Our Hero Page 5

  Clark strips to his “action costume,” outraces Matson’s sedan, scoops it up, and—in the scene that inspired Shuster’s famous cover—smashes it against a giant boulder after first shaking out all of its occupants, Lois included. Completely astonished by the guy in the blue tights and red cape, she doesn’t speak a word as he great-leaps her to safety. Her eyes bug, though.

  Over the span of thirty comic-strip panels, the primary conventions and patterns that would direct and drive the series for nearly five decades are thoroughly established: Lois’s contempt for Clark, her awe at Superman. And her need to be rescued by him.

  According to Michael Fleisher, Lois falls into deadly jeopardy time after time for one of four reasons: “(a) In pursuit of a news story, Lois fearlessly—and recklessly—places herself in mortal danger; (b) criminals attempt to harm her in retaliation for her articles exposing their rackets in the pages of the Daily Planet; (c) evildoers kidnap her and attempt to hold her hostage as protection against Superman or to force the Man of Steel to do their bidding; and (d) evildoers attempt to harm Lois as an indirect means of wreaking vengeance on Superman” (Great Superman Book, 148).

  During the mid- to late 1940s, solo stories featuring Lois Lane appeared as a back-of-the-book feature in Superman comics (issues 28-40 and issue 42). A half-page Lois Lane “topper” accompanied the Sunday newspaper strip during the same period. Although usually played for laughs (even the art was cartoonier), the vignettes presented Lois Lane as a single-minded reporter covering her beat without help from you-know-who. While the tone was amused and vaguely, sometimes not-so-vaguely, condescending, it was also affectionate, unbegrudging, and the stories left no doubt she could do her job capably, despite being a “girl reporter.”

  Siegel’s original Lois felt attracted to Superman, but she wasn’t a swooner, and matrimony isn’t much, if ever, on her mind. She had more important things to do than get married and raise a family, and for quite a while she wasn’t even curious about “who” Superman might be in “real life.”

  Michael Fleisher points out that while Lois first met Superman in 1938, she never evinced “even a mild interest in learning his secret identity” till early in 1940. Until the end of that same year she never expressed any “real desire to ferret it out.” Early on, when threatened with torture unless she reveals Superman’s secret identity, Lois replies, “But I’ve no idea who he is. As a matter of fact, I have no reason to believe that he has more than one identity.” She first raised “the possibility that Clark Kent might possibly be Superman” in the summer of 1941, but not till the following summer did she “actually begin to suspect that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same” (419).

  While gee-whizzing stunts and last-second rescues filled most episodes during the early and middle years of Superman comics, what gave everything its texture, its wink as well as its sex, was the Lois/Clark/Superman triangle. “It seems that among Lois Lane, Clark Kent and Superman,” writes Jules Feiffer,

  there existed a schizoid and chaste ménage à trois. Clark Kent loved but felt abashed with Lois Lane; Superman saved Lois Lane when she was in trouble, found her a pest the rest of the time. Since Superman and Clark Kent were the same person this behavior demands explanation. It can’t be that Kent wanted Lois to respect him for his false self, to love him when he acted the coward, to be there when he pretended he needed her. She never was—so, of course, he loved her. A typical American romance. Superman never needed anybody—in any event Lois chased him—so, of course, he didn’t love her. He had contempt for her. Another typical romance. (Great Comic Book Heroes, 20)

  Because of how she was drawn (tall, slender, black-haired, a swishy dress, a rakish cloche hat) and particularly because of the way she behaved (confident to the point of recklessness, sarcastic, clever, and practiced in journalism), it has generally been assumed that Siegel and Shuster based the character of Lois Lane on Hildy Johnson as played by Rosalind Russell. The problem with that is, Howard Hawks’s production of His Girl Friday came out two years after the first issue of Action Comics. But tough, wisecracking “news hens” had been a staple of American movies since the first talkies—Loretta Young in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931), Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz’s Front Page Woman (1935), Joan Blondell in Ray Enright’s Back in Circulation (1937). According to Siegel, in a letter published in Time magazine in 1988, the real inspiration for Lois Lane came from a series of late-thirties Warner Brothers B-pictures about a fast-talking big-city girl-reporter named Torchy Blaine. Nine Torchy Blaine films were released between 1937 and 1939, and all except two starred Glenda Farrell, a favorite of Jerry Siegel’s. For one 1938 release, Torchy Blaine in Panama, the reporter was played by Lola Lane—and that’s where Siegel said he came up with the alliteration and the last name of his heroine.

