Our Hero Page 11

  Stories often turned on the obligations of loyalty or the heroism of taking a difficult stance. And it wasn’t so much invulnerability and superstrength that saved the day, it was good thinking. And not always quick thinking, either—but tactical and strategic thinking. Weisinger presided over the creation of both an integrated fantasy and an extended family (and vice versa) that children could believe in and belong to. In those comics were everything a kid’s imagination needed for nourishment, except the glamour of rebellion. But for that we had MAD magazine — twenty-five cents, cheap!

  Weisinger also abetted something he may not have consciously intended but that was at least as significant. By publishing a letters page in each of the seven titles, he encouraged—stoked—the kind of clubby, chummy fandom for readers of Superman comics that as a kid he’d helped create for like-minded teenagers obsessed by the science fiction pulps. His letters to the editor columns invited readers to comment on stories as they came out, which in turn influenced the kinds written and published later. Because their comments were taken seriously (and acknowledged, often praised, in italicized replies by the editor), Weisinger’s readers took the stories and characters seriously, feeling free to point out, gloating with self-satisfaction, errors of consistency and motivation.21 Weisinger sometimes tried to weasel out of a mistake, but more often simply admitted the “boo-boo” and promised to do better. Fair enough.

  With close readers dogging every panel, Weisinger wanted all of his Superman stories, about twenty a month, to fit together logically. He also demanded that his writers contrive plots that built on previously introduced hooks and devices. Something called “continuity” entered the fan lexicon and gradually became its fundamental dogma. By 1970, when Mort Weisinger retired, that byzantine cohesion had become the hallmark of American superhero comic books, driving away casual readers and stopping younger ones dead in their tracks. After decades of being a narrative medium where nothing ever changed, it had become one in which change virtually described the covenant. (Second-tier or middling popular characters could even die.) (They just couldn’t stay dead.)

  As a boy I never wrote to any of the Superman titles. I wanted to, but how could I have competed in fluency or analytical intelligence with the handful of readers whose cocky and enthusiastic letters appeared month after month? Those letters read as though they’d been composed by—well, by high school seniors on the honor roll, or college students, or grown-ups! And for the most part they had been.

  Weisinger’s (and later over at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee’s) integrated titles had the unplanned effect of attracting a new kind of fan, older than ten, older than fifteen, often older than twenty, the first generation of bona-fide geeks who simply forgot to stop reading comic books in ninth grade and kept on going until not reading them became unthinkable. By the early 1970s, nearly all of the rookie editors and writers and artists entering the comic book field came from that first wave of boomer correspondents who knew the ephemera and incunabula (the name of Supergirl’s orphanage, the distinctive properties of various kryptonites, the permanent menagerie at the Kandoran zoo) and discussed newsstand comics with a priestly seriousness and reverence aging pros of Mort Weisinger’s generation could never have imagined with a straight face.

  When Weisinger had taken over as editor, Tom Crippen points out, Superman comics, “the baby boomers’ elemental comic book experience … were read by the most kids at the youngest age” (“Night Thoughts,” 166). By the time he quit, things had changed, drastically. Thanks in large measure to those letters pages (or in geekspeak: “lettercols”), the genre had become less and less (and then not at all) something produced for young children. It became entertainment for adolescents; for seasoned readers, for initiates. And for adults pleading a harmless lifetime hobby.

  30

  That the Superman stories he’d edited would ever be collected into books the way the stories of Bernard Malamud or Katherine Anne Porter were collected would have seemed absurd to Mort Weisinger, as it would have to his fellow editors—all of whom were old-school profit-and-loss magazine men, most of whom held the stuff they produced in varying degrees of contempt. At the very least they maintained a self-deprecating perspective; Vincent Sullivan, the first editor of Action Comics, once opined that publishing comic books was like operating a candy bar factory.

  But with the gradual elevation of comic books in the precincts of popular culture (and as the ever-nostalgic boomer generation becomes the Social Security generation), more and more of Weisinger’s stuff has been finding its way into pricey full-color “archival” hardcovers, as well as inexpensive black-and-white paperback collections published under the generic title Showcase Presents Superman.

