Superman

by Larry Tye

  As with most of the borrowing back and forth between comics and other media, Jimmy stuck because he tapped a nerve. Being a kid, he could share in Lois and Clark’s zany adventures without feeling any of the responsibility that weighed on adults like them. Jimmy was a foil for everyone around him—letting Superman repeatedly sweep to his rescue, Perry snarl at and then warm to him, and Lois display her suppressed mothering instincts. Every ten-year-old who flipped through a Superman comic book and tuned in to the radio show identified with him—which is why, however tired his shtick sounded, Jimmy has lasted through thousands of radio and TV broadcasts and through seventy years and counting of comics.

  Perry White was everyone’s grandfather or favorite uncle—hard-boiled on the outside but soft as a yolk once you peeled back the shell. And while he, too, got his name and personality on the radio, he quickly came to play a major part in Superman’s expanding comic book universe. Whereas Jimmy started out with just a first name, Perry, as befit his age and irascibility, at first had just a last one. Six months later he was humanized with a given name, although it was one that more commonly is a surname. His writers were novices when it came to newspapers, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they couldn’t decide just what rank he held, moving between editor, editor-in-chief, managing editor, and editor-publisher. The one constant was his championing no-holds-barred journalism.

  Perry’s most versatile reporter and Superman’s most cherished and tormenting friend was Lois Lane, who came onto the scene just five pages after Superman did. Readers could follow her infatuation with Superman, which in 1949 looked as if it might end in marriage, and her exasperation with Clark, which Superman exploited to get out of marrying Lois in the 1949 story with the implausible title “Lois Lane Loves Clark Kent.” She lived in unit 1705 at the Ritz Plaza Apartments, which was near Clark and filled with pictures of Superman. At the Daily Star and its successor, the Daily Planet, she held almost every job there was, from sob sister and columnist for the lovelorn to war correspondent, weather editor, question-and-answer editor, and head of the lost and found department. The story she most wanted to write in the early years but could never pin down was “that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same.” We learned that she had a bottomless collection of fashionable hats, a weekly show on radio station WCOD, and a pistol in her purse that she used to defend herself when Superman wasn’t there to save her.

  What fans couldn’t see but did speculate on endlessly was who was the inspiration for America’s most famous lady journalist. Was it Margo Lane, girlfriend of one of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s favorite pulp heroes, the Shadow? Perhaps it was Torchy Blaine, the fast-talking, crime-solving newspaper reporter who starred in a series of 1930s films and, in one, was played by actress and singer Lola Lane. That is what Jerry told relatives and friends over the years. Or was it Glenville High’s Lois Long, Lois Ingram, Lois Peoples, Lois Donaldson, Bertha Lois Beller, or Lois Amster? Joe repeatedly singled out Amster, a class beauty and National Honor Society member whom he said he had a crush on. Jerry did, too, but he backtracked when that struck a nerve for his new wife, Jolan Kovacs, who had modeled for Joe when he was drawing Lois. A character named Amster also showed up in one of the first issues of Jerry and Joe’s early collaboration “Doctor Occult.” The real-life Lois Amster, reminiscing at age ninety-three, says she “never spoke to” Joe and Jerry, “never had anything to do with them. They weren’t my type.… My type was more sophisticated than they were, more affluent than they were.”

  Easier to trace were Clark Kent’s roots, at least the ones outside the comics. His first name came from Gable, the king of Hollywood and star of Mutiny on the Bounty, and his last name was borrowed from a less well known film star of that era, Kent Taylor. His reporting style was based partly on the kind of journalist Jerry had once fancied becoming himself, when he doubted his comics would sell. A better model was Wilson Hirschfeld, the crusading reporter and managing editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and a high school classmate of Jerry and Joe’s. The three had worked together on the Torch, and dreamed up stories together on the front porch of Wilson’s home. Hirschfeld, who died in 1974, alternately confirmed and denied that he was Clark, although a warm condolence card from Jerry after Wilson’s death helped settle the case for the Hirschfeld family.

