by Larry Tye
Harry and Jack read the trend lines and responded. Superman was back on the Action cover for issue 7, and again for 10, 13, and 15. Nine months after his debut in comic books he was given his own daily newspaper strip, which was where Jerry and Joe had wanted him in the first place. It was the only time a comic hero had ever jumped from comic books to strips rather than the other way around. The Houston Chronicle was the first paper to sign up, followed by the Milwaukee Journal and San Antonio Express; by the end of 1939, sixty papers were running the daily feature and a Sunday strip was gearing up. That June his publishers had made Superman the first character to have an ongoing comic book named after him, although the plan at the time was for just one issue. The first press run of 500,000 sold out, as did subsequent ones of 250,000 and 150,000. The trial balloon quickly became a regular item, with Superman No. 2 selling all of its 850,000 copies, as well as a second run of 150,000, and Action continuing its record-setting pace.
No one had seen numbers like that since the pulps of the Roaring ’20s. Superman was outpacing the girlie magazines, the horror titles, and all his comics challengers. There were a dozen other comic books on the racks, all selling about 200,000 copies. Superman’s tally was five times that, a pace so far off the charts that competing publishers presumed it was an anomaly and took nearly a year to gin up their own imitations. The industry may have been at a loss, but Superman’s owners weren’t. They kept pushing. In October 1939 Jack set up Superman, Inc., to protect the trademark and develop new products. Five months later a new tagline showed up on Action covers, trumpeting its status as the “World’s Largest Selling Comic Magazine.”
If a pair of teenage scribblers from Cleveland had made all that possible, it was a pair of middle-aged fortune hunters from the Lower East Side who were making it happen. Now they were ready to claim credit. Jack, who generally was neither boastful nor sentimental, made an exception with Superman. “We liked it,” he said looking back at Jerry and Joe’s first set of Superman scripts. “We put it together and made a 13 page story out of it.” Who chose the artwork for that Action No. 1 cover? “I remember picking the first cover,” he said. Who harmonized the distribution and marketing? “I just wanted to create a demand.” What about adding new comic books? “Donenfeld thought it was too many magazines and he didn’t want to put out any more.” What did all that effort lead to? “That was the beginning of the comic industry as far as I was concerned.”
As far as Harry was concerned, Superman had a different heritage. Jerry and Joe wrote and drew him, and Jack did the marketing, but what mattered most were the brains and the bankroll behind the birthing. Both were Harry’s. He was the one who bought the story after every other publisher had turned it down. He had the artwork ready for issues 2 and 3 even before Action 1 hit the stands. Gambler that he was, he bet his stash on a dark horse and it came in. In 1940, Jerry and Harry appeared on Fred Allen’s radio show to talk about Superman. This would be the only recorded comment Harry would ever offer about Superman, and while it was comedy, it was revealing. Allen asked Jerry whether he was the man behind the hero and, with atypical modesty, he said, “I’m just one of the men, Fred.” Then came Harry, who shared the stage with a character the announcer called Superman. When Superman did not recognize him, Harry chided, “Why, I’m Harry Donenfeld, your boss.… I took you off a drawing board and made a man out of you! I splashed your name from coast to coast … and you’ve never heard of me!” In later years, as others forgot his role, Harry reminded them by showing off a life-size portrait of Superman that hung in his office lobby. He took to calling himself Harry Superman Donenfeld. And, ever the showman, Harry would wear a Superman T-shirt under his suits and even his tuxedo, waiting for the perfect moment to rip open his jacket and shirt and announce, “This looks like a job for Superman!”
IT IS NOT OFTEN that a child gets a name and an identity before its parents. That is the freedom of fiction and the reality of comic books, where stories play out in diminutive dialogue balloons and thin panel drawings that put a premium on each word and image. So it was with Superman: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had trouble enough conjuring up and getting published the basic biography of their superhero. The rest they filled in as they went along.