  For good reason, the first Showcase (released in 2005) opens with Action Comics number 261, cover-dated June 1958. Although Mort Weisinger had been assigned to the Superman titles since the early 1950s, it wasn’t until late 1957, following the departure of supervising editor Whitney Ellsworth (lost forever to Hollywood) that he took absolute control.22 The June 1958 issue not only marked the twentieth anniversary of Action number 1 (June 1938) but also introduced Superman’s Arctic-based Fortress of Solitude and featured Batman and Robin as costars, underscoring their mutual friendship outside the pages of World’s Finest, the regular team-up book. In temperament, emphasis, and look, Action number 261 inaugurates Weisinger’s absolutist reign. The initial volume of Showcase reprints every subsequent issue of Action through number 257 (October 1959) and every issue of Superman from number 122 (July 1958) through number 133 (November 1959). All told, 560 pages.

  Holding this mammoth thing, you realize just how much new material came out of Weisinger’s mill each month. Individually, stories run from howlingly stupid to clever to genuinely touching. They are almost never exciting, or suspenseful, but they are almost always sincere. No, not almost. Always.

  More satisfying than the actual stories (at least to the writer-me) are the creator credits on the Showcase table of contents, credits that didn’t appear in the original comic books. Writer: Jerry Coleman / Artist: Wayne Boring. Writer: Otto Binder / Artist: Al Plastino. Writer: Bill Finger / Artist: Kurt Schaffenberger. Writer: Alvin Schwartz / Pencils: Curt Swan / Inks: Stan Kaye. Writer: Ed Hamilton / Pencils: Curt Swan / Inks: Sheldon Moldoff.

  Some names show up frequently, some occasionally, some just once or twice. And then there’s a name that doesn’t show up till the very end of the table of contents. It appears as the writer credit for two consecutive nine-page stories reprinted from Superman number 133, cover-dated November 1959, the first story drawn by Al Plastino, the second by Curt Swan, and the name practically leaps off the page: Jerry Siegel. “How Perry White Hired Clark Kent.” Writer: Jerry Siegel. “Superman Joins the Army!” Writer: Jerry Siegel.

  Jerry Siegel?

  After twelve years spent schlepping around the comic book wilderness, writing for every publisher but DC, writing and then not-writing, editing and then sacked, struggling, slipping, living near poverty, then actually falling into it, desperate and frightened and sullen—after twelve years and at the age of forty-four, Jerry Siegel returned to DC Comics in late 1959 and began scripting Superman stories again. How it happened might have been dreamed up by Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky for some neoproletarian live television drama of the period. Gerard Jones in Men of Tomorrow credits Siegel’s second wife:

  The former Joalan Kovacs had an angry, Hungarian loyalty that fixed itself on an enemy and lashed out. She had already been nagging [DC Comics] off and on for years. When financial crisis struck—the diaper service cut off, the rent on their one-bedroom apartment missed—she would call Superman’s publishers and demand that they help. She even told them Jerry was writing letters to newspapers telling his side of the story. And the money came, a hundred here, two hundred there. This time, though, the situation was too dire for a hundred or two to bail them out. “This is Jack Liebowitz’s fault,” she insisted. “He owes you something.” When Jerry refused
to go contact Liebowitz, Joanne said she’d do it for him.

  Jack agreed to see her, but he wouldn’t agree to give Jerry work. He’d done everything for Jerry he’d been legally bound to do and then some, he said, and Jerry had repaid him with an expensive and embarrassing lawsuit. In Jack’s mind Jerry was out of the family.

  “Listen,” said Joanne. “Do you really want to see a newspaper headline reading ‘Creator of Superman Starves to Death’?”

  Liebowitz knew he couldn’t afford to call her bluff. He told her he’d ask Mort Weisinger to assign Jerry a Superman script and see how it went. [He] did impose one condition: that Jerry never claim publicly to be one of the creators of Superman. Joanne agreed. (283)

  So did her husband. But despite that mortification, compounded by another, equally bitter one that slashed his writer’s fee to a baseline ten dollars a page from the fifty a page he’d earned back in 1947, Siegel reclaimed his creation with a vigor and earnestness no one had any right to expect.

