Superman
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The marriage couldn’t happen fast enough. They filed their application on October 13, 1948, asking the state to waive the normal waiting period so they could have a “ceremony at once.” Both were already living at the Commodore Hotel in Cleveland, and her marriage had been over for years. His divorce agreement was worked out three months before and accepted by the court on October 7. A justice of the peace married them at the hotel on October 14, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story the next day. Three days later national gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote, “ ‘Superman’ creator Jerry Siegel and model Joanne Carter had it sealed in Cleveland.” But it wasn’t quite sealed. For a reason neither ever talked about, Jerry and Joanne were back with a second marriage application three weeks after the first and were wed again that same day, November 3. Whatever the glitch, it was fixed. Jerry had turned thirty-four in the interval. Joanne told Jerry, The Plain Dealer, and the state of Ohio that she was twenty-five, which would have made her a cherubic twelve or thirteen when she modeled for Joe as a voluptuous Lois Lane. Her birth certificate clears up the confusion: She was, in fact, about to turn thirty-one when she married Jerry, which she must have worried was over-the-hill.
Joanne knew about Jerry and Joe’s legal battles with National Comics, which is why she had changed her plan to come to the Plaza costume party as Lois Lane. She hadn’t had it easy herself. After high school she had left Cleveland for Chicago, then Boston, when a young man who had spotted her ad in the newspaper invited her to join his skating act. She said she couldn’t skate; he said he’d teach her. The act broke up before she had to perform the dangerous stunts he had planned for her, and she stayed for a while in Boston, where she “went to a local bar and began phoning artists listed in the yellow pages. As a result, I became a professional model instead of a professional skater.”
Joanne came into Jerry’s life just as he was losing his home, his car, his livelihood, and his superhero. His privations became her cause. She had never known high living, so didn’t have to make the adjustments he did; having her there made it easier for him. So did being able to lash out at his old bosses in the only forum still open to him, the comics. Less than three weeks after his marriage to Joanne, he published a Sunday Funnyman newspaper strip about a writer (Jerkimer) who was ripped off by a chiseling business executive (Winston Lightfingers of Gypsum Music). The writer was saved through the intervention of Funnyman, the only superhero Jerry still could call his own.
EVEN AS JERRY AND JOE were parting company with Superman, their hero was showing up in places no one expected to find him. There he was in the dentist’s office, in an eight-page thriller in which he rescued a U.S. pilot whose aching tooth crippled him in the middle of a dogfight, warning that “smart fellows take good care of their teeth and visit the dentist regularly.” Department stores gave out a Superman’s Christmas Adventure booklet, as well as Superman-Tim, which was published year-round and was half adventure story, half sales pitch. Superman adorned the backs of cereal boxes, the front of a holiday display at R. H. Macy & Co. that drew a hundred thousand visitors, and ads for Dr Pepper, sandwich spreads, and flour mills. The Man of Steel had gone viral and merchandisers wanted to go with him.
Sometimes the link-ups paid direct dividends to National Comics, as with Superman-Tim: A marketing firm bought the rights to produce the six-by-nine-inch booklets, then sold them to stores. The one million dental brochures that Jack and Harry printed, like the Superman balloon they entered in New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, earned them nothing directly but built name recognition and trust for their hero. So complete was that trust that a corps of secretaries at National was kept busy answering moms’ questions about how to make their kids stop biting their nails, eat egg yolks, and walk the dog. Mothers were learning the lesson librarians had years before: When Superman spoke, kids listened. As for name recognition, popular culture maven Harlan Ellison got it right when he observed that “the urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet; the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Djakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood … and Superman.”
That celebrity let National license more Superman products—over one hundred in all—than were commissioned for Sherlock, Tarzan, or Robin Hood, although no one could touch Disney’s Mickey. Superman, Inc., started licensing merchandise in 1940 and within months there were more than twenty items, from film viewers to military-style hairbrushes, which netted about one hundred thousand dollars for Harry and Jack. A year later, forty companies were making Superman toys, candies, games, and other items, with profits swelling. Jigsaw puzzles were an early favorite, with more than a dozen being produced in 1940 alone, from intricate five-hundred-piece ones showing him leaping to the rescue to box sets of six puzzles with forty-two pieces each. The first dolls had adjustable wooden joints and squinty eyes and cost just ninety-four cents (although today one in mint condition can fetch eight thousand dollars). For the action-oriented, the Turnover Tank let Superman flip the vehicle all the way over, no mean feat for a toy produced in 1940.
