Superman

by Larry Tye

  To Jerry, ghostwriters like Alvin were mere seat warmers. After all, Superman was his brainchild, and he kept sending in ideas while he was serving his country in the Army. Although he wore the insignia of the infantry, as a minor celebrity he wasn’t about to see real action. His special-assignment company in West Virginia was called DEML, for Detached Enlisted Men’s List, but it was known throughout the Army as Damn Easy Military Life. In a 1944 letter, Jerry asked Jack whether he could pull strings to land him an even cushier job in Washington writing for the Army newspaper. And while he was at it, could he send Superman pins and secret codes to all of Jerry’s fellow soldiers in DEML?

  Jerry ended up not in Washington but in Alabama, then in Hawaii, where he was promoted to corporal and wrote a comic strip for the troops, the first time a member of the military had ever done that. It was called Super G.I. and its hero, Private Joe Droop, again was modeled after Jerry—a soldier who was “small, weak … timid.” Every human being, Droop told himself, “is two persons. The person he is … and the person he’d like to be. It’s all a matter of concentration and psychic conditions.” While Jerry loved the attention he was getting in the Army, he was too obsessed to focus just on his military cartoon and his war. He worried that each check coming from Jack was too small, and that Detective was using his old idea for a Superboy comic book without giving him proper control or compensation. He complained less when Joe Shuster—who had been ceding increasing authority to his artistic assistants as his eyesight and work ethic frayed—was stripped of any remaining control over Superman’s design.

  Superboy wasn’t the only new product to emerge from World War II for Detective Comics, and Joe wasn’t the only one whose duties changed. Writers and artists were coming and going with the draft and other wartime demands, and Jack Liebowitz found new talent to replace them temporarily or forever. He discovered that a full-length novel worked as well as a thin comic book to tell Superman’s story, and that George Lowther was as good a storyteller as Jerry Siegel. And he found all the paper he needed for his books and comics despite a shortage that had forced newspapers to shrink the Sunday strips. No one knew better than Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz how to dip into black markets and make cross-border deals with Canadian publishers. Beyond that all they had to do was count their money, with monthly sales of comic books doubling to twenty million between 1941 and 1944, dealer return rates plummeting to zero, and war-related prosperity generating a windfall for the whole comics industry. Superman caught the breeze, with thirty million Americans regularly reading his comic books or strips. Soldiers were loyal fans, but truer still were their kid brothers and sisters back home, who bought Superman stories, read and reread them, then traded them in schoolyards and backyards. As for Jerry’s complaints that he was being shortchanged while he was in the Army, Jack said that in addition to commissions for stories others were writing, Jerry got a $5,000 bonus at the end of 1945. “You did not see fit to acknowledge [it],” Jack wrote, “though you did deposit it.”

  The riskiest business decision Jack Liebowitz made during the war—to keep Superman off the battlefield—was rewarded in spades afterward. Hop Harrigan, the Boy Commandos, and nearly all the other comic book heroes who were on the front lines saw their popularity fade, and many disappeared entirely. Finding a role for real warriors in peacetime was hard enough, but it was impossible for fantasy characters meant to provide an escape. Their association with a war America wanted to forget was too painful. Superman’s shepherds had bet right, keeping him engaged as a cheerleader rather than a combatant. It was a lesson they would not forget.

  An even more valuable lesson was one that Superman himself understood better than anyone. Over the course of World War II, the hero and his country went through a similar process of self-discovery. America learned that it had the world’s most vibrant and malleable economy and used it to forge a military complex powerful enough to smash the Axis juggernaut. Superman found he could not just jump high but he could take flight, see through or topple buildings, and defeat any foe. The mightier the superpower and its superhero got, the more both realized that the challenge was to marshal their strength not merely to win battles but to stand for something worthy of the fight. Truth was a good starting point. And of course there was justice. As GIs sacrificed their blood everywhere from the Ardennes Mountains to Iwo Jima, the United States and Superman added another element to their moral code: They were fighting to advance not just universal rights but very particular ones, like life, liberty, and happiness, that they called the American way. The Man of Steel and the nation that loved him were, during the long years of war, growing up together in a way that made him more relevant than ever in postwar America.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Matter of Faith

