Superman

by Larry Tye

  THE 1970S WERE A TIME for rebooting Superman’s comic books along with his movies. Gone were Mort Weisinger’s imaginary stories, along with Mort himself. Many of the Man of Steel’s powers melted away, as did the robots that Mort had inserted in Superman’s place to explain his absences when he was pretending to be Clark. The most surprising departure was kryptonite, which had been Superman’s most effective adversary. The changes amounted to decluttering an encrusted story. The aim was about marketing as much as storytelling: Bringing Superman closer to Jerry and Joe’s Golden Age creation would, his bosses hoped, win back older readers who missed the hero of their youth and educate younger ones on the brilliance of that more streamlined, less gimmicky vision.

  Who better to oversee that restoration than an editor who had helped spawn the original, or claimed to have? The son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, Julie Schwartz grew up in the Bronx—the place that had spawned more comics pioneers than any neighborhood in America. Julie and Mort attended the same high school, shared a passion for science fiction, and teamed up to publish a fan magazine, one of whose first subscribers was Jerry Siegel. Jerry liked what he read and launched his own publication, where he self-published “The Reign of the Super-Man.” All of which led Julie to pose, only partly tongue-in-cheek, his Big Bang Theory: “If Mort and I had not created our fanzine, neither would have Jerry Siegel created his—and as a result may never have triggered his creation of the original Living Legend, Superman. No Siegel fanzine, no Siegel Superman!”

  Julie had taken his first job in comic books in 1944, as an editor with one of the firms that would be absorbed into National. In the 1950s he was a central force in reviving the Flash and Green Lantern, kicking off a Silver Age of comics that lasted until 1970 and recaptured much of the energy and prosperity of its Golden Age beginnings. In the 1960s, while Mort was managing Superman, Julie was Batman’s master. In the 1970s it was Julie’s turn. He took over Superman not because he wanted to—he liked Superman but loved Batman—but because he knew the company’s preeminent superhero was the comics world’s definition of professional success. Now he was in the big time.

  It was time for a change. Writers and artists had chafed under Mort’s heavy hand. Circulation of the Superman family of comic books had been plummeting since 1966 and by 1970 its most popular title, Superman, was selling barely half what it had five years before. Archrival Marvel was moving up fast; within two years it would, for the first time, wear the mantle of industry leader. That got the attention of the Warner Communications executives who had taken over National and were asking whether they belonged in the comics business. Newly installed publisher Carmine Infantino was the man on the spot, and since his specialty was artwork, not writing, he turned to his friend Julie Schwartz, now in his mid-fifties, to come up with answers for Superman. Julie was the right choice, sharing Mort’s deep grounding in comics yet with few of Mort’s rough edges or insecurities. The Schwartz empire, however, was not as all-encompassing as Weisinger’s, including Superman and World’s Finest but not Action or the rest of the Superman-related titles that Mort had overseen.

  Julie’s impact was apparent from the first issues under his control in 1971. “Superman Breaks Loose” was the aptly named kickoff for a six-part series by lead writer Denny O’Neil in which a freak chain reaction converted all of the Earth’s kryptonite into ordinary iron. Fans had complained that the deadly green metal was too omnipresent so, poof, it was gone, along with its gold, red, red-gold, and other rainbow of flavors. KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE! the cover promised. But kryptonite, O’Neil recognized, “was merely a symptom. The disease might have been called elephantiasis of the powers. Superman was just too mighty.” Getting rid of kryptonite actually aggravated the illness by making Superman more invulnerable. The remedy, courtesy of Dr. O’Neil, was to have the explosion that rendered kryptonite harmless bring to life a demonic sandman who robbed Superman of critical powers. What was left was a streamlined hero, still super but now requiring both hands rather than the tip of a finger to hold up the world. The goal was to ratchet up the suspense by giving his enemies a better shot at taking him down. It also was to make the Kryptonian more human, more like the heroes that Stan Lee and Marvel were dreaming up.