  Physically, Lois was based on a Cleveland girl named Joanne Kovacs. As she said during an interview published in Nemo: The Classic Comics Library:

  When I met them I was struck by Joe’s age. We met during the Great Depression. I was just a teenager, and my father was out of work; so in order to have any spending money I had to earn my own. … I found that no one would hire me because I had no skills or training, and even grown people were having trouble getting jobs. I had read an article about modeling, and I thought maybe I could get away with that. So I practiced various poses in front of a mirror, and I put an ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the Situations Wanted column, advertising myself as a model, and Joe happened to see it. We corresponded, and he signed all his letters “Mr. Joseph Shuster,” so I thought he was an older man. We set up an appointment at his apartment, where he lived with his parents, brother, and sister. I went there on a Saturday afternoon because I was going to school during the week. I was so nervous, because I thought he was going to say I was too young.

  It was freezing cold day, and I was absolutely frozen by the time I got there, because I lived on the other side of town. I pounded on the door; and it opened a little bit, and I saw a young boy on the other side, and I said, “I’m the model that Mr. Shuster is expecting.” He said, “Come on in,” and we got to talking. I asked if I could leave my coat on, because I was still cold. Right away we got excited, we were talking about not only the weather but movies and everything. Finally I said, “Does Mr. Shuster know that I’m here?” And he said, “I’m Mr. Shuster.” That was the way we met. (2: 12)

  She posed that Saturday and on several others in the weeks that followed, and I find it flabbergasting, but also impressive, that Siegel and Shuster, who must have been around twenty years old at the time, each still living at home and neither gainfully employed, had gone and hired a model. They were serious about all of this, obviously. Jerry would come over whenever Joanne Kovacs was at the Shuster apartment, to keep his eye on his, you know, creation. The three hit it off—all of them had worked on their high school newspapers—and remained friends, staying in touch even after Joanne moved away.

  Years later, they met again in New York City—at a cartoonists’ convention in the Plaza Hotel—and Jerry, whose marriage had ended and who was depressed over the recent loss of the first Superman copyright suit, asked Joanne for a date. They married in 1948. They were still married when Jerry died in 1996.

  A daily comic strip, scripted by Jerry Siegel but drawn by ghost artists over Joe Shuster’s hurried layouts, debuted in newspapers on January 6, 1939. A Sunday page followed on November 5.

  The Supermen of America fan club (motto: “Strength-Courage-Justice”) announced itself in the centerfolds of Action and Superman comics early in 1939. For ten cents, a kid could join and receive in the mail a wallet-size membership card and a button with Superman’s picture (bursting chains) on it in full color. Also a decoder for secret messages. Within three years the club had registered a quarter of a million “charter members,” including New York City mayor La Guardia’s two children.

  And on Thanksgiving Day 1939 a bulging, bobbling, cable-straining eighty-foot Superman helium b
alloon debuted in the Macy’s parade.

  He wasn’t Mickey Mouse, not that kind of popular, not yet— but getting there.

  In 1940—February 12 — The Adventures of Superman began its long run on radio: a fifteen-minute serial broadcast three times a week at first, then every weekday, with an early-evening time slot that captured a few million grown-ups too. Bud Collyer, a lawyer-turned-actor, played both Clark Kent and Superman in more than two thousand broadcasts, changing vocal registers to distinguish them—going from milquetoast tenor to bottomless baritone, from mild mannered to near-bombastic: “This is a job … for … SUPERMAN!”7

  Licensed Superman merchandise, playsuits to paint sets to jigsaw puzzles and coloring books, showed up in department stores, mom-and-pop candy stores, the local five-and-dime. Party balloons, moccasins, gum cards, Milton Bradley board games. Two different ones. A battery-operated metal ray gun that projected a comic-strip picture on the wall every time you squeezed the trigger. And at the grocery store you could buy Superman brand sliced white bread, each “super flavored loaf extra rich in vitamins.”