  HE DIDN’T LOOK JEWISH. Not with his perfect pug nose, electric blue eyes, and boyish spit curl that suggested Anglo as well as Saxon. No hint in his sleek movie-star name, Clark Kent, which could belong only to a gentile, probably one with a lifelong membership at the country club. His social circle didn’t give it away either: Lois Lane, George Taylor, and even Lex Luthor were, like him, more Midwest mainstream than East Coast ethnic. The surest sign that Clark was no Semite came when the bespectacled everyman donned royal blue tights and a furling red cape to transform himself into a Superman with rippling muscles and expanding superpowers. Who ever heard of a Jewish strongman?

  The evidence of his ethnic origin lay elsewhere, starting with Kal-El, his Kryptonian name. El is a suffix in Judaism’s most cherished birthrights, from Isra-el to the prophets Samu-el and Dani-el. It means God. Kal is similar to the Hebrew words for voice and vessel. Together they suggest that the alien superbaby was not just a Jew but a very special one. Like Moses. Much as the baby prophet was floated in a reed basket by a mother desperate to spare him from an Egyptian Pharaoh’s death warrant, so Kal-El’s doomed parents, moments before their planet blew up, tucked him into a spaceship that rocketed him to the safety of Earth. Both babies were rescued by non-Jews and raised in foreign cultures—Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter, Kal-El by Kansas farmers named Kent—and the adoptive parents quickly learned how exceptional their foundlings were. The narratives of Krypton’s birth and death borrowed the language of Genesis. Kal-El’s escape to Earth was the story of Exodus.

  Clues mounted from there. The three legs of the Superman myth—truth, justice, and the American way—are straight out of the Mishnah, the codification of Jewish oral traditions. “The world,” it reads, “endures on three things: justice, truth, and peace.” The explosion of Krypton conjures up images from the mystical Kabbalah, where the divine vessel was shattered and Jews were called on to perform tikkun ha-olam by repairing the vessel and the world. The destruction of Kal-El’s planet and people also calls to mind the Nazi Holocaust that was brewing when Jerry and Joe were publishing their first comics, and it summons up as well the effort to save Jewish children through Kindertransports. Superman’s lingering heartsickness was survivor’s guilt. A last rule of thumb: When a name ends in “man,” the bearer is Jewish, a superhero, or both.

  If most of his admirers did not recognize Superman’s Jewish roots, the Third Reich did. A 1940 article in Das Schwarze Korps, the newspaper of the SS, called Jerry Siegel “Siegellack,” the “intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York.” Superman, meanwhile, was a “pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind.” Creator and creation were stealthily working together, the Nazis concluded, to sow “hate, suspicion, evil, laziness, and criminality” in the hearts of American youth who “don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.”

  Superman had even stronger cultural ties to the faith of his founders. He started life as the consummate liberal, championing causes from disarmament to the welfare state. He was the ultimate foreigner, escaping to America from his intergalactic shtetl and shedding his Jewish name for Clark Kent, a pseudonym as transparently WASPish as the ones Jerry had chosen for hims
elf. Clark and Jerry had something else in common: Both were classic nebbishes. Clark and Superman lived the way most newly arrived Jews did, torn between their Old and New World identities and their mild exteriors and rock-solid cores. That split personality was the only way he could survive, yet it gave him perpetual angst. You can’t get more Jewish than that.

  So compelling were those bonds that decades later TV’s Jerry Seinfeld would refer to Superman as his Jewish brother-in-arms, and BBC Radio would air a debate entitled “Is Superman Jewish?” The Jewish 100, a book about the most influential Jews of all time, listed Jerry and Joe alongside Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Abraham. Jules Feiffer, an authority on cartoons and Jews, said the Last Son of Krypton was born not on Krypton but on “the planet Poland, from Lodz maybe, possibly Crakow, maybe Vilna.” The alien superhero was, more than anything, “the striving Jewish boy’s goyishe American dream.”

