Superman

by Larry Tye

  It did work. In 1960, the first year in which sales data was made public, Superman was selling more comic books than any other title or character, and he stayed on top through much of the decade. The Man of Steel was at the front of a charge that saw superheroes taking over from western and romance-themed comics. Some of that was a dividend from an easing of the comics scare and other, broader forces, but Weisinger’s reinventions were key ingredients in Superman’s comeback. “Mort kept it alive,” says Carmine Infantino, a National Comics artist who would rise to editorial director, then publisher. “He was a damn good editor. Damn good.”

  You could see Mort’s influence in the artwork. Curt Swan, who did his first Superman drawings in 1948 and his last thirty-nine years later, gave the hero a more refined look in the 1960s. Gone was Wayne Boring’s muscular virility, replaced by a more dignified and human sensibility. Gorgeous had yielded to handsome. While storylines leaped back and forth between science fiction and reality, Swan’s artwork kept Superman grounded and credible. Swan also settled the question of how old the hero was: a clean-cut and youthful twenty-nine, which was how old he’d stay through the next two decades. Weisinger steered all these changes, as Swan and Boring have testified. Swan said battling Mort gave him migraines. Boring said that, after nearly thirty years of drawing Superman, he couldn’t believe his ears when Weisinger fired him in 1966, so he asked if he’d understood right. “Do you need a kick in the stomach to know when you’re not wanted!?” the editor answered. His biggest nightmare, Boring added, was that “I’d die and go to hell and he’d be in charge!”

  Weisinger’s writers brought their own flourishes. Some stories, like “Mr. and Mrs. Clark (SUPERMAN) Kent!” used a liberated imagination to take readers places they never thought they would go. Characters also experienced extraordinary things—Clark ending up in a wheelchair, about to marry the magnificent Sally Selwyn—only to have them undone by amnesia. Other oft-used ploys: magic potions, instant aging and even faster rejuvenation, and short-lived superpowers for mortals such as Jimmy and Lois. Mort’s favorite trick was making Superman temporarily lose his omnipotence, forcing him to fall back on his wits, à la Sherlock Holmes. Whimsical departures like those would have been out of the question in the 1950s, when the comics were supposed to stay in sync with the TV show, which on its meager budget had trouble convincingly depicting science fiction. Now that the franchise was both flush and confined to print, the only limit was Mort’s imagination, and his fanciful devices became so common in the Superman comics of the sixties that covers were often forced to assure fans that what they were about to read was not an imaginary story, a hoax, or a dream.

  Reality was a more tender matter. Weisinger stories steered clear of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the black power movement, and other issues that fired the 1960s. There was none of what Mort would have called “touchy-feely” either, much as readers might have liked to know how Clark felt about his split personality, or whether Superman and Lois engaged in the battles between the sexes that were a hallmark of the era. Mort wanted his comics to be a haven for young readers, and he knew his right-leaning politics wouldn’t sit well with his leftist writers and many of his Superman fans. That didn’t stop Otto Binder from sneaking pro-feminist and anti-homophobic messages into his fantastic Superman adventures. He also got away with insulting Weisinger to his face and surviving at National. “Called him every goddam name I could think of,” said Binder, who claimed to have written the Mr. and Mrs. Kent story and to have planted with Jerry and Joe the original idea for a comic about an interplanetary orphan with special powers. After unleashing his invectives against his boss, Binder said, he “walked out, and went to see Julie [Schwartz], and Mort comes down the hall and says, ‘Are you going to have lunch with me, Otto?’ He didn’t believe a word I’d said!”

  Another writer Weisinger hired to breathe new life into Superman was the man who had breathed life into him to begin with. Mort called Jerry Siegel “the most competent of all the Superman writers.… What his successors did was just embroidery, including my own contributions. Siegel was the best emotional writer of them all.” The feelings were not mutual. While he was glad to have a job, Jerry’s correspondence from the early years made clear how he felt about Mort telling him how to write the character he had begotten. “What I find particularly distressing is the editorial attitude, as personified by Mort Weisinger, toward my SUPERMAN magazine scripts,” Jerry wrote Jack Liebowitz in 1946. “Mort rejects ’em wholesale, and I find myself in the position of having an editor telling I, who created SUPERMAN, that I don’t know how to write it. If this happened only occasionally, I’d shrug and figure every writer is entitled to some rejection slips, and forget it. But he rejects my stuff so consistently, with aggravating comments, that he puts me into a frame of mind where I find it almost impossible to write.”