Action 1 referred to Superman’s home only as a “distant planet” that “was destroyed by old age.” No name or location. No mention of its culture, religion, history, or why advanced age spelled destruction. Just these small teases: Its “inhabitants’ physical structure was millions of years advanced of our own,” and “upon reaching maturity, the people of his race became gifted with titanic strength!” That April 1938 backstory got more interesting the following January, with the launch of the Superman newspaper comic strip. Word one on day one gave his home planet a name, Krypton, followed by an elaborated context. The distant world was “so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen—beings which represent the human race at its ultimate peak of perfect development!” On day five we learned that Krypton was dying not of old age but of an implosion caused by “an internal cataclysm.” Five installments after that, Krypton was no more, having disintegrated into a million fragments. The first Superman comic book, published in the summer of 1939, added one last fact about Krypton that would help explain Superman’s super-strength: It was bigger than Earth, which meant that gravity had greater pull on Superman’s home planet than on his adopted one.
Superman’s parents fared worse. In Action 1 his Kryptonian birth father went nameless, although we were told he was a scientist who placed his infant son “within a hastily devised space-ship, launching it toward earth!” Not a word about his mother, assuming the baby had one. The first series of comic strips, titled “Superman Comes to Earth,” started filling in the blanks. Superman’s father got a name, Jor-L, and he was crowned “Krypton’s foremost scientist.” But while he was smart enough to detect his planet’s impending doom, he was not persuasive enough to get the ruling council to evacuate. We also met Superman’s mom, Lora, who came up with the notion that safety lay in the distant stars and decided that if only one of them could be saved, it would be her overactive newborn. The last we heard of either parent was as the baby rocketed toward Earth: “An instant after their glorious, self-sacrificing gesture, Jor-L and Lora perish in the earth quake’s awful grip!” Just the sort of stilted prose and unequivocal heroism that appealed to Joe DiMaggio and every other red-blooded American.
Baby Superman, like his parents, first got a name and a life on Krypton only in the newspapers. He was Kal-L, and he quickly showed himself to be a chip off his dad’s strong-willed block by giving his doctor a black eye and leaping from his mother’s arms. His existence on Krypton lasted mere months, but after a perilous journey he made it to Earth, where he was found by a passing motorist and left at an orphanage. That motorist had no further role in either the first comic book or the original comic strip, and Superman had neither parents on Earth nor an explanation for why he was called Clark Kent. In Superman No. 1 he got a father without a first name and a mother named Mary, who adopted him from the orphanage where they had deposited him. They lasted for ten panels, or not quite two pages—enough time to name the boy Clark Kent, watch him grow to manhood, see him discover his powers, and caution him to hide those gifts while using them to “assist humanity.” Then the elderly Kent couple died, and Clark was off to keep his promise to them. “And so,” the comic announced, “was created—SUPERMAN.”
It was not the full-scale world-building that visitors to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth would come to expect—that detailed lore would begin taking shape for Superman in the mid-1940s—but it did give the caped hero a little more context and depth. The creeping pace was partly a matter of the form: It would have taken nearly thirty years, or 350 issues, for a title like Action to equal the word count of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It also was a matter of serendipity. There was no master plan for the related but distinct storylines of the Action and Superman books and the S
uperman strip. No one had known that Action would catch on enough for the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which had turned the strip down twice before, to come begging to bring Superman to the funny pages. Neither Harry nor Jack had planned for a separate Superman comic book, or for that to be ongoing. Having Superman’s story play out across different venues presented a challenge for Jerry and the writers who came after him: Each installment needed to seem original yet part of a whole, stylistically and narratively.
Their solution, at the beginning, was to wing it, which presented its own opportunities. The first Superman book opened with six pages that provided a critical introduction to the character and his world missing from the inaugural issue of Action. The comic strip allowed for a different pacing, composed as it was of digestible four-panel dailies whose storylines could run for months when the plot justified it. The newspaper funnies also would have five times as many readers as the books, with stories every day rather than once a month. The multiple offerings meant a lot more money—for Jerry and Joe along with Harry and Jack—from rabid readers who had to follow every turn and twist.
