Bogdanove expertly re-created the style that Joe Shuster used in drawing Superman at the time, and the story made clever use of comparing Superman to the traditional Jewish figure of the mystical, superstrong golem, specifically the classic piece of Jewish folklore about Rabbi Judah Loew creating a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks during the sixteenth century. In the story, Clark Kent is sent to Europe to expose the horrors that were being inflicted by the Nazis. While undercover as a resident of the ghetto, Superman ends up protecting the denizens in much the same way that the famous golem did in the sixteenth century. The story is told with quite a few graphic depictions of the conditions in the ghetto and the savagery of the Nazis. However, many people were put off by the fact that DC Comics made a specific point of telling the whole story without using the words Jew or Holocaust.
When the story became a bit of an issue (even making it onto the Howard Stern morning radio show), the editor of the title, Joey Cavalieri, explained his decision to specifically excise the words in question (together with the word Catholic) in an attempt to avoid offending anyone. He felt that young readers might end up using the insults the Nazis in the comic hurl at Jewish children and that a comic designed to speak of tolerance shouldn’t give more fodder to intolerances. Thus Cavalieri chose to make readers search a bit for the identity of the people that the Nazis were persecuting. Such phrases as the “target population of the Nazis’ hate” and the “murdered residents” were used, although a great deal of Yiddish was used as well, so it was not exactly a mystery—just not evident to children unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust.
DC issued a public apology for the incident, which was accepted by the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.
THESE WERE NOT the only times that DC Comics found the content of its Superman comics closely examined by outside forces. In fact, during the 1940s a number of Superman stories drew reactions from the United States Department of War that might lead one to ask the question, “Is Superman a spy?”
The first two instances came from issues of Superman that the U.S. government (which kept a watchful eye on popular publications of the time) quietly asked DC to hold off from publishing. The first, “The Battle of the Atoms,” was written by Don Cameron, Jerry Siegel’s successor as writer of the Superman comic when Siegel went to war. In it, Lex Luthor attacks Superman with what Luthor calls “an atomic bomb.” It holds no resemblance to an actual atomic bomb, but the government felt it would be better to avoid any mention of the term atomic bomb until it was made public that the government was developing one, so the story was delayed for a couple of years.
The second, “Crime Paradise,” was written by a writer whose name has been lost to history (credits at the time were nonexistent, but it was most likely Cameron, Alvin Schwartz, or perhaps even Siegel after he returned from the service). “Crime Paradise” was written after the atom bomb became public and was about Superman filming an atom bomb detonation for the army. The comic was again delayed for a year or so, most likely because the government preferred not to have the atom bomb featured in this manner so soon after its use in World War II.
The most notable example, though, was Alvin Schwartz’s Superman comic strip, which led to the U.S. War Department filing official reports on its attempts to keep Schwartz’s story quiet. Schwartz was a young, well-read author who worked in comics for a number of years. He joined Cameron on the comic books but was also the successor to Siegel on the Superman comic strip. In 1945 DC Comics was contacted by the War Department over a story Schwartz was developing in the strip that involved a cyclotron (also called an atom smasher), which was what physicists used throughout the 1940s to develop the very first nuclear power plants in America. During that period, all nuclear research was kept under strict government control because of fears that it would lead to other countries developing nuclear weapons. Any possible leaks were cause for concern, so when Schwartz wrote a story involving one of the key tools in current nuclear research, the government sprang into action.
The FBI first approached Siegel in the army, thinking that he was still writing the comic (his byline was still on the strip). When he explained that he was no longer working on the strip, the War Department went directly to DC Comics to ask them to censor the strip, which they did. Later on, the agent assigned to the case, Lt. Col. John Lansdale Jr., explained in a memo his twofold reasons for getting involved with the Superman strip. The first, as mentioned above, was fear of a leak, even from a comic strip. The second, and more prominent, reason, though, was that nuclear energy was soon to become an important part of American power, and the government wanted its citizens to take the mechanics of it seriously. They felt this would be undermined if they were appearing as part of Superman comics.
Amusingly enough, Alvin Schwartz was informed of the situation when a number of newspapers featured the story after the war (no one told him about the controversy at the time) and revealed where he got his information about the cyclotron: an article he had read in Popular Mechanics a decade earlier!
THE NAZIS WERE not the only real-life bad guys that Superman found himself dealing with back in the 1940s. In a memorable story line from the Superman radio series, Superman went head-to-head with the Ku Klux Klan!
The story was the brainchild of the author Stetson Kennedy, who spent a good amount of time after World War II infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, along with a network of other undercover agents, all working together to get as much information on the secretive racist organization as possible. Kennedy’s theory was that if he was to pierce the cloak of secrecy the Klan surrounded its activities with, then the Klan would lose a great deal of its power.