  In 1940 National Comics produced a special World’s Fair comic book featuring Superman, and thirty-six thousand children attended the fair on Superman Day. (They also hired an actor, Ray Middleton, to put on a cheesy Superman suit and wave to the crowds. The first actor to wear the suit. Ray Middleton, ladies and gentlemen.)

  That Christmas, a Superman exhibit at Macy’s department store drew an audience of one hundred thousand.

  Paramount Pictures purchased animation rights to Superman and contracted with Max and Dave Fleischer to produce a series of Technicolor cartoons. In his book about the Fleischers, Leslie Cabarga explains that the studio, famous already for its Popeyes and Betty Boops, was reluctant at first to take on the project because it would have to be animated realistically and the characters drawn with human proportions. “As sophisticated as animation had become by 1941, this would be difficult and costly. Paramount decided, however, that Superman was worth it and paid the extra cost. The animators solved the drawing problem by substituting blocks and wedges for the usual circles and ovals that all comical cartoon characters were composed of. Interestingly enough, the Fleischers’ Superman was better drawn than the comic book hero” (Fleischer Story, 136). Late in 1941 the first of seventeen cartoons—moody, shadowy, and self-consciously Modernist—showed up on movie screens in first-run theaters.

  Scarcely a year after his debut in comic books, Superman was popular enough to warrant his own special day at the New York World’s Fair (from the collection of Harry Matetsky, © DC Comics)

  The dramatic and Modernist Superman from the first of the Fleischer Studio’s Technicolor cartoons, 1941 (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)

  The same year, the Saturday Evening Post reported in an article profiling Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that the Superman comic book had grossed $950,000 for National in 1940. As for the two triumphant “boys from Cleveland,” their joint income had amounted to roughly $70,000. Which they spent lavishly on roadsters, houses, and top-notch Florida vacations. (There’s a good, and maybe even a true, story about Joe Shuster, ever scruffy despite his new status, being arrested as a vagrant during a winter trip to Miami Beach. When he made a sketch of Superman at police headquarters, the cops let him go.)

  Nobody knew how long all of this magic was going to last, might last, could last, but for the time being things were great in the Superman business.

  Then, bam, Pearl Harbor.

  And things got even better.

  As related by Jerry Siegel in different interviews over his lifetime, the origin of the origin of Superman sounds a little fishy to me, the kind of apocryphal episode you find in juvenile biographies of famous men. Jerry insisted that the idea came to him out of the blue one hot summer night in 1934, and from then on he was tossing and turning in bed, inspiration gathering, beating at his conscious mind, breaking in. A little over a year earlier he had written a novelette (under the stodgy pseudonym Herbert S.

  Fine) about a superman, small-s, and Joe Shuster had illustrated it for a mimeoed fanzine they’d briefly published (Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Civilization,” cover-dated January 1933). But that superman was a villain. This was different. Better.

  “ ‘I hop right out of bed and write this down,’ he said, ‘and then I go back and think some more for about two hours and get up again and write that down’” (quoted in Steranko, History of Comics, 35). All night long it went on—Jerry pondering in the dark, thumping to the floor, snapping on a lamp, and typing up the Story So Far.

  By daybreak, according to Siegel, the capital-S Superman who came to Earth as a baby in a rocket ship from a doomed (not-yet-named) planet and wears a costume and has a civilian identity had been conceived, his powers determined (leap an eighth of a mile, outrace trains, planes, even bullets, lift incredible weights, bend steel, everything Hugo Danner could do in Philip Wylie’s bad novel) and explained (Earth’s lighter gravity). As for his personality, the original Superman was, as Bradford Wright puts it in Comic Book Nation, “actually a tough and cynical wise guy, similar to the hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade who also became popular during the Depression” (9).

  Forgoing breakfast, Siegel “dashed” (his usual verb of choice) from his house on Kimberly Avenue all the way to Joe Shuster’s apartment twelve blocks away, bringing with him both the typescript and his stupendous enthusiasm.