Lois Lane was a fixture from the very start, although at first she was mainly a foil for Superman to rescue and Clark to pine over. Action 1 set the pattern: Kidnapped by three thugs, Lois was quickly whisked to safety by Superman and then laughed at by her editor, who, hearing her recount her unlikely adventure, inquired, “Are you sure it wasn’t pink elephants you saw?” The editor had his own problems. It took more than a year for him to get a name (George Taylor), and while it was clear from the beginning that his paper was the Daily Star, in Action No. 2 it was inexplicably called the Evening News and situated in Jerry and Joe’s Cleveland. The creators must have had Cleveland on the brain, and lax editing in the office, because the Ohio city turned up again as Superman’s home in Action 11. Everyone got their geographic bearings three issues later, in September 1939, when the superhero and his newspaper were situated once and forever in Metropolis. It would take until later that fall, and the second issue of the Superman book, for Metropolis to be situated in New York State.
Superman was a man of the world, perennially on call and needing to dash to wherever Lois and others required his help. Flying would have made that easier, but the most he could manage in 1938 was leaping an eighth of a mile and outracing an express train. Two years later, after what must have been intense training, he could vault into and beyond the stratosphere, outrace an airplane, and run a mile in a scant second. By 1942, he could run at the speed of light and outpace an electric current—but still no take-off. There were hints it was coming in a single frame of a story in May 1943, when his jump looked like he might be taking flight, and he did, finally and irrefutably, that October in the Action story “Million-Dollar Marathon.” “Let’s see ya fly!” adoring boys at Children’s Hospital yelled to Superman, and so he did, telling them, “I’ll be back for a real visit pretty soon! Up—up—and away!”
Veteran comic book writer Don Cameron, not Jerry Siegel, described that maiden flight, and Joe Shuster’s stand-in, Ed Dobrotka, did the artwork. But flying was something Joe had contemplated early on and Jerry had been dreaming about even before he climbed to the top of his garage roof. “To fly, to fly, to fly! What bliss!” he scribbled in his memoir, thinking back to when, as a boy, he climbed onto his father’s leg and was hoisted into the air. While Superman wasn’t the first comic book hero to fly—that honor belonged to Namor the Sub-Mariner—flight did become the Man of Steel’s most defining and coveted feature. It was a dream made real for millions of earthbound readers.
Superman always had the eyes of an eagle and the hearing of an owl, but over time both got sharper still. Within a year he could see what was going on in a building across the street whether or not it had windows, and it wasn’t long before he brought into focus objects millions of miles away on a pitch-black night. Only lead could obstruct his view. His glare alone was hot enough to melt metal, a power that would come in handy for trimming his own hair, which wouldn’t yield to scissors or even pruning shears. His ears, meanwhile, became so sensitive that he could eavesdrop on police radio calls without a radio and hear an ant fall thousands of miles away.
Following those twists and turns meant paying attention, and his young fans were transfixed. It was not just their hero’s possibilities they were piecing together but their own. They knew that Superman could hold his breath for hours underwater or douse a raging fire just by blowing on it. His million-decibel yell had enough intensity and pitch to topple tall buildings. What if a building fell on him? A tickle at most. His nostrils were super-acute. His typing was super-fast. Superman did age, but super-slowly. No need for the FBI to run a fingerprint search; Superman could find the match. Of all his strengths and skills, the most invaluable was his intellect. He had a photographic memory that let him draw an exact likeness of someone he hadn’t seen since childhood. His gaze was intense enough to hypnotize a whole tribe of South American Indians at once. He could converse with a mermaid in her native tongue and beat a checkers expert his first time playing. All that was partly a matter of nature, but he nurtured his intellect by reading, which is easier when you can scan the full contents of a library in under five minutes.