  Whatever Jerry thought, it was Mort who now was Superman’s boss as well as his mouthpiece. In Russia, Weisinger met Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who he said told him that “the Man of Steel cannot get through the Iron Curtain.” In Washington, he sat down for a chat with President Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger. An MIT class sent Mort a letter from Albert Einstein, who asserted that nothing, not even Superman, could move faster than the speed of light. Mort consulted his “good friend” Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, who said that “Professor Einstein’s statement is based on theory. Superman’s speed is based on fact.” Mort knew everyone, or pretended to, and he had no shame promoting himself and his comic book star despite his feigned modesty. “When people asked me what I did for a living, I would suppress the fact that I was editing Superman,” Mort wrote. The truth, his psychologist son Hank said, is that “any time we went anywhere, it only took five minutes for him to let everybody know he was the editor of Superman.”

  Most helpful to National, Mort took on Dr. Fredric Wertham. In a radio debate, Wertham talked about how all of the two hundred inmates he had interviewed at reform school had read Superman, prompting Weisinger to ask, “Did you get them to confess that they also chew bubble gum, play baseball, eat hot dogs and go to the movies?” There was no joking in an “investigation” he did for Better Homes and Gardens in 1955 entitled “How They’re Cleaning Up the Comic Books”—and no mention, as he outlined the “stern self-censorship” publishers were pursuing to purge comics of everything from sex to cannibalism and bad grammar, that Weisinger was not a disinterested investigator but a top editor at America’s biggest comic book publisher.

  In the end, Weisinger’s 1960s remake of Superman was more earth-shifting than any changes the Man of Steel had undergone before, including when Jerry softened him up in the earliest years. Mort was a master plotter. His stories planted the hook with unexpected twists and threats—always by page six of a nine-page story—then reeled in young readers. His formula was to start with a thesis (Lois wants to marry Superman), follow with an antithesis (she is so obsessed she blackmails him into matrimony), and end with a synthesis (she backs out when she realizes an accident has changed her personality and takes a drug that cures her). That became a problem, though: His writers adhered to his rules so faithfully that a refreshing wackiness started looking predictable, and the writers started feeling creatively castrated. Even more limiting was Mort’s focus on marketing gimmicks like ultra-powered villains and robotic universes when what kids craved was the hero’s humanity and fallibility. Human foibles came naturally to a scarred and human creature like Batman, but not to the infallible Superman. They had come naturally to Jerry and Joe, but not to Mort.

  That might not have been such a problem if Superman and National had had the playing field to themselves. Stan Lee and Marvel Comics were not going to give them any such gift. In 1962 Marvel introduced Spider-Man and all his teenage hang-ups. He joined the Hulk and Fantastic Four, and a year later came the ultimate outsiders, the mutant X-Men. Here was a new breed of superhero, insecure, vulnerable, and realistic—a dramatic and intentional
challenge to the self-assured, all-powerful brand that was National’s specialty. “I wanted to get characters,” longtime Marvel boss Lee explains, “whose personal lives were as interesting as their superhero identity.” What he really wanted, and found, was the anti-Superman. National now faced a dilemma that was partly of its own making, since it had hounded out of business heroes who were distant facsimiles of Superman and had stressed the Man of Steel’s plots over his soul. Even the parent company’s name, National Comics Publications, evoked a Wall Street stuffiness, one that fans on Main Street countered by referring to the publisher by its original title of Detective Comics or, simpler still, DC. Now upstart Marvel Comics was unveiling champions who really were different, posing a choice for every comics-reading adolescent who grew up in the 1960s and beyond: Superman or Spider-Man? DC or Marvel?

  Spider-Man kids loved romance, Superman disciples were more classicists. It was the choice between the let-it-rip rapture of Little Richard and the self-contained genius of Duke Ellington. Marvel was in your face, the way Robert Maxwell and Phyllis Coates had been. DC was softer-edged, like Whitney Ellsworth and Noel Neill. The competition between the two brands of superhero began slowly, but by the mid-sixties it had become fierce. Looking back, it has the feel of a friendly family squabble; at the time it was a cultural chasm, one built around beliefs so basic some still resonate a half century afterward.