  The first handful of stories he contributed during his anonymous second coming are crude concoctions, rife with dated tomfoolery and a juvenile fondness for practical joking (“How Perry White Hired Clark Kent,” for instance, finds the Man of Steel dressing up in a cheesy Abbott and Costello gorilla costume). You can’t tell whether he’s trying too hard, which he probably was, or not trying at all. Soon, though, Siegel’s work, appearing regularly in both Superman and Action Comics (and reprinted in subsequent volumes of Showcase Presents), has a clarity it never showed, or seemed capable of showing, before. His captions are still clunky and his dialogue is nearly as lugubrious as before (although who can say how much is Siegel’s and how much the meddling Weisinger’s?), but this is not the disorganized, freeassociational, agitprop writer of yesteryear and Cleveland; this is somebody new: a craftsman, a pro. Seasoned, to say the least.

  Mort Weisinger had found in Jerry Siegel the perfect writer to give him the kind of “emotional” stuff he wanted and believed his readers instinctively craved. “Most of the stories,” writes Gerard Jones,

  still turned on goofy shenanigans or evil schemes of Luthor and Brainiac, but they were regularly punctuated by tear-jerking returns to Krypton, “imaginary stories” in which Superman’s loved ones died, and churning melodramas of betrayal and loss. … [Siegel] found every way there was to have Superman marry or lose Lois, every way for Superboy to encounter his real parents or lose his foster family. All the implicit but unexamined themes in Superman’s origin— orphan hood, immigration, lonely American boyhood, the passage of Moses—were laid bare on the page now. (Men of Tomorrow, 288)

  Jerry Siegel’s original Man of Steel had been nothing like this. The first Superman was “above caring that he’d been sundered from his home world and his parents. His charm was his laughing invulnerability. Jerry’s new Superman was a superhero because of his tragedy. His power was his superhuman grief” (288). Imagined and dramatized by a middle-aged man who knew a little something himself about grief—not to mention separation, loss, iniquity, and cosmic bad luck. To Danny Fingeroth, Siegel’s new stories displayed “a distinct yearning … for things lost, whether for European Jewry itself, or, more personally for Siegel, for the glory days of his own lost youth, specifically the days when he was reasonably well paid and respected—if not by his employers, then by the greater world—as the co-creator of perhaps the best-known popular culture figure in history” (Disguised as Clark Kent, 84).

  But as inspired as Siegel was, ten dollars a page was still ten dollars a page, and no matter how much material he turned out over the next six years, he never could make a decent living. (In any given month, he might contribute a twelve-page lead story to Action Comics and two or three six-pagers to Superman and Adventure Comics. Do the math.) In private, Weisinger confided to colleagues that Siegel was the “most competent” writer in his stable (quoted in Murray, “Superman’s Editor,” 13), but he’d be damned if he’d tell him that. What he mostly told Siegel was “do it over.”

  Jerry Siegel simmered again with resentment. It was galling! He shouldn’t have to work so hard. He should be rich, he ought to be famous. Knowing that DC Comics would have to renew the Superman copyright in 1964, Siegel hired another lawyer and filed a second lawsuit to contest it. Joe Shuster, who by then had moved with his brother to a rundown neighborhood in Queens, New York, and was working intermittently as a deliveryman and courier, declined to participate. As had happened in 1947, the court, with a shrug, found for the defendant, who promptly fired the plaintiff. And this time Jack Liebowitz made it clear: Jerry Siegel would never work for his company again.

  Relying on pro bono legal aid, Siegel appealed the court’s decision, futilely. In the meantime he picked up some freelance work at both Archie and Marvel Comics, and turned out the occasional Donald Duck story for Disney’s Italian comic book division. It wasn’t enough. He struggled on in New York for several more years (at one point selling off his comic book collection to pay bills), then moved with his wife and daughter to southern California, where at the age of sixty, he took a civil service exam and landed a clerk-typist’s job at the Public Utilities Commission. It paid around seven thousand dollars.

