The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  The next year, 1929, Wylie decided it was time to tackle a grand social allegory. He wanted to show how a truly superior man would be loathed and destroyed by our mediocre society: “great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes … the needs of skin, belly, and womb.”

  His plot was a scientific conceit: a biologist turns his son into “a super-child, an invulnerable man” who grows into a being of incomparable strength and vitality and innate moral superiority. “There, in the forest, beyond the eye of man, he learned that he was superhuman. I’m like a man made out of iron instead of meat.” He tries to give the gift of his superiority the world: to the good he would lend his strength; to the corrupt he would lend his embattled antipathy. He would not be one impotent person seeking to dominate, but the agent of uplift. But mankind is too small for him. Bullies pick fights with him, the military presses him into a venal war, women give themselves to him and then run from his power, a little Jew cons him into the boxing racket, Congressmen and lobbyists jockey to exploit him, a money-grubbing Communist calls him, “Fool! Dreamer! Impossible idealist!” He imagines tearing down the Capitol Building like Samson, but knows it will accomplish nothing.

  Wylie’s use of biological fantasy would later lead science fiction fans to claim Gladiator as a product of their beloved genre, but his models were not Hugo Gernsback’s pulp stories. Wylie mocked junk culture, mocked yellow journalism and Bernarr MacFadden and narcissistic bodybuilders, and he’d surely have mocked Amazing Stories if he’d bothered to notice it. He lifted tricks from the satirical parades of Henry Fielding and William Thackeray, pulled themes from the intellectual allegories of H. G. Wells and Friedrich Nietzsche. Then he fell in love with his hero, his man of “breathtaking symmetry … a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a young god,” and hurled him into scenes of sexual awakening and combat and political melodrama as clotted and superheated as anything on the pages of Cosmopolitan or Collier’s.

  The result was a drunken disaster of a novel, dumbest at its most intellectually ambitious and emptiest at its most passionate, in the end lurching wildly into a lamppost of self-pitying nonsense:

  “Now—God—oh, God—if there be a God—tell me! Can I defy You? Can I defy Your world? Is this Your will? Or are You, like all mankind, impotent? Oh, God!” He put his hand to his mouth and called God like a name into the tumult above. Madness was upon him and the bitter irony with which his blood ran black was within him.

  A bolt of lighting stabbed earthward. It struck Hugo, outlining him in fire. His hand slipped away from his mouth. His voice was quenched.

  Hugo Danner wasn’t the only one struck by lightning. So was Jerry Siegel.

  When other fans called Jerry’s attention to Gladiator in 1932, it had already been on the shelves for two years. Wylie had had two more books published and was deep in his first big novel, Finnley Wren. He’d have cared nothing for a young science fiction fan’s love of Gladiator (and would no doubt have been shocked to know that eight years later he’d be preparing to sue that fan for plagiarism). It was, however, the perfect moment for Jerry. Eighteen years old and still in the middle of high school, still without a girlfriend or a plausible career but dreaming of beauties and riches, launching a new magazine but hearing the condescending indulgence of his peers—Gladiator must have touched upon everything he wanted and feared to be.

  The “superman” was scarcely a new idea, and was in fact a common motif of both high and low culture by the early thirties, the inevitable product of those doctrines of perfectability promoted by everyone from Bernarr MacFadden to Leon Trotsky. The word had descended from Nietzsche’s übermensch through Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, but it was easily wedded to ideas neither Nietzschean nor Shavian. In Germany, Adolf Hitler was claiming that a whole nation of supermen could be forged through institutionalized racism and militarism, and his popularity was rising steadily. In America, the idea of eugenics was being actively explored at Ivy League universities. Eugenics inspired Wylie’s pseudo-scientific plot device in Gladiator, and his hero explicitly considered its use to improve mankind.

  Even leftists could use the word: a Milwaukee radical named Joseph Firicin argued in his lectures that Socialist production methods would create a “superabundance” of goods and opportunities, would make the citizen of a Socialist future a “veritable superman” by our current standards. He claimed he once gave this lecture at a Cleveland community center in the early 1930s, and in the audience were two young Jewish men who later … We can complete the anecdote, and surely dismiss it as wishful thinking, but it’s a measure of the ubiquity of the symbolic superman.

  The idea of the superman was explored in much of the more romantic pulp culture, even if the term wasn’t used: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars were not simply the strongest and noblest of their breed, but were clearly described as of an order apart, beings of such innate and apparent superiority that they rose to command every world they entered. Their ties to the English nobility and the old Confederacy explained their potential for superiority, but that potential was realized only through a miracle that lifted them outside history: Tarzan’s return to the evolutionary Eden of the apes, John Carter’s unexplained, almost mystical, longevity. In 1929, Jerry’s Siegel’s old pen pal Jack Williamson wrote a novel, published by Hugo Gernsback, which explained the superbeing in a science-fictional way. It was called The Girl from Mars, and it featured a strange visitor from another planet with powers far beyond those of normal men.