As a means of achieving this goal, Kennedy contacted the popular Superman radio show, The Adventures of Superman, which starred Bud Collyer as Superman (and Clark Kent, naturally), and suggested that they do a series on the Klan, with Kennedy providing information he collected (either in person or through one of his operatives) to make the story more realistic. The show agreed, and in June of 1946 began the story line “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” in which Superman encounters the evil Clan of the Fiery Cross (standing in for the Ku Klux Klan). The story used a number of actual passwords from the Georgia branch of the Klan (which was headed by former Imperial Wizard Dr. Samuel Green), though perhaps less secret information was passed on than listeners might recall. The story was spread out over sixteen parts, so the secret information was similarly divvied out. Still, secret Klan information was distributed to the radio audience of the Superman radio show.
That much is undisputed, but what is disputed is exactly what effect the show’s story line had upon the Klan or America’s view of the Klan. There have been stories told of the Klan attempting to organize a boycott of the radio show on Georgia radio affiliates, but there has been no real proof of any such boycott attempt, and if there was one, it was not successful, since the show continued to be broadcast normally in Georgia. In addition, the story line has been repeatedly credited with spurring a decrease in Klan enrollment, which seems to be a difficult statement to prove, since the Klan did not exactly take a precise census of its membership. Even if there was a decrease, there is yet to be any proof that the decline was related to the Superman series (Klan membership had been dropping steadily since the 1930s).
A PLACE WHERE the Superman radio show did have an undisputed impact was on the Superman mythos as a whole. The Adventures of Superman had its radio debut in early 1940, less than two years after the creation of the Superman comic book. The show lasted an impressive eleven years, finally coming to an end in March 1951. Until the late 1940s, when it expanded to a thrice-weekly half-hour show, it ran in syndication three to five times a week, in fifteen-minute installments usually airing in the late afternoon or early evening. In an attempt to maintain the illusion that Superman actually appeared on the program, his portrayer, actor Bud Collyer, went un-credited for the first six years of the show’s run.
Due to the fact that there
were only two years’ worth of stories to adapt from the comic book, the radio show quickly ran out of stories and was forced to create some of its own. And the radio show was not always consistent with the comics. In fact, in the second episode the radio show came up with its own origin story that was drastically different from the one in the comics, but this story, which involved Superman coming to Earth as an adult and befriending a professor who helped him take the identity of a reporter named Clark Kent so as to study Earth, did not catch on with the public.
Superman star Bud Collyer reading about the man he portrays on air.
The radio show had better luck with the characters it introduced. If the comic did not have a character it needed, and often even if it did, the radio program just created a new one. A number of these new characters, like Superman’s police contact Inspector Henderson, became so popular that they were quickly adapted for use in the comic books. The most notable new additions were Clark Kent’s coworkers at the Daily Planet (in fact, the radio show came up with the name Daily Planet—the comic called it the Daily Star in the original stories), specifically editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen. Olsen, in particular, was so popular that he had his own spin-off comic that lasted for over a decade, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
One of the radio show’s strangest additions to the Superman mythos was the introduction of Kryptonite, the pieces of Superman’s home planet Krypton that came to Earth in the explosion that destroyed said planet. The small fragments are radioactive and are highly deadly to Superman. The radio show came up with the idea of Kryptonite because of a format constraint. Since it was a weekly program, the writers needed gimmicks to give Collyer opportunities to take vacations. In the episodes with Kryptonite, Superman is deathly ill, so another actor could simply make moaning noises to fill in for Collyer. Kryptonite was soon added to the Superman comics, and over the years many different varieties of Kryptonite have popped up, each one having a different effect on Superman (the most popular varieties are green, which hurts Superman, and red, which causes different unpredictable transformations, like turning him into a dragon or a giant).
WHILE KRYPTONITE MADE its first appearance in the Superman radio show, it could have been in the comics first if it had been up to Jerry Siegel. He wrote a script in 1940 that would have dramatically shifted the Superman mythos but instead ended up dramatically shifting the creative dynamic between him and DC Comics.
“The K-Metal from Krypton,” written by Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster’s studio, was most likely originally intended to appear in 1940 in Superman #8. In this tale, Siegel introduced K-Metal, a meteor made up of pieces from the exploded Krypton that was passing close to Earth. As it passed by, Superman felt weak and lost his powers. After hearing a scientist explain where the meteor came from, Superman realized for the first time that he was from the planet Krypton (this was not revealed to Superman in the comics for a number of years). Later, while investigating some crooked miners with gangster connections, Clark Kent and reporter/love interest Lois Lane are trapped inside a mine shaft with a group of gangsters, slowly losing oxygen. While there, though, the meteor travels far enough from Earth for its radiation to cease affecting Superman. With his strength returned, he must make a choice—with the group trapped in a small space, there would be no way he could save them without revealing his secret identity.
Ultimately, he decides that their lives are more important than his secret, and so he rescues them all. The gangsters, upon being freed, take the opportunity to attack Superman and Lois, and the end result is an avalanche that kills everyone except Superman and Lois. With the knowledge of his secret identity, a beaming Lois quickly agrees to become Superman’s partner, helping him to maintain his secret identity. After some time to reflect, though, her disposition changes: she realizes that Superman/Clark has played her for a fool for years. Still, she agrees to act as his partner, but only for the good of mankind, not because of any personal feelings for him.