  Unused to that sort of challenge, DC second-guessed itself and its standard-bearer. The problem, however, wasn’t Superman himself, who “done correctly was the greatest hero of all times. It was his writers who were out of touch, who were all about gimmicks and twists rather than honest emotion,” says Jim Shooter, who was about to turn thirteen when he sold his first Superman story to Weisinger and who later became Marvel’s top editor. “I was a kid and I knew how kids talked,” Shooter explains. Mort realized he was in trouble as Spider-Man sales took off, but the realization came late. And the competition wasn’t just Spider-Man: DC’s own Sgt. Rock spoke in a way that Superman didn’t to young people struggling with issues like the Vietnam War. Though Mort brought in young talent to help restore the youthful energy and relevance that Jerry and Joe had captured by instinct, it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t in time. The Superman family of comic books stayed the top sellers through the 1960s, but their sales were falling and their lead shrinking. Batman tumbled earlier and deeper, to the point where Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane was outselling him and National contemplated killing off the Caped Crusader; he was saved by his campy TV show, which started in 1966. Marvel, meanwhile, was in the ascendant. The company not only had heroes in tune with the times, its ongoing storylines made young readers worry about missing a single issue the same way their grandmothers did about missing their TV soaps.

  The declining sales and his increasingly grating style would put Mort Weisinger’s job in jeopardy when new owners took over in 1968 and his patron Jack Liebowitz could no longer protect him. He admitted later he was losing touch with a new generation of kids and their notions about heroes and villains. He said he had tried for years to leave, repeatedly asking for raises big enough to ensure he’d be turned down—but he never was. Finally, as he reported afterward, he walked away in 1970. Carmine Infantino, the editorial director who had called Weisinger a “damn good editor,” says it didn’t happen quite that way: “Mort said, ‘I’d like to stay.’ And I said, ‘No, Mort, I think it’s time you moved on.”

  THE SUPERMAN UNIVERSE THAT Mort Weisinger left behind was more expansive than the world of any character in the comics, and perhaps in all of fiction. It began on a reimagined Krypton. In Jerry Siegel’s first rendering, back in 1938, the planet lasted a single panel and had a simple, utilitarian purpose: to die so Superman could begin his life on Earth. Now that multiple comic book plots had to be contrived and more material was constantly needed, Otto Binder and other Weisinger writers had the chance to linger on Superman’s planet of origin and make it into a jeweled paradise. The Gold Volcano spewed that precious metal instead of lava. Shrinkwater Lake reduced men to the size of ants. Pink leopardlike creatures had horns like unicorns’ and, when they got angry, spit fire. Robots did all the hard work, the last war had ended thousands of years ago, and weather towers purified the air and stage-managed the seasons. It was a world that fulfilled science fiction’s promise of a planet better than our own, anticipating the kind of intergalactic order that Gene Roddenberry would construct several years later for Star Trek. Krypton had gone from a mere launching pad to a wonderland that gave young readers goose bumps as they peered at the stars.

  The most emotional of the Krypton tales was written in 1960 by Jerry Siegel, who got a three-part, twenty-six-page story called “Superman’s Return to Krypton!” to fill in arcs in the plot he had rushed through more than twenty years before. A fully grown Superman found himself on Krypton before its destruction. He got to know his father and see the sacrifice his mother made by placing him in a rocket meant for her. He fell in love with the Kryptonian movie star Lyla Lerrol and imagined the life he might have lived on this faraway planet. He was getting the chance every child dreams of to see his parents when they were kids, especially boys like Kal-El and Jerry who had been robbed of their fathers, and Jerry was getting the opportunity every writer covets to spruce up an old story. Finally, Superman could purge himself of his survivor’s guilt by seeing firsthand that there was nothing he could have done to rescue his planet or his mother and father. “It’s impossible for me to save Lyla or my parents!” he told himself as he decided not to perish with them. “Earth needs me!”