  Clark’s parentage inside the comics remained more ambiguous through the 1930s and 1940s. The couple who found and raised him at first were simply called “the Kents.” Ten years on, in a comic book published in the winter of 1948, his foster parents got first names: John and Mary, although those names appeared not in the text but on the Kents’ gravestones. A year later Pa Kent would inexplicably become Silas, and it would take until the 1950s for the couple to settle in as Martha and Jonathan. From the first the Kents were big-hearted. They saved the baby boy who rocketed into their world, adopted and raised him as their own, and imbued him with a mission. “No man on Earth has the amazing powers you have. You can use them to become a powerful force for good!” John admonished from his deathbed. “There are evil men in this world … criminals and outlaws who prey on decent folk! You must fight them … in cooperation with the law! To fight those criminals best, you must hide your true identity! They must never know Clark Kent is a … super-man! Remember, because that’s what you are … a Superman!”

  Inspired though that message was, it was not original. Nearly identical passages had appeared six years earlier in yet another medium, the novel. It was written by George Lowther, a scriptwriter for the Superman radio show, and had the same title as that show: The Adventures of Superman. It was the first full-fledged book ever centered on a comic character, and Lowther was the first writer other than Jerry Siegel to get credit for writing a Superman tale. The comic strips’ Jor-L and Lora became Jor-el and Lara in Lowther’s book, and those spellings stuck although Jor-el became Jor-El. The Kents, too, got new names here: Sarah and Eben. Lowther fleshed out the worlds of Superman’s parents on Krypton and his foster parents on Earth. His longest-lasting contribution to the mythos was having Clark slowly discover his powers during his teens, which made him more empathetic and believable. “It was not until his thirteenth year that the incident occurred that was to set him apart from ordinary humans,” Lowther wrote. “Clark watched the teacher as she poked about in the desk drawer, and as he did so he became slowly aware that he was also looking at the inside of the desk, that his eyes had pierced the wood.… The simple truth was that he had looked through the desk as though the wood were transparent.”

  Such narratives about Superman’s growing pains were captivating to adolescent readers who imagined themselves in Superman’s place. The Superman legend had never waded into any of that. The Kents hid from him his otherworldly origins; he didn’t don his Superman identity until he was an adult; and his childhood took up just eight panels in the first Superman comic book and two fewer in Action 1. Jerry Siegel realized what a rich trove he had glossed over and now proposed a comic focusing on the pranks of a noncostumed character he called Superboy. Detective picked up the idea—minus the whimsy and with a costume—while Jerry was in the Army, launching a feature that explored Superman’s adventures growing up in the Midwest. It began in 1945 in More Fun Comics, a year later switched to Adventure Comics, and in 1949 Superboy got a comic book of his own. For the first time, readers learned how Martha Kent had stitched her adopted son’s playsuit into a red-and-blue cape and tights, and how she used glass from his rocket ship to make Clark’s special eyeglasses. The stories were not just about Superboy but about a Saturday Evening Post world of picket fences that needed painting and apple pies warming in brick ovens. Fans went wild—young ones new to the legend and their parents who had grown up with Superman and The Saturday Evening Post—making Superboy the most popular new title of 1949, a time when most superheroes were fading away.

  If learning about his roots on Krypton had humanized Superman, learning what he was like as a boy softened him. To his young fans, girls as
much as boys, he was more than ever one of them. Yet even as the new stories answered questions that kids had asked since the beginning, they raised concerns that would take years more for Superman’s handlers to sort out: How could Superboy know about his origins long before Superman did? How could there even be a Superboy if, as the earliest Action and Superman stories made clear, Clark didn’t acquire the Superman costume and identity until he was an adult?

  Those questions mattered to readers and writers but not to Harry and Jack. By the mid-1940s they had a better fix on who was buying comic books. The most devoted audience was kids aged six to eleven, with 95 percent of boys and 91 percent of girls reading them regularly. The numbers slowly declined in successive age groups, but even at age thirty half of the men in America and about 40 percent of the women were poring over comic books occasionally, and many were still steady fans. That helped explain the 150 different titles that jockeyed for space on newsstand racks, accounting for record monthly sales of forty million. Detective now faced competition from Fawcett, Timely, Dell, Street & Smith, and a series of other publishers, while Superman was going head-to-head with the likes of Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Bulletman. While they wanted to give kids the new Superboy stories they craved, Jack and Harry also wanted to satisfy adults who were devoted to the old Superman tales they’d been raised on. The solution: Reap profits from both old titles and new, contradictions be damned.