  Until he encountered Wylie’s Hugo Danner, however, Jerry had never seen a superman whose feats were set so vividly against a familiar and constraining reality: “I can do things, Dad. It kind of scares me. I can jump higher’n a house. I can run faster’n a train.” Hugo transforms clichéd scenes of trench warfare in France when he learns that a bullet can’t pierce his skin, and even a bursting shell only knocks him down. And he’d never seen a human portrait of the superman that encompassed his flounderings, his frustrations, his isolation, his pain. Hugo Danner displays his super-strength as a child and frightens the timid townsfolk. His father draws him aside to explain that he must use his strength for “a good and noble purpose” to keep people from hating him; indeed, when men first see his full strength they call him “a demon.” Hugo withdraws from the world “to become acquainted with his powers” and builds a solitary fortress in the woods. When he brings his greatness to the world he knows moments of triumph, but each one only deepens his isolation. He’s taken to bed by an Ivy League beauty:

  Half goddess, half animal … the vanguard of emancipated American womanhood. But only once, for she learned something, too, she never came back to Hugo, and kept the longing for him as a sort of memory which she made hallowed in a shorn soul. It was, for her, a single ascetism in a rather selfish life.

  The capsule review of Gladiator in Siegel’s fanzine hints at none of the impact it must have had on a lonely, angry boy. But his story in the next issue of Science Fiction, dated January 1933, suggested that it was working its way into his imagination.

  “The Reign of the Superman” by “Herbert S. Fine” (a nod to his cousins) is framed by Joe Shuster’s illustrations. Joe’s work was coming along: the snarling villain and the futuristic city of skyscrapers, drawn in a clear-line style based on the cylinders and circles of industrial design, show that he was well attuned to the iconography of his moment. Then the nine densely typed pages of Jerry’s story begin:

  The bread-line! Its row of downcast, disillusioned men; unlucky creatures who have found that life holds nothing but bitterness for them. The bread-line! Last resort of the starving vagrant.

  With a contemptuous sneer on his face, Professor Smalley watched the wretched u
nfortunates file past him. To him, who had come of rich parents and had never been forced to face the rigors of life, the miserableness of these men seemed deserved. It appeared to him that if they had the slightest ambition at all, they could lift themselves from their terrible rut.

  Professor Smalley selects a vagrant as a human guinea pig and injects him with a mysterious element he’s discovered in a meteor from another planet. His subject escapes and discovers that the element has given him superhuman powers. He can hear the thoughts of strangers like words in the air: “Brains is what this gang needs and brains is what it ain’t got.” “I gotta have that dough, Ma. I gotta have it!” “He’s just a kid, Mame. Why don’t you let him alone?” “To hell with the anarchists!” “I’d starve before I go back to that brute.” “I wish he’d keep on his own feet. A helluva nerve he has askin’ a swell dancer like me to fox trot with a palooka like him.” “Look here, punk, you may be the star reporter on this rag but unless you turn in your copy by three o’clock you’ll be out in the street peddling shoelaces.”

  The character now called “the Superman” goes to the library to read “Einstein’s Expanding Universe.” “Trash! Bosh!” he cries. When the librarian tells him to be quiet, the Superman hisses, “If I had a ray-tube within reach, I’d blast you out of existence!”

  Late 1932 was a politically electrical moment, and most bright eighteen-year-olds, especially in a left-leaning Jewish milieu, could have waxed fairly eloquent about unemployment and class agendas; but Jerry went not an inch beyond the most common Hollywood tropes. The people of his world thought in bad Warner Brothers dialogue. And he obviously had no more interest in science than he had in social reality or character, a fact that sheds some light on his inability to get himself taken seriously by the fans of Amazing Stories. He raced impatiently past every detail that would have made his story more convincing to get to the one long sequence that seemed to excite his passion: the angry struggle for control between the Superman and his maker.

  One passage leaps out to the reader who knows about Jerry Siegel’s later life:

  [Smalley] secured pencil and paper and began to write a long, heated letter. He told how he had taken Dunn from the breadline to make him the noble subject of the greatest experiment of the century. He told of how the chemical had been administered and Dunn’s subsequent vanishing. “And,” he concluded, “unless this creature is snared and shot dead like a beast, he will grow, his powers will strengthen, increase, until he will hold the fate of the world in the palm of his hand!” When the letter was completed he placed it in an envelope, addressed it to the City Editor of the largest newspaper, then left the laboratory and mailed it.

  Maybe it’s only an accidental foreshadowing of the long, heated letters that Siegel would later use in his fight to regain control of Superman; but it is the one moment when a character stumbles out of the strictures of plot and behaves in an oddly small and human way. It may be that even before he had a real property to fight over, Jerry was already waging wars of entitlement in his head.