Superman, Inc., offered something for every taste and age. Fathers could drench their cereal in Superman milk, lather up with Superman shaving cream, add Superman hood ornaments to their cars, then drive away using high-octane Superman-certified gasoline. The latter made it especially clear that the only thing needed to make an association with the Man of Tomorrow was a client willing to pay today. Kids could trade seventy-two different Superman picture cards, just as they did baseball cards or comic books. Mothers could take the kids to the Macy’s Christmas show, then fit them out in a blue broadcloth shirt, red broadcloth cape, and navy cotton twill pants—all for just ninety-eight cents. Anyone of any age interested in bulking up could try a Superman muscle-building set, with hand grippers, a jump rope, a measuring tape, and a chart to track their progress.
Public relations and advertising were in their adolescence as the 1930s were yielding to the 1940s, and both vocations were hell-bent on making every American a consummate consumer. It was a time before focus groups, when anything went, and Robert Maxwell fit in instantly. Even before his Superman radio show debuted, Maxwell was put in charge of Superman, Inc., where he was anxious to show how much money he could make for Harry and Jack. Some of the promotional deals he negotiated involved products that grew out of the hero and his exploits. Others added Superman’s endorsement to items or services already on the market. “Let Superman be your Super-salesman,” Maxwell’s brochure pitched. “Superman has a tremendous, loyal fan following, a ready-made juvenile market that will respond by boosting your sales volume.” It worked from the start and got even better when Maxwell brought it with him to the radio show he was launching. Laundries, dairies, and meat packers signed up as sponsors, then watched their profits shoot up. The Rochester, Minnesota, bottler of Dr Pepper and 7 Up offered an object lesson, its sales doubling after it started sponsoring the show on KROC.
While Superman, Inc., vanished as a corporate entity in the summer of 1946 when it was absorbed into National Comics, the mindset remained that he was a commodity that could be branded, packaged, sold, and incorporated. Neither National nor its predecessors had ever pretended to be a charity. They had always been focused on building a commercial success hand in hand with the Superman story, in whatever form that story might take. Making money was a way of ensuring that Superman would not suffer the fate of the Green Lantern, whose plummeting sales led to his being pulled from publication between 1949 and 1959, or of World War II aviation ace Hop Harrigan, who was grounded forever in 1948. But Maxwell, Liebowitz, and Donenfeld were smart enough to know they could push only so far before they threatened the integrity of their character, and they rarely tested those limits. They took care to associate their all-American hero with all-American products like piggy banks, coloring books, and sliced white bread. Keepers of the legacy fr
om Superman comics would sit in on plotting sessions for his movies, and in-house censors pored over each printed word to ensure the Big Blue Boy Scout stayed true to his name.
That name defined not just one hero but the whole National Comics universe in its early years. Superman, Inc., managed Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of National’s stable of heroes in the 1940s, none of whom had nearly the product line that Superman did or brought in nearly the revenues. The more success Superman had in one medium, the more others wanted him, with comic books leading to comic strips, radio, cartoons, and film. And the fans who read, listened, and watched couldn’t get enough of Superman valentines, timepieces, and the Super-Babe dolls that Macy’s introduced just in time for Christmas in 1947. “Superman turned baby by mysterious atomic rays,” the ads explained, and for $5.59 ($56 today) kids could have their own fifteen-inch doll with latex rubber skin, moveable arms and legs, and eyes that opened and shut.
Kids were the key to National’s strategy, and not just because they were Superman’s most avid fans. Hooking them young could mean keeping them forever, and Superman was proving to be a gateway to get young people to try all kinds of other comics. Their parents might have worried about adult conceits like consumerism and commercialism, but kids had their own truth: the Superman they were reading in comic books, listening to on the radio, and watching at the movie house was as pure as ever, and he was theirs. Having Superman toys on the shelf and Superman food in the pantry brought their hero closer and made him more central than ever to their lives.