The script was drawn and ready for publication when DC editorial coordinator Whitney Ellsworth decided to pull the story (see page 37, where Ellsworth makes a similarly important editorial decision). No specific reason was ever given, but one would think that the dramatic change in the Superman-Lois relationship was the deciding factor. Ellsworth was also the DC liaison to the Superman radio show, so it would not be surprising to learn that he passed on the unpublished Kryptonite idea to the show’s writers (although this has never been established). With this decision, it became clear for the first time in the history of the young strip that the destiny of the characters would not be controlled by Superman’s creators but by DC Comics.
The story was lost until, almost fifty years later, a DC employee, Mark Waid (who would later go on to become a popular writer for DC), discovered a faded, dusty copy of Siegel’s scripts in a box at the back of DC’s library archives. While DC has decided not to publish the script, at least fans now have access to the original story. In fact, there is a Web site (http://k-metal.cc) where a group of artists illustrate Siegel’s script.
Interestingly enough, in the 1990s DC ended up doing what it would not let Siegel do in 1940: allow Superman to reveal his secret identity to Lois Lane and let the pair eventually become husband and wife.
IN THE 1980S, DC rebooted Superman. It brought in a new writer-artist, John Byrne, and gave him the freedom to revamp the entire line of Superman comics. Byrne ended up keeping about 90 percent of the elements of the comic before the reboot, changing only relatively minor aspects of the character. One of the changes was that Clark Kent was given a bit of a makeover and depicted as more of an attractive character in his own right. Indicative of this change in his characterization, the writers that followed Byrne eventually had Lois Lane date Clark Kent. The two became a steady couple, and finally in 1990 Clark proposed to Lois and she accepted! Soon after the engagement was announced, the next big shock came when Clark revealed his secret identity to Lois.
In 1991 the creative teams and editorial staff of the Superman titles (at that point consisting of four different titles) got together to plan the next step in the Superman mythos, which at the time was thought to include the marriage of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. The proposal took place in Superman (Vol. 2) #50, so the plan was to have the wedding take place in #75, in late 1992. However, a bit of a snag came from outside DC Comics editorial.
As noted earlier, DC Comics is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment, and at the time Warner Bros. was planning a new Superman TV series. It was to focus more on Lois Lane (early possible titles included Lois Lane’s Daily Planet), and by 1991 the name had changed to Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
While the series was not scheduled to start until 1993, Warner Bros. felt that the comics should begin taking the television series into consideration before its debut. Since the new series would be very much based on the emerging relationship between Lois and Clark in the comics (which differed from the classic stories where Lois has no interest in Clark as she pines for Superman), it was felt that eventually the characters would get married on the television series, so the comics should hold off until the show got to that point.
With the marriage story taken off the table, the Superman comic creators came up with a crazy idea that ended up being one of the highest-selling comic book stories of all time: instead of marrying Superman off, they would kill him off! “The Death of Superman,” in late 1992, caught the public’s attention in ways no one could have imagined, and the end result was booming sales for the Superman titles, with total sales in the millions and more media coverage than DC could have possibly expected (especially considering that the death had been announced in advertising months earlier).
Eventually, of course, Superman returned from the dead, and Lois and Clark were back together. However, since their relationship could not end in marriage until the television series (which was doing quite well in the ratings with them being single) got to that point, the writers decided to ha
ve Lois and Clark break up in the comics. This happened in early 1996. However, after seeing the ratings for Lois & Clark go down, the producers and ABC quickly decided to have Lois and Clark marry early in the 1996-7 season, well ahead of schedule, in hopes of saving the show. So now, with very little notice, the comics had to get Lois and Clark back together and marry them all within a month (see pages 112-14 for a similar problem at Marvel). The marriage, sadly, did not end well for the TV series, which was canceled at the end of the 1996-7 season.
THE SUPERMAN COMICS often had to deal with the fact that adaptations of the character into other media were not always going to be particularly faithful, although occasionally, as with some of the characters created for the radio show, the changes were good enough to be incorporated back into the comics themselves. One such change came about, not as a well-thought-out addition to the mythos, but as a simple attempt at saving money.
Fleischer Studios was an animation house run by two brothers, Max and Dave Fleischer. At the height of its popularity, it was the number one competitor to Walt Disney’s cartoons. Before it began working with the Superman character, Fleischer Studios’ most notable characters were Betty Boop and Popeye, who both starred in popular theatrical shorts throughout the 1940s. However, the animation world changed dramatically in 1939 with the release of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This high-quality, full-length color movie revolutionized the marketplace for animated theatrical films. Fleischer Studios felt that it needed to respond, so it began hiring more animators and producing full-length features too. These longer films came with larger costs, which were hard for the small studio to bear. Soon Fleischer Studios began looking for ways to cut costs wherever it could.
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