The challenge was to keep him human. The Kryptonian superhero was alien enough with the powers he had when he landed on Earth, and every issue or two the voltage was amped up. Humor helped soften him, as when he hoisted a circus strongman in one hand and iron barbells in the other, wondering, “Which is the greatest dumbbell?” Jerry’s words made the point; Joe’s drawings of a beaming Superman and a terrified muscleman ensured that no one missed it. Being an orphan twice over—having lost his parents on Krypton, then watched the Kents pass away—made the invulnerable Superman more empathetic. So did mild-mannered Clark Kent, although an alter ego could only go so far in warming up a gladiator who could blast boulders to dust and move mountains. Humility went further. The name “Superman,” the hero pointed out, was not his idea. Neither was saving the world. Both conceits came from his parents, were fanned by reporters like Lois Lane, and made him uneasy. He was not just the most manly of superheroes but the most modest, which made his fans hold him even closer.
Themes like those made Siegel and Shuster seem wise if not old, yet other aspects of their writing and drawing reminded the reader how young and green they were. Their very first story, which they had had years to fine-tune, ended nearly every sentence with the most exuberant, least subtle punctuation mark: an exclamation point! Early issues were full of awkward or inappropriate phrasing. Describing how Clark’s posture straightened when he changed into Superman, Jerry wrote, “His figure erects.” As Superman got ready to burst in on a boyish gang’s secret meeting, he said to himself, “The boys don’t know it, but they’re going to have another attendant at their meeting.” And while a twenty-five-cent word like “sardonic” might have impressed Jerry’s high school teachers, a ten-cent one like “smart-alecky” would have been an easier sell to Superman fans. The illustrations also were uneven. Sometimes the superhero had facial expressions that were easy to read; just as often, Joe’s blocky depiction made it difficult even to make out his face. Thankfully, the audience that ripped through the dialogue and devoured the drawings was even younger than Jerry and Joe, and they were willing to suspend their judgment along with their belief.
Superman was a money machine from the get-go, but he also was a butt-kicking New Dealer. His coming-out party in comic books saw the callow hero tackling a wife beater and liberating an innocent man from death row. In subsequent issues he upended a munitions manufacturer, humiliated the commanders of warring armies, exposed an unscrupulous mine operator, and finished the career of a crooked college football coach. Those no-goodniks didn’t deserve a Bill of Rights, and they wouldn’t get one with Superman. His messages were simple and direct: Power corrupts. The average Joe deserves a super-powered friend and rich SOBs deserve a boot in the rear. There’s a new sheriff in town. These we
re the very lessons that Depression-era America wanted to hear and that FDR preached in his fireside chats and legislative crusades. But where the president was soothingly patrician, Superman was neither kind nor gentle. A nearer and more apt role model for the new comic book hero was Eliot Ness, who after pursuing Al Capone’s mob in Chicago was taking a broom to Cleveland’s scandal-ridden police force. So it was that Superman gave the wife beater a thrashing of his own, in the process sounding a warning that applied to all his lowlife targets: “Tough is putting mildly the treatment you’re going to get! You’re not fighting a woman, now!”
No story better reflected Superman’s take on the world’s wrongs, and his faith that they could be set right, than Action No. 8’s “Superman in the Slums.” It opened with a neighborhood tough appearing before a judge and his mother pleading on his behalf. Covering the proceedings for his paper, Clark Kent thought, “The mother’s right! But if I know the court of law … her plea hasn’t a chance!” This was a cynical and tough Clark paired with a take-no-prisoners Man of Steel. The courts wouldn’t deal the kid a fair hand? Superman would. He rescued the delinquents from their double-crossing adult handler and from the police, then gave them a lecture worthy of settlement house pioneer Jane Addams: “It’s not entirely your fault that you’re delinquent—it’s these slums—your poor living conditions—if there was only some way I could remedy it—!” There was. He simulated a cyclone that left the shantytown in shambles. But it did not stay that way for long: “During the next weeks, the wreckage is cleared. Emergency squads commence erecting huge apartment-projects … and in time the slums are replaced by splendid housing conditions.”