  The image of Kal-El as Krypton’s solitary survivor was a central thesis of Jerry’s early narratives. As heartrending as that was, it made for a lonely existence and made it difficult for Superman to learn about his past. Upon revisiting Superman’s origins, Jerry discovered that his original thesis was wrong: Others had survived, too. Krypto, baby Superman’s dog, had been blasted into space by Jor-El as a test before he dared launch his son. Miraculously, Krypto eventually drifted to Earth and into the arms of Kal-El, who could hardly resist this headstrong canine dressed in a crimson cape. Beppo the Super-Monkey and Titano the Super-Ape took similar paths to Earth. They would be joined by two other super-pets—Comet the Super-Horse and Streaky the Super-Cat—neither of whom came from Krypton but both of whom became members of the Legion of Super-Pets and delighted youthful audiences.

  The fellow Kryptonian who gave Superman the greatest joy, and the most sleepless nights, was his cousin Kara Zor-El, known on Earth as Supergirl. While she wasn’t launched as a character until 1959, we quickly got the full story. She and all of Argo City had been hurled into the cosmos when the rest of Krypton exploded. Later, when the orbiting Argo itself was threatened, Kara’s father launched the child in a spaceship headed for Earth. Save for gender, her story mirrored her famous cousin’s: She assumed a secret identity as the pigtailed Linda Lee, she had adoptive parents named Fred and Edna Danvers, she shunned her male admirers, and she had superpowers that she used to help humankind. The Maid of Steel, who would get her own comic book shortly after Mort Weisinger left National, gave Superman a blood relative and fellow outsider with whom he could let down his defenses. If youths of all stripes embraced Superboy, now girls had a heroine made in their own special image. And if H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds had given aliens a bad name, Supergirl and Superman polished the image of the interplanetary interloper.

  Argo wasn’t the only city to outlast the cataclysm on Krypton. Its capital, Kandor, had been stolen by the space pirate Brainiac, who shrank it to microscopic size and saved it inside a glass bottle in his spacecraft. Superman eventually recovered the bottle and brought it to Earth. While he was able to shrink himself down to Kandorians’ size so he could visit with them, he couldn’t enlarge the city or its residents. Kandor, like all of Weisinger’s inventions, opened up marketing and storytelling possibilities. It gave readers a dollhouse world where they could see sun lamps that mimicked K
rypton’s red sun, mental suggestion helmets that aided the mentally deficient, and jet-powered flying belts. Superman’s enemies now had a way to get at him—via his defenseless fellow Kryptonians—and they never stopped trying. Kandor also made clear that even Superman couldn’t get everything he wanted, since there was nothing he wanted more than to restore the Kandorians to their rightful size.

  Superman kept Kandor and everything else that mattered most in his Fortress of Solitude, hidden on the side of a snowbank deep in the Arctic. It was a museum to his life as the Last Son of Krypton. There was a room in honor of Batman and Robin and another dedicated to Supergirl. He kept his atomic-powered robots there, and when he had a free minute he loved challenging them to a tug of war. There were rooms memorializing his birth parents from Krypton and his adopted ones on Earth. There was even a Doghouse of Solitude for the Dog of Steel, although it was situated in outer space rather than at the North Pole. The same way Superman’s identity as Clark gave him a break from being Superman, his time at the Fortress let him get away from the pressures of being a hero and a reporter.

  Brainiac, Kandor’s kidnapper, looked human but was actually a computer. Two giveaways were his green skin and the lightbulbs in his head. Another was his tenth-level intelligence, which made him nearly twice as smart as a clever human. Each of Superman’s recurring enemies claimed to be the most menacing and wicked, but none could back up the claim like this emotionless genius with infinite memory who had an unrivaled mastery of science and engineering and was programmed with a single-minded focus on wreaking havoc. He, or it, embodied everything that Space Age America worshipped and feared about technology. At the other end of the evil-genius spectrum was Lex Luthor, Superman’s longtime archenemy, who was as smart as any human if not as smart as a computer—and made up for the gap with a kill-Superman obsession no artificial intelligence could match. While he first showed up in 1940, it was not until the 1960s that we learned the source of his hatred. Growing up together in Smallville, he and Superman had been friends, until an accident at Luthor’s laboratory made him go bald, an accident he mistakenly blamed on the teenage superhero. Their clashes over the years were made more interesting because each craved what the other had—Lex wanted Superman’s powers, Superman envied Lex’s humanness.