  Was that what Jerry and Joe had in mind? Neither was an observant Jew or attracted to organized Judaism. Some of Superman’s Jewish touches—such as the spelling Kal-El, versus Jerry’s more streamlined Kal-L—were added by later writers and editors, the preponderance of whom also were Jewish. But Jerry acknowledged in his memoir that his writing was strongly influenced by the anti-Semitism he saw and felt, and that Samson was a role model for Superman. He also was proud that his anti-Nazi superhero touched a nerve in Berlin. So, undoubtedly, were Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, both of whom had experienced Jew-baiting up close in Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side. What Jerry did, as he said repeatedly, was write about his world, which was a Cleveland neighborhood that was 70 percent Jewish, where theaters and newspapers were in Yiddish as well as English, and there were two dozen Orthodox synagogues to choose from but only one place—Weinberger’s—to buy your favorite pulp fiction. It was a setting and time where juvenile weaklings and whey-faces—especially Jewish ones, who were more likely to get sand kicked in their faces by Adolf Hitler and the bully down the block—dreamed that someday the world would see them for the superheroes they really were.

  THE EVIDENCE THAT HE was a Jew did not stop other faiths from claiming Superman as theirs. Christian enthusiasts saw him as Jesus, the child dispatched to Earth by his omnipotent father to save mankind. No surprise that his Kryptonian name was Hebrew, since Jesus was a Jew, but the Kal in front of El suggested to Christians a presence beyond just God—a son, perhaps. The fact that Clark Kent’s adoptive mother originally was called Mary added to their argument, as did Superman’s cape, which can look like the wings of an angel. Superman’s story reminds Jews of Old Testament heroes from Moses to Aaron and David; Catholics and Protestants find the holy saints when they read between the cartoons’ lines.

  The case for a Christian Superman was grounded in geography. It was not merely that he came from the heavens—but that he landed in Kansas. It was a state made up mainly of God-fearing Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists. It fell just outside the Bible Belt but deep within the Grain Belt, thanks to its sorghum and wheat, soybeans and corn. It was the American heartland, with plainspoken rules about how to treat others and clear-cut values taken straight from the Ten Commandments. It gave Clark a grounding in right and wrong as he headed to the big Metropolis and gave Middle America a sense that he was one of them.

  Symbols mattered, too, as always in religion and popular culture. Baby Kal-El’s blanket brought to mind Jesus’ swaddling clothes. Clark’s Fortress of Solitude rose like a cathedral. His fellow reporters had as much trouble recognizing him as Superman as Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes did seeing him as their savior. True believers also have attached meaning to names. Krypton is Greek for hidden, which is one way the New Testament described the kingdom of heaven, and in Kryptonese Kal-El means Star-Child, which could refer to the Star of Bethlehem, signal of the birth of Christ. Lex Luthor sounded and acted like Lucifer. Clark means cleric, in this case one whose middle name—Joseph—is perhaps a wink to the carpenter from Nazareth. These and other connections are laid out in Stephen Skelton’s book The Gospel According to the World’s Greatest Superhero. The dots became even easier to connect in later years. Comic books would kill off Superman, then resurrect him. In the movies, a godlike Marlon Brando would dispense to his son advice straight out of the Book of John to “show the way” to the earthlings who “lack the light” but have the “capacity for good.” On stage in Godspell, Jesus would wear a Superman shirt. And a television show about an adolescent Superman would open with an episode showing a young Clark hung on a crucifix by a gang of football players.

  While the search for religious meaning has yielded compelling nuggets, sometimes it seems strained. Is Jor-El, Superman’s father, a play on Hebrew words for “God teaches”? Or is it, as Jerry insisted, Jor as in Jerome and El as in Siegel—making Jerry Siegel, rather than any deity, the true father of Superman?