  Clark, too, was different under Julie, although in his case the change had more to do with modernizing than restoring. He moved from being a newspaperman on the Daily Planet to anchoring the news desk at the Galaxy Broadcasting System, which had bought the Planet. Young people, Julie explained, “got their news from the television, so therefore it was only natural that Clark Kent should take a job as a television reporter.” Not so natural was that whenever Clark needed to change into Superman, the station took a commercial break. His reliable but crusty boss, Perry White, was supplanted by Galaxy president Morgan Edge, who was less steeped in journalism and less trustworthy. Clark’s rumpled blue suits were out as well, with a new look snazzy enough to warrant an article in the real Gentlemen’s Quarterly. More interesting to Marvel readers was Superman’s internal struggle over which of his identities—the human reporter or the alien superhero—was the real him. The verdict: Both were indispensable.

  Mort’s successors took Superman places politically that he hadn’t been since Jerry’s early days. In “I Am Curious (Black),” which came out in 1970 just as Julie was about to take the reins, Lois was shunned by the black community she was trying to write about because “she’s whitey.” Superman helped darken her complexion for a day, which she spent exploring the world from an African American perspective. A taxi zoomed past her outstretched arm “as if I don’t exist!” Other subway riders stared at her “as if I were a … a … freak?” In the end Lois asked Superman whether her temporarily black skin would stop him from loving her. His answer planted Superman squarely back in his 1930s role as Champion of the Oppressed: “You ask that of me … Superman? An alien from Krypton … another planet? A universal outsider?”

  That wasn’t the only story in which race was front and center, nor was racial justice the only hot-button issue on which Superman weighed in during the decade that brought us the legalization of abortion, the fall of Saigon, and mood rings. Something important was always at stake now for the hero and his friends. Lois helped recruit Dave Stevens as the Daily Planet’s first black columnist. Superman and Lois promoted Native American rights and she temporarily adopted an Indian baby. Pollution got him even more riled up. He sucked smog out of the air and expelled it into outer space a year after America celebrated its first Earth Day, and he worked to shut a dangerous chemical plant two years before toxins forced the evacuation of the Love Canal section of Niagara Falls, New York. Kal-El already had watched one home, Krypton, disintegrate when its inhabitants failed to acknowledge its impending environmental doom. He was determined to make sure the same thing didn’t happen here on Earth.

  Julie and his young writers collaborated in ways the scripters never had with Mort, and they answered, more convincingly than Mort’s Cinderella Fallacy, the age-old question of why anyone believed Superman’s lame masquerade as Clark Kent. Waking from a dream where his secret identity had been exposed, Superman put on his glasses and looked in the mirror, concluding, “That’s the dumbest disguise I’ve ever seen!” By the end of “The Master Mesmerizer of Metropolis!” Superman and all of us had the answer. His power of “super-hypnotism” entranced anyone he met and “automatically projects my subconscious desire to be seen as a weaker and frailer man than I really am!” Not just that, but his glasses—made from the shattered glass of the Kryptonian rocket that sent him to Earth—had “some unknown property” that intensified the hypnotic effect. “Did you realize that the most successful practitioner of mass hypnosis in the world is Superman?” the editors asked as the story closed. “We didn’t think so! After all—until today, Superman didn’t even know it himself!”

  The truth was that real fans didn’t need a short-lived gimmick like that—or Christopher Reeve’s shifting his hair part—to buy into Superman�
��s disguise as Clark Kent. They loved all that he stood for, from his idealism to his unflinching heroism. Too many of their flesh-and-blood heroes were gone now. Assassins got Jack Kennedy, then Martin Luther King and Jack’s brother Bobby. Drugs took Elvis and Marilyn. Baseball great and humanitarian Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash, his body lost at sea. A breakup spelled the end of the Beatles. They were all gone, but Superman endured, seemingly forever, and all those who looked to him as an archetype were grateful. If all he wanted back was for them to play along while he switched in and out of his cape and tights, his fans were ready.