And it was not just in America. France and Italy imported the Man of Steel barely a year after his debut here, with kids in Paris calling him Yordi and ones in Rome preferring Ciclone, or “hurricane.” South American children loved him, as did Germans before the Nazis started railing against his Jewish roots. He was America’s most iconic export. Superman is a hero “for the whole universe,” explains Vincent Maulandi, a lifelong fan in France. The Last Son of Krypton “had no more homeworld and the Earth would replace that home, not only America.” As Superman’s comics and films spread around the globe, so did the international flavor of his wares. From France would come a Superman towel rack, from Nepal a can of cooking oil with a large picture on the front of the Man of Steel, and from Mexico a papier-mâché piñata built to look like El Hombre Supre. Ka-ching.
CHAPTER 6
The Deadly Truth
SUPERMAN HAD AN IMAGE PROBLEM. During World War II, the Nazis had denounced him for being a pawn of the Jews and poisoning the minds of America’s youth. In the Cold War that followed, a Jewish psychiatrist was accusing him of being a Nazi out to corrupt the adolescents of America. Either way, his detractors were sure that Superman was bad for the kids.
Now they had Melvin Leeland and Billy Becker to prove it. On a cool summer night in 1947, Melvin, a fourteen-year-old from Washington, D.C., was showing a friend how to play Russian roulette. He spun the loaded cylinder, raised the .22-caliber revolver to his right temple, and, as his mate watched in horror, blew a hole in his head. His mother told the police that he had read about the deadly game in a comic book. Two months later Billy, a twelve-year-old from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, tossed a clothesline over a rafter in his basement and hanged himself. Mrs. Becker said he was reenacting a scene from a comic book. “I burned every one I found,” she told a coroner’s jury, “but Billy always found ways of hiding them.”
The common denominator in tragedies like these was “crime” comic books, Dr. Fredric Wertham explained. From Batman to Wonder Woman, Superboy too, all shared the blame for the scourge of juvenile delinquency sweeping the nation. They were “an invitation to illiteracy” and encouraged “criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.” Batman and Robin were secret lovers. Wonder Woman was an overt lesbian. Most depraved of all was the Man of Steel, “with the big S on his uniform,” Wertham wrote. “We should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.… The very children whose unruly behavior I would want to prescribe psychotherapy in an anti-superman direction, have been nourished (or rather poisoned) by the endless repetition of Superman stories.”
Looking back, Wertham’s warnings read like the ravings of a quack, but he was an esteemed psychiatrist and he wasn’t alone. In the spring of 1940, just two years after Action Comics No. 1, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News leveled the first broadside. “Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the ‘comic’ magazine,” Sterling North warned. The cure, he added, “can be found in any library or good bookstore. The parent who does not acquire that antidote for his child is guilty of criminal negligence.” Catholic World weighed in next, asking, “What’s Wrong with the ‘Comics’?” Its answer: “The influence of these comics over the popular mind is one of the most striking—and disturbing—phenomena of the century.” As for Superman, “in a vulgar way this fantastic character seems to personify the primitive religion expounded by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ‘Man alone is and must be our God,’ says Zarathustra, very much in the style of a Nazi pamphleteer.” The shrillest denunciation came from cultural critic Gershom Legman. “The Superman formula,” he wrote in 1949, “is essentially lynching.” The Man of Steel “is really peddling a philosophy of ‘hooded justice’ in no way distinguishable from that of Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan.”
Could the cause-and-effect relationship between Melvin and Billy’s reading habits and their deaths be that clear-cut? Scores of librarians, teachers, judges, and priests had been saying so for years, but the wider world wasn’t buying it. Wertham tipped the debate. He had been taking detailed case histories from troubled youth at his mental health clinics in New York. “Comic-book reading,” he concluded in a 1948 Collier’s article headlined “Horror in the Nursery,” was “a distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent or disturbed child we studied.” His findings carried the weight of science and of his résumé. He was the senior psychiatrist for the New York Department of Hospitals and former chief resident psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. Born in Nuremberg as Frederic Wertheimer, the Americanized Wertham was a friend of culture critic H. L. Mencken’s, a collaborator of renowned criminal attorney Clarence Darrow’s and syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann’s, and a valued ally of the NAACP as it gathered evidence on the harms of racial segregation. He may not have been trained as a social scientist, but he was a social reformer and his judgment—rendered in repeated press interviews, then in a book with the unnerving title Seduction of the Innocent—was taken as gospel.
