued that this crown jewel of a character keeps dropping off people’s radar because his essence, the things about him that everyone knows and instinctively responds to, keep being forgotten, misplaced, or ignored. He intended, Waid wrote, to get back to basics and rebuild Superman from the ground up. But what ground would that be, exactly, at that stage of the game?
As eventually published, Birthright’s version of Superman came close to being sweetly, too sweetly, New Age (he’s a strict vegetarian, and can see “life auras”), but Waid tweaked his script in ways that not only recognized but engaged harrowing new-century political realities (terrorism, naturally, and genocide in Africa), trying to establish a Superman palatable to post-9/11 readers living in a digital age of lowered expectations. His Superman exists in a cynical, insecure American society with a shallow celebrity culture, in which a life of service, of purely philanthropic service, is met with suspicion, and a philanthropist viewed as being either secretly corrupt or a sap, but either way probably dangerous. Lois Lane tells Superman during their first long conversation in Birthright, “You can’t show up nowadays and be a super-friend. We are a skeptical lot. Government … Advertising … God help me, the media … these things manipulate us 24/7, and worse, we know it. We claim to fight it, but most of us don’t have the energy to struggle every moment of every day. Wear us down enough and the lesson we eventually take to heart is that it’s easier and safer to be cynical than it is to trust someone.”
Naturally, being utterly no-nonsense, she doesn’t ask Superman to tell her the color of her underwear.
In developing and finessing his take on the character, Waid decided that Superman is, most authentically, an alien, a come-here. A classic American immigrant, yes— that again. But also, metaphorically, a “guest worker,” an illegal, a refugee. He looks like us, but he’s not. Approach with caution. As the citizens of Metropolis do at first in Birthright. And it worked. Waid’s version? Worked just fine.
But, then, so did John Byrne’s version. So did Siegel and Shuster’s, so did Mort Weisinger’s. And so did Dave and Max Fleischer’s. So did Bud Collyer’s, so did George Reeves’s. So did Richard Donner’s. So did Bryan Singer’s.
Between 1996 and 2000, a sleek and angular Superman appeared in a series of fifty-four smartly written half-hour cartoons broadcast on the WB network (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)
So, for that matter, did the separate and stand-alone All-Star Superman comic book series that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely collaborated on in 2007-8. Morrison’s scripts imagined a macabre version of Superman that probably came closest to Mort Weisinger’s robot-building, star-igniting demigod, but with a large dose of postmodernist mock-solemn Dada on every page. But it worked.
We can accept Jerry Siegel’s, and Christopher Reeve’s, bumbling, timid, masquerading Clark Kent, but also George Reeves’s macho Kent, and John Byrne’s and Tom Welling’s Clark-the-popular-jock in Man of Steel and Smallville. We can accept a Superman built like a circus acrobat, and one built like a Russian weightlifter. No problem. A Clark Kent despised by Lois Lane, and one she loves and eventually marries? Either one. Married Superman, bachelor Superman, they’re both okay. We don’t care.
All we need, finally, from Superman, any Superman, are a few basics. Writers (and by extension, artists and actors and filmmakers) can play with them all they wish, but they can’t remove them (for long) or mock them (ever). Superman (as toddler, infant, or even as a fertilized egg, they’re all good) was sent hurtling toward Earth in a rocket ship moments before the planet Krypton exploded. He’s an orphan and he’s an alien. And he lives among us as Clark Kent. (Kent’s occupation, I’d argue, doesn’t make all that much difference, although every time he’s been taken out of the Daily Planet building—as happened during the 1970s, when he was briefly a news anchorman for a Metropolis TV station—it doesn’t … feel … exactly … right.)
What else? He wears the costume. The costume.
Anything else? Well: Lois Lane. Naturally. Of course. Superman requires a Lois Lane.
Exploding planet. Rocket ship to earth. Secret identity. Original costume. Lois Lane. What about Lex Luthor? Essential? No, not really, none of the bad guys are. So. Anything else?
Then just this, the basic-basic, saved for last: he can fly, and perform marvelous feats of strength, which he chooses to do because it brings him great satisfaction.
Chooses to do because it brings him great satisfaction. The philanthropist’s dirty little secret.
As with athletes and artists, there has always been a selfish, even a self-serving quality to Superman, to Superman’s ego. He doesn’t require love from the multitudes; Lois Lane will do. Basically, what he needs, and all he needs, is the freedom to act in ways that are satisfying to him.
That’s why he’ll “never stop doing good.”
It makes him feel good, dammit.
Our hero.
* * *
1. In 1986 the name of the original Superman comic book, which had been in continuous publication since 1939, was changed to The Adventures of Superman; the numbering carried on from the original series. At the same time, a new comic book entitled Superman began publication; it was this title that reached number 75 in late 1992.