  “Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet,” said Shuster, who spoke, unfailingly, of his partner with the reverence and awe of a kid brother. “He put the superhero in ordinary familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done” (Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids with Dreams,” 15).

  Working together, fortified by sandwiches, they decided upon the character’s appearance. Average build, average height, a cross between the movie cowboy Tom Mix and Captain Easy from the funny sheets. The bespectacled look of Clark Kent, meanwhile, was based on Harold Lloyd, the silent-film comedian. Superman’s skintight body suit, the cape, even the trunks almost certainly were inspired by the weirdly Ruritanian wardrobes of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. (And if Jerry’s memory wasn’t, um, playing tricks, and indeed this all happened during the summer of 1934, it might explain the choice of red, yellow, and blue for their hero’s costume: those just happened to be the tricolors of Flash Gordon’s clothing that June, July, and August.)

  At first Superman’s chest insignia—Flash Gordon’s doublet sported one, also in bright yellow—was a double-bordered isosceles triangle with a scraggly S hemmed in; Shuster had, he said, “a heraldic crest” in mind (14). (The graphically classy five-sided shield came much later, the result of gradual finagling over more than a decade by a platoon of Superman ghost artists.) They discussed whether he should wear a domino mask. Maybe a cowl?

  A hood? A helmet? Jerry inclined toward adding a mask of some kind, Joe was against it.

  Oh, what the hell—Jerry conceded: no mask.

  As for the cape, Jerry suggested it, and Joe went for it. “It really helped,” he said, “and it was very easy to draw” (14). (Or to copy: in the funny papers that summer, Flash Gordon’s lissome girlfriend Dale Arden ran around planet Mongo in a long crimson cape that billowed out behind her.)

  Once the costume and the concept were finalized, all that remained to do, all that remained for Joe Shuster to do, was to pencil, ink, and letter a couple of weeks’ worth of daily strips.

  It’s possible that Jerry Siegel’s memory was true, but the story seems overly shaped and more than a little self-heroicizing. Jerry is the protagonist, the inspired genius, Joe the agreeable sidekick. Jerry is the creator, Joe the facilitator. Jerry has the brainstorm, Joe provides the drudge work. Joe suggests, Jerry decides. But who knows, it could have happened that way.8 And besides, what matters finally is the creation itself, the char
acter—the big-S Superman that combined and synthesized all of Jerry Siegel’s juvenile and adolescent influences, and probably many if not most of Joe Shuster’s, and was a transparent, ecstatic, slightly vengeful projection of their matching insecurities and fantasy lives.9

  But you can look at Siegel and Shuster’s brainchild and glimpse something else, too, another twist, another fillip, another spontaneous variation on an idea much in the air at the time, part of the 1930s zeitgeist: the feasibility of a perfectible human being. The feasibility and consequences of a truly advanced specimen, a super man.

  In “From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman,” Thomas Andrae points out that while the superman theme in science fiction had been explored and mined since the beginning of the twentieth century, “it did not really catch on until the early thirties, when a flood of stories about mental and physical supermen hit the newsstands as either book length novels or short stories” (125). Most of which young Jerry Siegel would have been familiar with, intimately.

  The Heartbreak Boys from Cleveland—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman (PhotoFest Digital, © DC Comics)

  What would a true superman be? Be like? How would he act? What would he feel toward the rest of us? Pity? Disgust? And of course what would we feel about him? According to Andrae, in science fiction of the period, the superman is (as Jerry’s original prose version was) almost always a “sinister figure … obsessed with his power and … contemptuous of mankind … who cannot be permitted to exist” (125).

  Siegel and Shuster’s innovation, their originality, Andrae concludes, “was in differentiating their creation from his predecessors … by being neither alienated from society nor a misanthropic power-obsessed nemesis but a truly messianic figure … the embodiment of society’s noblest ideals, a ‘man of tomorrow’ who foreshadows mankind’s highest potentialities and profoundest aspirations but whose tremendous power, remarkably, poses no danger to its freedom and safety” (125).