Superman

by Larry Tye

  Back in the United States, Big Blue had returned to the newspapers with a strip that was launched in 1978 as The World’s Greatest Superheroes and the next year was renamed The World’s Greatest Superheroes Presents Superman. Movies offered even more potential for the synergy that Kahn and Levitz were so keen on. Comics lovers had been gathering for ever-bigger conventions since the mid-1960s, and DC capitalized on these gatherings to get fans geared up for Christopher Reeve’s Superman film long before it hit the theaters. Not long after its release in late 1978 they published the first comic book miniseries, World of Krypton, along with a behind-the-scenes book on the movie and a Superman dictionary for kids. The film and its stars also hitched themselves to the Special Olympics, which was good for the charity and for the company’s bottom line. Movie-related marketing had become standard fare by then, but it had never been seen on this scale. Two hundred licenses were awarded for more than twelve hundred products, from soap packaged like a telephone booth to velour sweatshirts that sold at Bloomingdale’s. Companies paid even more to see their names or merchandise on the screen. It was no accident that we could easily read the name of Lois’s Timex watch when she romanced Superman on her balcony, and in the sequel Philip Morris paid forty thousand dollars to get its Marlboro delivery truck into the fight scene with Kryptonian bad guys.

  Kahn and Levitz weren’t just focused on the present. They were building for a future when comic books would again pay their own way without offshoots like licensing. The turnaround didn’t come as soon as they expected—the “DC explosion” of new titles quickly and embarrassingly became the “DC implosion” when many old and new books couldn’t pay for themselves—but comics did eventually regain some of their profitability. Advertising helped. Comic books had drawn ads from the beginning, but they took up fewer than two of the sixty-four pages in Action No. 1. Advertising copy quickly grew to 10 percent of the publications and stayed that way through most of the Golden Age. By the 1970s, DC was running up to sixteen pages of ads in books that were down to thirty-six pages, which would prove to be the high-water mark for advertising space in comics, although still not at the 50 percent level of most magazines. The nature of the ads was shifting, too, reflecting comic books’ changing readership and society’s changing priorities. Gadgets were replaced by beauty aids and muscle manuals. “Sex education” products came and went quickly, thanks to the Comics Code. Breakfast cereals were a perennial advertiser, along with Oreo, Reese’s, and other sweets. Pitches for correspondence courses suggested that high school dropouts were a key part of the fan base, just as pitches for older comics made clear how many collectors there were.

  The DC brain trust also realized that it paid to treat the creative talent better. When Kahn arrived in 1976, she began giving artists and writers 20 percent of licensing fees for characters they dreamed up, and in 1981, when she became president as well as publisher, she began paying them 5 percent of revenues on comic books that sold more than one hundred thousand copies, a milestone that Superman hit regularly. Freelancers were now getting medical insurance and yearlong contracts, the very benefits that had made Jack Liebowitz blanch. Giving creators a financial stake measurably improved their work. Suddenly a job at DC was a better deal than one at Marvel or at other competitors, which helped lure away the best talent, at least until the competition started matching the benefits. DC Comics, which thanks to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had been a poster child for the old feudal system, now seemed the model of enlightenment.

  EVEN JERRY AND JOE would benefit from the new ownership, not that it was easy.

  Jerry had spent the first half of the 1970s hoping to win his lawsuit against National and settling into his new life. He was in dire enough straits that he took work first as a writer and then as a proofreader at DC’s archrival, Marvel, then he moved his family to California, where there was a healing sun for him and Joanne and inexpensive colleges for their daughter, Laura. To pay for the move, he had to sell off some of his treasured collection of comic books. To make a living, he took a seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a clerk-typist with the state of California, while Joanne sold Chevrolets at a car lot in Santa Monica. Jerry earned extra income by writing stories about Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck for Walt Disney’s Italian line of comic books. He had fallen so far that he sometimes thought about killing himself, as George Reeves had. A living wage and the California weather helped overcome his depression, but now he worried about his weakening heart and how, if he needed an operation, he would pay for it.