  The adult Superman was getting a different sort of makeover. Joe Shuster had drawn a sticklike superhero whose skimpy facial expressions were difficult to see, not to mention read. By the late 1940s, Wayne Boring was setting the standard with a more muscular Man of Steel whose face was chiseled, whose jaw jutted onto the page, and who had more stature, bulk, and gravitas than his early incarnation. It was an image that fit with a Superman who had gone from leaping to flying and whose powers were perpetually expanding. Everything around him got bigger, too, from city skyscrapers to the S emblem on his chest. His world was now as outsized as his place in it.

  Superman and those he treasured were not the only ones who were evolving. Those he loathed were, too. His first enemy to appear in a costume was the Archer, who, once Superman unmasked him as Quigley the big-game hunter, confessed that “I thought hunting human beings would prove more profitable!” Superman: “Any kid could tell you that crime doesn’t pay, Mr. Quigley.” The Prankster, the Toyman, the Puzzler, and J. Wilbur Wolfingham, a W. C. Fields lookalike, used tricks and gags instead of a bow and arrows in their bids to conquer Superman. For editors wary of controversy, 1940s villains like those were a way to avoid the sharp edges of the real world. For a nation weary of war, they offered a release. For Superman, the masters of disguise and the tricksters let him demonstrate that his wit was at least as potent as his fists in battling bad guys.

  While none of those villains lasted long, Lex Luthor did. When he first turned up in the spring of 1940 he had a full mop of bright red hair. By that summer he was gray, and a year later he was as bald as the evil Super-Man of Jerry and Joe’s high school imaginations. What didn’t change was Luthor’s determination to take down Superman on his way to mastering the universe. In their first encounter Superman confronted him, asking, “What sort of creature are you?” Luthor answered with candor if not modesty: “Just an ordinary man—but with th’ brain of a super-genius! With scientific miracles at my fingertips, I’m preparing to make myself supreme master of th’ world!”

  It is true that you can judge a man by his enemies, and Luthor had a way of bringing out in Superman both his vulnerabilities and his invincibility. From that opening encounter Lex drew on the full mix of villainous tactics—zapping Superman with an all-powerful ray gun, fomenting war as part of his scheme to grab power, and kidnapping Lois Lane. He tested Superman’s mettle and exploited his soft spot. But in the end the Man of Steel smashed to bits the ray gun, talked the warring parties into signing an armistice, and rescued Lois. Holding her in his arms, he announced, “And that’s th’ end of Luthor!” If only it were true. Having created the closest thing Superman would ever get to a nemesis, Jerry and Joe were not about to let him die.

  Mr. Mxyztplk, a bald imp who wore a purple suit and derby, was a different sort of adversary: He had superpowers but no interest in world domination. That had been his goal when he arrived on Earth from the fifth dimension, but he decided it would be more fun to discombobulate Superman by playing pranks on him, the way Bugs Bunny did with Elmer Fudd. What he hadn’t counted on was that the no-nonsense superhero could be as playful as he was. Superman learned he could send the little man back for at least a month to his home world of Zrfff if he could trick him into saying his name backward—Klptzyxm. So he came up with a different way to do it every time they met. “Let’s test your eyesight,” the Man of Steel teased his adversary in one such meeting, after convincing him he was losing his sight. “There are three small signs 20 miles from here! If you can read them off, fast …” Before he could finish, Mxyztplk was breezing through sign one, sign two, and finally: “It says, ‘Oxygen! Hydrogen! Nitrogen! Klptzyxm—’ Oops—I spoke the word that’s sending me back to Zrfff!”