  Smalley decides to partake of the meteorite himself and replace Dunn as the Superman. But the Superman murders him first. He’s now learned to master others with his mind, and plans to achieve world domination by sending “the armies of the earth to total annihilation against each other.” “The International Conciliatory Council was in session … Chinaman and Jap, Frenchman and Englishman. American and Mexican, all smiled genially at each other.” The Superman broadcasts “thoughts of hate which would plunge the earth into a living hell.” The delegates begin “attacking each other like mad hate-filled wolves.”

  But a reporter reads Smalley’s letter and confronts the Superman. (The reporter’s name is Forrest Ackerman; for the fan, the in-joke is always more real than the drama.) The end comes in a scene of religiosity and shouting echoing the lightning-bolt finish of Gladiator. “In this moment of dread and terror the reporter sent a silent prayer up to the Creator of the threatened world. He beseeched the Omnipotent One to blot out this blaspheming devil. Was it true that Forrest saw the look of hate swept from the Superman’s face and terror replace it, or was it mere fancy?” “No!” shouts the Superman to the empty air. He realizes that the drug is wearing off. “The arrogant, confident figure had departed. Instead, there now stood, a drooping, disillusioned man … ‘I see, now, how wrong I was. If I had worked for the good of humanity, my name would have gone down in history with a blessing—instead of a curse.’”

  Jerry Siegel was not a religious kid. “I don’t think he ever went to the synagogue in his life,” said Jerry Fine. The Omnipotent One entered via Wylie. Jerry was uninterested in grappling with Wylie’s idea that a man could be good and yet still be unable to make a difference, preferring the reassurance of genre fiction that we can all choose whether history will bless us or curse us, but he was playing with the question raised by Gladiator: what can and should a superman do in a world of real troubles?

  Just a few weeks after he’d mailed out that issue of Science Fiction his questioning took a new turn. He was flipping through the issue of The Shadow that hit the stands in February 1933, when the boldface word jumped out at him: “SUPERMAN.” Beneath it was a picture of a he-man wrestling with a gunman, and the legend, “Doc Savage—man of Master Mind and Body.” It was the first ad for Street and Smith’s new “superhero.”

  Doc Savage may also have owed something to Wylie, too. Like Hugo Danner, Doc had been cultivated to human perfection by science, and he had a Fortress of Solitude where he went to think. His name and appearance—a muscular giant with mahogany skin, bronze hair, and gemlike eyes—may have come from a more recent Wylie novel, The Savage Gentleman (1932). He shared the Shadow’s network of operatives, but instead of fighting urban crime he was a globetrotting rescuer of innocents in peril. Before it had hit the stands, Jerry and Joe knew they would be fans.

  Then came another turn. As spring melted the Cleveland snows and the nation waited to see what Franklin D. Roosevelt would do as President and Jerry and Joe waited to see what Doc Savage would be like, a cheesy, tabloid-sized, cardboard-covered magazine called Detective Dan appeared on the newsstands. In the wake of Dick Tracy, hundreds of young cartoonists had whipped out their own tough-cop comic strips to peddle to the syndicates. A low-end publisher in Chicago, calling itself both the Humor Publishing Company and the Consolidated Publishing Company, decided to print a few of those in black and white and put them on the newsstands to see what happened. They weren’t distributed well and probably didn’t pay back even their printing costs. Detective Ace King and Bob Scully, Two-Fisted Hick Detective, disappeared almost without trace, but Detective Dan found its way to Cleveland. They were what future comic book historians, always in quest of origin stories, would come to call the “first modern single-character original content comic books.” Jerry Siegel, with those quivering pop-culture antennae that enabled him to be the first creator of a science fiction fanzine and one of the original subscribers to The Time Traveller, was one of the few people who would ever recall having actually seen one on the stands—and apparently the only one who made an important career decision because of it.

  Jerry bought Detective Dan and brought it to Joe. Joe thought it wasn’t Dick Tracy by a longshot but it was pretty good. Jerry said that wasn’t the point. The point was that it wasn’t much better than what he and Joe could do—but it was in print. And its publication didn’t depend on the distant and indifferent world of newspaper syndication but on what was, in Jerry’s mind at least, the far more familiar world of cheap magazines. “We can do this!” he said.

  In his mind it may already have been real: they’d write and draw a comic strip based on an action hero of their own creation and sell it to Humor Publications. To make it stand out they wouldn’t copy Dick Tracy or any other strip but take their inspiration. Like Buck Rogers and Tarzan, from another medium. They’d do a pulp-style hero for comics. He even had an idea, springing from Gladiator and from the ads for the new Doc Sava
ge. They’d create a pulpy adventure about a brawling do-gooder of extraordinary strength.

  They’d call it The Superman.

  Gladiator

  PHILIP WYLIE

  Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Incorporated from Gladiator (Manor Books, 1976 [1930]), 240-250.

  HUGO HAD THREE HOURS TO WAIT FOR A CHICAGO TRAIN. HIS WAGES PURchased his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.

  When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated. His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires would not yield to any temporal powers.