His timing couldn’t have been better. Postwar America was feeling prosperous in ways it couldn’t have imagined when its young men were overseas fighting and its economy was on a full military footing—but that prosperity brought changes that unsettled many Americans, especially ones who had grown up in a more austere and hidebound prewar world. Kids had more money to spend now and they spent more time away from home. Rock and roll was picking up the beat, with Jackie Brenston’s Delta Cats and Bill Haley’s Comets setting the tempo. Hot rods (cars with tuned-up engines and no hoods or fenders) were the bossest way to get to the passion pit (drive-in theater), and the kookiest films to see there were James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. This new generation even spawned a term for itself—teenagers—and they brought with them a new fear: juvenile delinquency. The FBI said that kids under eighteen were responsible for half of America’s car thefts and burglaries and a rising share of robberies and rapes. Gangs of working-class whites were facing off against poor Puerto Ricans on America’s urban streets, or so the Broadway hit West Side Story told us. Years later, studies would demonstrate that the rise in youth crime was due to crackdowns by law enforcement and the way family life was disrupted when fathers shipped off to war and mothers took their places in the factories. But in the heat of the moment, parents, newspaper columnists, and crusading scientists like Wertham latched onto an easier target: the mass media, and especiall
y the billion comic books American kids were buying each year.
The finger-pointing was understandable. It was what later generations would do in blaming television, video games, and social media for corrupting the youth of their eras. And it was what Americans in the 1950s were doing on the foreign front, where the Russians had an H-bomb to go with their A-bomb, the Reds in North Korea had invaded the democratic South, and G-man J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy were finding communists wherever they looked in Washington, Hollywood, and classrooms across the country. Just as domestic subversives were real and did pose a threat, so comic books were swelling in popularity and challenging more cultured reading habits for youngsters. But both threats also were overtaken by hysteria and overreaction. Borrowing from the term “Red Scare,” as the crusade against communists was called, the campaign against Superman and Batman would come to be known as the Great Comic Book Scare. “We are dealing with the mental health of a generation,” Wertham told 2.5 million Collier’s subscribers, “the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain.”
Here, finally, was not just a clear diagnosis of what was wrong but a remedy. Five months after the Collier’s article, six hundred grade school children in Spencer, West Virginia, gathered to hold last rites for two thousand comic books they had rounded up. “Believing that comic books are mentally, physically and morally injurious to boys and girls, we propose to burn those in our possession,” said thirteen-year-old David Mace before he ignited a copy of Superman. “We also pledge ourselves to try not to read any more.” Additional burnings followed across the country, along with a police raid of a publishing house. More than a dozen states started regulating comic books, with New York dealing the harshest blow by banning any that depicted explicit sex, brutality, or criminal techniques as well as any that used in their titles the words crime, terror, horror, or sex. The National Parent Teacher Association pushed for a “national housecleaning” of comic books. The United States Senate held hearings under the leadership of the ever-ambitious Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had his eye not just on Superman but on the White House. In Cleveland, which counted Superman among its favorite sons, the city council outlawed comics showing rape, arson, assault, kidnapping, burglary, mayhem, larceny, manslaughter, murder, prostitution, sodomy, or extortion. To show it meant business, the city assigned two policemen to the comic book beat. Comics had always operated around a generational divide between adoring kids and fretting parents. A Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of adults now believed that comic books were at least partly responsible for juvenile delinquency and 26 percent felt they deserved a “great deal” of blame. No one bothered to ask kids how they felt, but the pollster couldn’t resist offering his surmise: “Older people are much more inclined to brand both comic books and TV-radio crime programs as factors contributing to juvenile delinquency than are young people.”