  Jerry Siegel said he invented the elfin character to give Superman and his readers “a change of pace” after all the battles against deadly adversaries like Luthor. “I think it added something to the feature to show Superman tangling with a magical foe who enjoyed making the idol of millions uncomfortable on his super-pedestal.” What made editors at Detective Comics uncomfortable was having to spell the Zrfffian’s name. One time when they typed it wrong—Mxyzptlk instead of Mxyztplk—the misspelling somehow stuck.

  Names already were an obsession for Detective’s writers and artists, most of whom had transformed theirs for reasons of art or assimilation, so it is not surprising that they had fun with the names of their characters. With Superman their obsession was nicknames, the best gift you can give a friend. Man of Steel was the most used, but he also was known then or later as the Last Son of Krypton, Metropolis Marvel, Kryptonian, Citizen Fix-It, Wonder Worker, Man of Tomorrow, Champion of the Underdog, Champion of the Oppressed, Champion of Democracy, Champion of Justice, Colossus of Krypton, World’s Mightiest Hero, World’s Mightiest Citizen, Man of Might, Big Blue, Big Blue Boy Scout, Big Blue Cheese, Action Ace, Smallville, Strange Visitor, King of Speed, and, the simplest and most intimate, Supes.

  The era that stretched from the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s became known as the Golden Age of comic books. It was a time when the comic book became an accepted art form and the superhero played a central role in American culture. Fans would look back longingly as comics hit a rough patch in the 1950s, with fewer heroes and plummeting sales. The dawn of the earlier, more hopeful era was marked by the birth of Superman. Its last important title was the Superboy comic launched in 1949. Who better to bookend comics’ gilded age than its reigning monarch? And in Superman’s case it wasn’t just a Golden Age of comic books but of comic strips, dramatic radio broadcasts, pioneering animation, and wildly successful movie serials. Superman was jumping from medium to medium just as Americans were, responding to society’s likes and dislikes and, just as often, shaping them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Superman, Inc.

  THE COMICS HAD NEVER BEHELD a golden goose like him before. Superman was now the marquee attraction in four separate comic books and he shared top billing with Batman in a fifth. Each magazine brought in just ten cents, but a 1940s dime is today’s dollar and 3.2 million dimes were rung up every month. True Man of Tomorrow addicts could get a daily dose in the funny pages. They were the newspapers’ most fought-over feature, especially Sunday’s four-color splash, and every Sunday Superman’s strip was delivered to twenty-five million homes, each of which swelled his royalties. Ka-ching.

  The cash value of stardom was even easier to measure outside the comics. The radio Adventures of Superman was a runaway hit, with every “Atom Man” or “Clan of the Fiery Cross” adventure bringing a fat check from spo
nsors such as the snap, crackle, and pop makers of Battle Creek. Superman cartoons and serials were selling out—at forty cents a ticket for a weekend matinee—at theaters from Boston and Baton Rouge to Barcelona, where moviegoers cheered their “El Hombre Supre.” Even department stores were mining the gold. Starting in 1942 they bought up and gave away millions of Superman-Tim booklets, featuring cutout puzzles, heroic stories of Superman and his young pal Tim, and a reminder from everyone’s favorite strongman not to “Be A Whoo-Shoo! He’s The Boy Who Gets This Magazine Every Month, But Never Buys Any Of His Clothes At The Superman-Tim Store! Gee!” Ka-ching.

  Then there were the synergies, a newly minted term for the way Harry Donenfeld, Jack Liebowitz, and their apprentices were turning Superman into a product line. As early as 1941, buttons designating the wearer as a paid-up member of the Supermen of America Club were proudly worn by hundreds of thousands of youthful fans, including Mickey Rooney, Our Gang’s Spanky, and half a dozen middies at the Naval Academy. Kids across America lathered peanut butter and jelly onto super-flavored Superman bread and, if they ate all the crust, they might get treated to a Superman lollypop or Superman chocolate bar. Their Superman suspenders held up Superman dungarees. They stored their money in Superman billfolds until they had enough to buy Superman bubble gum, squirt guns, lunch boxes, underpants, jammies, moccasins, horseshoes, and a Krypto-Raygun complete with bulb, battery, lenses, and seven strips of film that let them flash onto a wall images of their idol in twenty-eight action-packed poses. Ka-ching.