  For his part, Julie Schwartz added personal touches that he hoped would make his hero even more appealing and abiding. Julie drew on his Jewish heritage in stories pitting Superman against the galactic golem, Lex Luthor’s evil incarnation of the mythic character of clay that watched over Jews. The editor dropped into his comics notes steering readers to old stories or explaining arcane terms, sometimes signing them with an impersonal “editor” and sometimes as “Julie.” He tipped his hat, or rather Clark’s, to his predecessor: The Kent apartment was furnished with a sculpted bust that looked like Weisinger and when Clark came home he tossed his hat on the statue, saying, “Evening Morty.” Julie also tipped his hat to his writers and artists, including their bylines along with his on every story. And, with help from writers like the legendary Jack Kirby, the family of Superman books showed a flourish for the science fiction Julie had been raised on—giving readers a handheld computer decades before it came into use, and delving into genetic research and cloning before they were part of our vocabulary.

  Many fans applauded the changes Julie brought as a return to first principles. Others mourned the dulling-down of Weisinger-era tomfoolery. In any case, most of the plot shifts didn’t last long and some never made it into Action and other DC titles beyond Julie’s control. By 1973 Superman was back with the world on his fingertip and Denny O’Neil was back to Batman. Kryptonite returned as Superman’s Achilles’ heel in 1977. By the end of 1978, to realign Clark Kent with Christopher Reeve’s wildly popular incarnation, Julie’s comic book journalist again had print flowing through his veins and a job at the Daily Planet. Like reboots of Superman that came before and would follow, Julie Schwartz’s arrived with fanfare and fizzled without notice.

  That is less a commentary on Julie and Mort than an observation on how Superman shaped his own reality. The same way parents, through a blend of nature and nurture, influence their child’s values, politics, and looks, so Superman’s handlers animated who he was and what he did. But at some point a child grabs hold of his fate, and so, too, did the superhero. His writers, artists, and editors thought they were in control when it was Superman’s personality and legend—what he stood for and what his fans demanded—that set their boundaries. If the DC creative team moved him too close to Clark and away from Superman, or made him more (or less) powerful than he needed to be, he quietly tugged them back toward Jerry and Joe’s original vision. Sometimes it took decades, as with Mort’s imaginary world; “Kryptonite Nevermore” and Julie’s other tinkering unraveled more quickly. Alvin Schwartz was one of the few who saw that it was the fictional hero who was pulling the strings. “Superman directed his own destinies,” says Schwartz, who ghostwrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and 1950s. “All of us were merely his pawns.”

  By the mid-1970s, even Superman’s magic had stopped working. His troubles had less to do with him, his editors, or his writers and more to do with the wider business of comics. Marvel had pulled ahead of National, but both were slumping. Readers continued to age, sales at newsstands were still in free fall, and while specialty comic book stores were catching on, it was not enough to make up the difference. Movies, meanwhile, were making a comeback with special effects blockbusters like Star Wars; TV was attracting young viewers with shows like All in the Family and Saturday Night Live; and video games like Atari’s Pong were making a claim on the time and money of bell-bottomed preteens. Even The New York Times wondered whether America’s most popular superhero, once a symbol of vitality, had fallen victim to that dreaded affliction: the irrelevancy of middle age. “The famous blue long-john union suit, now faded to the color of old jeans, sags loosely where steely abdominals once stopped speeding locomotives dead on the tracks,” humor columnist Russell Baker wrote. “The double chin is nearly a triple. On the back of the skull the hair is sparse, and a bit too blue to be persuasive.”

  Superman may never have looked like that, but it was a generous take on the cigar-chomping sixty-year-old men who ran National. New blood was needed to spice up the company and refill its coffers, and it arrived in 1976 in the person of Jenette Kahn. At twenty-eight, National’s new publisher was the youngest senior executive at Warner Communications and in the world of comics. This daughter of a rabbi also was everything that Jack and Harry hadn’t been: college-educated, with a degree from Harvard; an art history major who believed comic books were a form of art; and a neophyte to the industry, although she had grown up reading Superman by flashlight under the bedcovers. Most unsettling, she was a woman in a field where there were almost none. One male colleague later confided that when he heard about her hiring he headed to the men’s room and threw up.