2. When the nuptials happened, really and truly, in 1996, after Superman was resurrected and had resumed his career, it drew only a fraction of the media attention his death had. And while in the comic books Lois and Clark have been married for well over a decade by now, I’ll bet you it would come as news to just about anyone not a devoted Superman reader.
3. In the Time Annual for 1992, Lance Morrow pop-contextualized the national mood in the year Superman died: “The cold war was over: the fact had a telling effect on American social and moral psychology. Americans, who more than other people require some sense of national purpose, some coherent idea of themselves and their mission, were living in a new unfamiliar context. The struggle against communism, by which Americans had defined their purpose for more than 40 years, had ended in a decisive and even surreal fashion: the other side simply disintegrated. Now Americans felt disoriented. The
y told pollsters they had come to feel their own country had somehow gone off the track. The old stabilities of American life seemed unreliable. Something was wrong” (134).
4. According to the novel—which Wylie drafted while working as a staff writer at the New Yorker—Hugo Danner’s strength “is an application of the same principles of nature which gives insects like the ants the ability to handle great loads” (29). Siegel used the identical metaphor—substituting grasshoppers for ants—in the first page of the first Superman story. In the early 1940s Wylie sued Siegel and Shuster and National Comics for plagiarism, but the case was dismissed. Every month by then Action and Superman comics were selling millions of copies. According to Wylie’s biographer, Truman Frederick Keefer, Gladiator had sold only 2,568 (Philip Wylie, 46).
5. As related by Joe Shuster, National Comics had accepted their first submissions, which (because the two Clevelanders still hoped their favorite creation might one day yet sell as a newspaper strip) didn’t include “Superman.” “But [the editors] did say ‘We like your ideas, we like your scripts and we like your drawings. But please copy over the stories in pen and ink on good paper.’ So I got my mother and father to lend me the money to go out and buy some decent paper, the first drawing paper I ever had, in order to submit these stories properly” (quoted in Mietkiewicz, “When Superman Worked at the Star”).
6. One of Jerry Siegel’s favorite comic strips was Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, which premiered in 1931. In the first sequence, Tracy’s fiancée Tess Trueheart is similarly kidnapped, which may well have stuck in Siegel’s memory. In any event, implications of rape invariably are the subtext of spontaneous abductions like this one in the comics.
7. During the first several years of the program, Collyer acted the part anonymously, uncredited, because listeners were supposed to believe it was the real Superman, appearing “as himself.” Oh. And whose bright idea was that?
8. According to the comics blogger Jeff Trexler, the “origin of Superman” story is a lot murkier than Siegel invariably recalled it during interviews. “In preparing the termination notice to regain the Superman copyright,” Trexler wrote in late 2008, “the Siegel family found a box of old Superman material.” Among the material were photostats of mid-1930s scripts written by Jerry Siegel that present a very different Superman, as well as samples of Superman artwork drawn by Russell Keaton, who at the time was ghosting the Buck Rogers Sunday pages. Trexler continues, “In 1934 Joe Shuster had become discouraged with the Superman newspaper strip and decided to let it go. His departure prompted Siegel to look for a replacement, so he sent an inquiry to Keaton. … Based on the surviving artwork, it would appear that Keaton did indeed prepare a set of sample daily strips for the [Bell] syndicate to review. … The material also provides a decidedly different take on Superman’s origin. In this version, the infant Superman arrives here from the future via a time machine, sent to 1935 by ‘the last man on earth.’ The couple that discovers him: Sam and Molly Kent.”
9. Or as Jim Steranko puts it: “Siegel and Shuster … were in their own way, striking back at a world of bullies that had threatened, bruised and beaten them” (History of Comics, 39). Well, maybe — except there’s no evidence that either of them ever was actually “bruised and beaten” by anybody. More likely, as teenagers, they were there-but-not-there, unnoticed, dismissed. Like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.
10. Bradford Wright observes that “Superman’s America was something of a paradox—a land where the virtue of the poor and the weak towered over that of the wealthy and powerful. Yet the common man could not expect to prevail on his own in this America, and neither could the progressive reformers who tried to fight for justice within the system. Only the righteous violence of Superman, it seemed, could relieve deep social problems—a tacit recognition that in American society it took some might to make right after all” (Comic Book Nation, 13).
11. Recently, the designer Craig Yoe confirmed one of the oddest and longest-lived rumors in American cartooning: that, post-Superman, Joe Shuster contributed illustrations to a number of fetish magazines, among them all sixteen issues of Nights of Horror—the kind of slapdash things once upon a time sold under the counter in pool halls and cigar stores. The characters in Shuster’s erotic drawings — all of which have been reproduced in Yoe’s weird and discomfiting Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster—bear unmistakable resemblances to Superman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Lex Luthor. Although published anonymously, a few of the drawings are signed “Josh,” a pseudonym apparently derived from the first two letters of the artist’s first and last names.