  The truth is that Superman’s most Christ-like features have less to do with how he looks or sounds than how he behaves. He represents our best selves and highest aspirations. He intervenes where he can, as with the abusive husband and death row inmate, but recognizes that man must have free will even when it hurts, as in World War II. That sense of devotion and duty inspired Father John Cush to enter the priesthood, and it resonates with the high school students he teaches in Brooklyn. “Obviously,” Cush explains, “as a Roman Catholic priest, I see Superman as a Christ figure.” To some clerical leaders, that is apostasy. “The Word became flesh, not steel,” said the Reverend Kenneth Reichley of New York’s St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. “Superman is magic. He manipulates fate and history … Jesus is not magic. He works within history.” Not so, said the Reverend Andrew Greeley, Catholic scholar and author: “Superman, I’ve always thought, is an angel. Probably the angel stories found in all of the world’s religions are traces of the work in our world of Superman and his relatives. Who is to say I’m wrong?”

  Christians and Jews were not the only ones. Muslims, at least some of them, saw in the Superman creation story a reflection of their own origins, with Jor-El dispatching Kal-El as a messenger to mankind much the way God did Muhammad. Buddhists put in dibs, too, seeing the superhero as the Man of Zen. Superman knew how “to live entirely in the now,” explained Alvin Schwartz, who was born Jewish, was long interested in metaphysics, and wrote Superman’s comic strip when Jerry was in the Army. “He’s totally fixed on a single point. His one defining act—his rescue mission. That’s what he does … and that’s why you can’t have a Superman without a Clark Kent—because no one can live all the time at that level of experience. There has to be a retreat to ordinariness, to self-recollection.”

  Nonbelievers had a different take: Superman was a paragon, but he wasn’t a Jew or a Christian, a Buddhist or a worshipper of the ancient gods of the sun that gave him his power. He was so strong he could truly move mountains and so pure he would neither litter nor jaywalk. He could crawl away from kryptonite but was undone by moral relativism. He never asked his followers to die in his name or to proclaim themselves the chosen ones. This vision of Superman as a secular messiah tapped into America’s cultural myths and oral traditions—into its communal do’s and don’ts—which is just the way agnostics, atheists, and spiritualists would have him. It also is just what Geoff Johns calls to mind when he writes Superman stories or edits them. “You can have spirituality and morality without religion,” says Johns, today’s chief creative officer at the company built by Jack and Harry. “Superman shows that is possible.” Mark Waid—who collaborated with Alex Ross on the graphic novel Kingdom Come, the most spiritual Superman story ever—agrees that religion is not the point: “Superman is not a story about faith, it’s about inspiration. It’s a story about trying to move us into emulating, into being, into doing.”

  The early Superman did that not by preaching, or even explaining, but by letting his actions speak to his intent. The governor wouldn’t pay attention to a prison superintendent who was abusing his inmates? No problem. Superman burst into the gove
rnor’s mansion just as he had a year before to stop an execution, whisked the state leader to the prison, and let him see for himself the abuse. The superintendent wouldn’t confess? Into the sweatbox he went, with the governor looking on and Superman vowing, “I’m going to plug the air-holes … You’ll suffocate and die, just like your own victims did!” Superintendent: “No! No! Let me free! I swear I’ll never torture the prisoners again!!”

  By the time Waid wrote Kingdom Come, more than half a century later, the Man of Tomorrow had found his voice after abandoning—then dramatically reclaiming—his mantle as a superhero. “Years ago, I let those I swore to protect drive me away. We all did,” Superman—speaking for Batman, Wonder Woman, and the other crusaders—explained to United Nations leaders. “We saw you as gods,” said the UN secretary-general. Superman: “As we saw ourselves. And we both were wrong. But I no longer care about the mistakes of yesterday. I care about coping with tomorrow … together. The problems we face still exist. We’re not going to solve them for you.… We’re going to solve them with you … not by ruling above you … but by living among you. We will no longer impose our power on humanity. We will earn your trust.”