  But Kahn knew publishing, having launched three successful kids’ magazines, and she was willing to try anything to raise her heroes’ profiles. When Bill Sarnoff, the head of Warner Publishing, was interviewing her for the job, he actually proposed terminating publication of any new comic books and focusing on licensing and other media, which was where the firm made its money. “Whether he really would have done that I can’t say,” she says looking back, “but I said that if we were to do that, the characters would have a radioactive half life and all the other revenue would dry up.” She sensed she had limited time to make her case, so she started pushing from the day she arrived. One symbolic move was to change the company’s name from National Periodical Publications, a colorless title that hid what the company did from would-be censors, to what young readers had always called it: DC Comics. Superman novels were not new, but there were more of them now, including Superman: Last Son of Krypton. Kahn’s company also was anxious to get more free publicity, as it did when Henry Kissinger showed up on the cover of Newsweek wearing a red cape, blue tights, and the moniker SUPER K, and when a former DC intern began teaching the first accredited college course on comic books. His class was approved only after Michael Uslan convinced the Indiana University dean that Superman and Moses shared an origin story and a teachable moment. Carmine Infantino made history just before he left as publisher with a special-issue comic book teaming Superman with Marvel’s Spider-Man; Jenette Kahn did him one better with a book in which Superman partnered with Muhammad Ali to defend the Earth against an alien attack.

  She recognized that with so many new forms of entertainment to distract the young, Superman never again would be a million-seller, and that even steep price hikes—comic books began the decade selling for fifteen cents and ended at forty—couldn’t make up for the revenue lost with declining circulation. So Jenette and her business-savvy sidekick, Paul Levitz, started viewing comics as creative engines rather than cash cows, able to spin off profitable enterprises in other media. It was a process that Jack Liebowitz had started when comic books themselves were big moneymakers; now those efforts were redoubled.

  Superman animated cartoons had come and gone since the Fleischers pioneered them in the 1940s, but by the late 1970s the Colossus of Krypton and Froot Loops were once again a Saturday morning ritual across America. The animator this time was Hanna-Barbera and the lineup of characters came from the Justice League of America comic book. Teamwork was the theme, with Superman collaborating with such heroic friends as Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. A not-so-subtle subplot, given the target audience of four- to eight-year-olds, was that violence was verboten the way it had been during the scare of the 1940s and 1950s. The show took on various names, all but one of which included
the words Super Friends, and each made friends of sleep-deprived parents, who delighted in the extra hours they got in bed while their kids were mesmerized by Superman.

  But the Hanna-Barbera cartoons were more than a distraction. If reach and duration are the measure of a medium’s influence, Super Friends gave Superman his biggest stage yet with the small fry. The series ran, with occasional interruptions, from 1973 to 1986. At its height it attracted several million children, most of whom were getting their first look at Superman and many of whom would form a lifelong bond. The show became a paradigm for Kahn’s new DC, and it was Superman’s most successful venture into animation. Super Friends “drew a humungous audience compared to the comics,” Levitz says. “It introduced more kids to our hero than Reeves or Reeve.”

  Luis Augusto was one of those kids. The forty-year-old architect says the Super Friends cartoons were “totally real to me, then, and Superman was more real than all of them. He could fly! He could bend steel with his bare hands! Nobody could bully him (unless he was pretending to be weak)! Oh, how I dreamed of all these [things].” For Augusto as for so many children, the cartoons were a gateway to other Superman experiences—feasting on Superman comic books, entertaining himself with Superman toys, and cherishing the way Christopher Reeve brought his hero alive in the movies. Superman became a part of Augusto’s life, no matter that Metropolis was thousands of miles away from his home in Salvador, Brazil. Superman was “not just some action hero,” says Augusto, who today writes and draws his own comic strips, “but a model. A goal to achieve in my life.”