  31

  Even before Jerry Siegel got the axe at DC that second time, my years as a constant reader of Superman comics had ended. I was fourteen, fifteen, in high school, and the stuff that once enchanted me no longer did. I’d moved on to more angsty super-heroes like Spider-Man, to Ian Fleming and Eric Ambler novels, to science fiction, Newsweek, the Beatles, Motown. (I’d even read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Most of it.) I was—to paraphrase Bob Dylan, yet another then-new interest of mine—just doing what I was supposed to do. I was growing up.

  Anyway, as Mark Waid observes, “innovations in the Superman saga were coming fewer and much farther between now that his alien heritage had been strip-mined for potential and Earth had become overpopulated by Kryptonians” (Introduction, 9). The eccentricity and relaxed confidence slowly drained out. With Curt Swan still doing most of the drawing, or at least providing the template, Superman comics continued to look the same; it was the stories, and the quality of storytelling, that deteriorated.23

  Throughout the comic book medium’s so-called Golden and Silver Ages, the same bunch of freelance writers from Manhattan, north Jersey, and Long Island had provided most of the scripts at DC. They’d been loyal, they’d been reliable, but now they were guys (all guys) in their forties and fifties, even sixties, and the future was making them nervous. In 1968 they tried to organize a company union. According to Steve Duin and Mike Richardson, they “were looking for better pay rates, reprint rights, medical insurance, and a noose for the cantankerous Mort Weisinger” (Comics Between the Panels, 180). But when they brought their grievances and proposals to Jack Liebowitz, they were summarily and permanently dismissed. The Great Philanthropist. Take a hike. And that was that. In a period of months, practically all of the old pros at DC were gone, replaced by young and eager comic book geeks tribally steeped in finicky trivia but glaringly deficient in narrative skills. The English majors among them came in determined to raise literary standards and ended up just being wordy.

  By decade’s end, most Superman stories were as ungainly as they were self-referential. Asterisks and footnotes superabounded for close and serious readers—the only ones who counted—needing to confirm an allusion to some years-old episode involving, oh, say, the Legion of Super-Villains. The fans had taken over the fantasy, and for the first time since the early 1950s, sales of the Superman titles fell off. But as far as Warner Communications was concerned, that was okay or at least no cause for alarm: the new owners seemed more interested in licensing their “properties” than in publishing comic books anyway.

  32

  After TV’s Adventures of Superman finished its six-year run in 1957, the Man of Steel became strictly a comic book and newspaper-strip franchise again.24 It remained so for almost a decade, till Filmation Studios, a budget animat
ion shop that primarily served ad agencies, optioned the character for a series of Saturday morning color cartoons. The executive producer was Allen Ducovny, who’d developed the original Superman radio program with Robert Maxwell a quarter of a century earlier. Which explains, I guess, why Bud Collyer, by then an avuncular television game-show host (Beat the Clock, To Tell the Truth) was invited back to contribute the voice acting for Superman and Clark Kent. He wasn’t the only radio veteran, either. Joan Alexander did the voice of Lois Lane again, and Jack Grimes returned as Jimmy Olsen. Even Jackson Beck, Superman’s longtime broadcast announcer (“… yes, Superman! … Strange visitor from another planet …”), came back. Ted Knight, later to become famous as goofus anchorman Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, provided the exasperated voice of Daily Planet editor Perry White.

  The New Adventures of Superman, each half-hour show comprising three six-minute cartoons (the first and third featuring Superman; the second, Superboy), premiered in September 1967 on CBS. Despite scripts of unfailing blandness and limited animation that made characters move like placards bobbing on a tired picket line, it scored a hit with millions of preschoolers in footed pajamas hunkered scarfing Trix on living room sofas. Eventually expanded to sixty minutes and televised under a variety of different titles (The Superman-Aquaman Hour of Adventure, The Batman/Superman Hour) the series continued until 1973, when the rights passed from Filmation to Hanna-Barbera. H-B simplified figures and backgrounds even further, added a few second-string DC heroes and a couple of kid characters to the cast, and rechristened the whole lusterless package Super Friends, a show meant not really for watching, but for being on. It didn’t interfere with homework, board games, listening to records, or tormenting siblings. It never presumed.