12. Nor, ultimately, did his flawed logic. Mort Weisinger, the longtime editor of the entire Superman line of comic books, once wrote of a radio debate between Wertham and himself: “For his trump card, the good doctor displayed a set of statistics. ‘Here is a list of more than 200 inmates I interviewed in various reform schools,’ he thundered. ‘Each of them admitted having read Superman. That’s your common denominator for juvenile delinquency!’ ‘Dr. Wertham,’ I said, ‘did you get them to confess that they also chew bubble gum, play baseball, eat hot dogs and go to the movies?’” (quoted in Weisinger, “I Flew with Superman”). Touché! (But considering Weisinger’s lifelong tendency to make up more stories than he edited, the Great Debate probably never happened. His friend Julius Schwartz proposed once that his tombstone be engraved “Here Lies Mort Weisinger—As Usual;” Man of Two Worlds, 34.)
13. In one memorable radio serial broadcast during the summer of 1946, Superman took up the cause of religious tolerance when he championed an interfaith community center terrorized by a gang of vigilantes. “Remember this as long as you live,” he lectures at the close of the story. “Whenever you meet up with anyone who is trying to cause trouble between people—anyone who tries to tell you that a man can’t be a good citizen because he is a Catholic or a Jew, a Protestant or what you will—you can be sure he’s a rotten citizen himself and an inhuman being. Don’t ever forget that” (quoted in Tollin, Smithsonian Historical Performances, 26).
14. Action Comics, Superman, World’s Finest (in which Superman teamed up with Batman and Robin), Adventure Comics, Superboy, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, and Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.
15. In the beginning, Weisinger’s responsibilities included writing stories as well as editing them, and he’s credited with the cocreation of a number of long-lived second-string superheroes, including Green Arrow and Aquaman.
16. Neill had played Lois Lane for the first time in the two Superman movie serials of the late 1940s — and she’d played her long-haired, big-hatted, spunky, fearless, and capable of scorn, all traits she was forced to relinquish while playing Lois in The Adventures of Superman from the second season through the sixth.
17. In Umberto Eco’s famous essay “The Myth of Superman,” it’s that absence of causality, or “the notion of time that ties one episode to another,” that constitutes the central dilemma/fascination of the character’s primal version: “In the sphere of a story, Superman accomplishes a given job (he routs a band of gangsters); at this point the story ends. In the same comic book, or in the edition of the following week, a new story begins. If it took Superman up again at the point where he left off, he would have taken a step toward death. On the other hand, to begin a story without showing that another had preceded it would manage, momentarily, to remove Superman from the law that leads from life to death through time. … The stories develop in a kind of oneiric climate—of which the reader is not aware at all—where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said” (153).
18. Otto Binder, who had scripted hundreds (451, to be exact) of Captain Marvel comic book stories between 1941 and 1953 before going to work for Mort Weisinger, was often chagrined by the visual stodginess of the
Superman titles. “Many artists kill the story or make it dull,” he complained, “by failing to make good transitions from panel to panel. To keep continuity intact, choosing how (to illustrate) each scene is vital” (quoted in Voger, Hero Gets Girl, 44).
19. Scrappy Harry Donenfeld died in 1965. The story of his last years, as related by Gerard Jones in Men of Tomorrow, is bizarre. The week before he was to wed his longtime mistress in 1962, Donenfeld, who’d been drinking alone in a hotel room, fell and struck his head. “Injured as he was,” writes Jones, “he managed to crawl into bed. The next day [his son] Irwin found him there. … When Harry finally woke, he was blank. He seemed not to recognize his son. He didn’t speak. … Harry lived for three more years. He became more functional with time, but he never regained his memory” (293).
20. And moral instruction wasn’t the only perk: “Comic books,” says Schumer, “taught me everything I know! How many other 8-year olds had a vocabulary rife with words like invulnerable — elongated—incognito—origin — and hoax! And phrases like ‘to no avail’” (176).
21. Traditionally (before, say, 1965), you didn’t “collect” comic books: you bought one, you read it, you rolled it into a tube and stuck it into your back pocket or school bag—then maybe you passed it along to a friend or it was confiscated by a teacher or parent, but pretty soon it disappeared. It cost a dime. It killed half an hour. It certainly wasn’t a lifestyle.
22. Whitney Ellsworth developed a pilot for a Superboy TV series in 1961, but it didn’t sell. A few years later, however, he was invited to help create the Adam West Batman series. He retired in 1970 and died in 1980.
23. That would seem to be the prevailing judgment even at the House of Superman itself; in an anthology published by DC Comics purporting to contain the “best” of the 1960s stories, only one out of seventeen stories collected was originally published after 1964.