  No one found out about any of that until later because Jerry had gone underground, declining to talk to the press and steering clear of most old friends and colleagues. He emerged from the shadows in the fall of 1975, just as Mario Puzo was turning in his movie script and Superman was back on center stage. The creator of Superman knew how to grab the spotlight when he wanted to, and now he did. “Jerry Siegel, the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie!” read the press release he tapped out on his manual typewriter and distributed to all the major media. “I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.” For anyone unfamiliar with the stench, Jerry filled them in with a single-sheet summary and a nine-page exposition. National Periodical Publications and Jack Liebowitz especially had “killed my days, murdered my nights, choked my happiness, strangled my career. I consider National’s executives economic murderers, money-mad monsters.”

  It was Jerry at his melodramatic best, showing the same passion and single-mindedness he had tapped to compose and sell his first Superman story forty years before. What led him to cook up Superman? He was inspired by President Roosevelt’s fireside chats, by the Nazis’ slaughter of fellow Jews, and by a depression that left him and millions of others jobless, which gave him “the great urge to help … help the despairing masses.” What would he do if he had the strength of his superhero? “Rip apart the massive buildings in which these greedy people count the immense profits from the misery they have inflicted on Joe and me and our families.” What did he want now? A cut of the profits.

  Jerry had always been torn as well as tortured, as demonstrated in years of letters to Jack. The angry young man who felt wronged quietly did battle with the lonely one aching to be embraced. His memoir would reflect the latter; his press release bared his mad-as-hell side. No matter that Jack was just a board member now while others ran the company, or that Jerry had promised in his legal settlement never to rehash these issues. It was not just he who was hurting now but his wife and child, and he was out for blood.

  The press saw this for the great story it was. A Washington Star reporter visited Joe Shuster in 1975 in the dingy apartment in Queens where he was “slowly going blind, still hoping his Superman would come to his rescue.” The next month a New York Times reporter talked to Jerry. “For years,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for Superman to crash in and do something about it all.” Their stories played even better on TV, as the Today show, the Tomorrow show, and Howard Cosell appreciated. Orchestrating the publicity was Neal Adams, whose fiery art had brought new life to the Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman. Adams chaperoned the aging creators around New York, persuading the media to pay for their hotel rooms and cartoonist Irwin Hasen to draw his wide-eyed war orphan Dondi with a huge tear on his face and the words, “Is it a plane? Is it a bird? No, it’s a pity.” Adams remembers that “Joe was like an angel sent from heaven, I never heard him utter an angry word. Jerry was very bitter.” Adams drew on both and, with help from Batman artist Jerry Robinson and the Cartoonists Society, he made the case with Warner Communications. “What was my leverage?” Adams asks. “Humanity. Pity. Common sense. I mean, truth, justice and the American way.”

  Warner’s point man in the publicity struggle was Jay Emmett, Superman’s longtime marketing whiz and now a man in the middle. On one side, his uncle Jack Liebowitz was
adamant that Jerry and Joe had voluntarily signed away their rights and didn’t deserve anything more. On the other, morality dictated that Warner, flush with cash from its Superman franchise, help the creators of that golden goose. Business logic bridged the difference. “We were about to put out a movie worth tens of millions and I said, ‘Let’s not worry about chicken feed,’ ” recalls Emmett. So after back-and-forth over particulars, Emmett and his company agreed—two days before Christmas—to give Jerry and Joe $20,000 a year for life, an amount that was intended to be fixed but that rose substantially over the years. Their medical expenses, which were enormous, were covered, along with a one-time bonus of $17,500 for each of them. Their bylines were back on the comic books and nearly everywhere else Superman appeared, including a prominent opening credit in Superman: The Movie and its sequels. In return, the creators agreed, again, not to sue for more.

  “Joe and I are very happy to be associated with our ‘Superman’ creation again,” Jerry wrote in his memoir, with his joyful tears at the movie premiere making clear he meant it. Joe was happier still. The money let him move to California, where he could be in the sun, in an apartment of his own, back near Jerry and Joanne. It also let him get married for the first time, in December 1976, to Judith Ray Calpini, who seemed to have everything he had been looking for. The attractive blonde was three years younger than he was and five inches taller. Their marriage license listed her as a nurse, while a press photo called her a former showgirl and current writer and artist. It was her fourth marriage, her third having ended nine months before, and it happened almost exactly a year after his settlement with Warner Communications. It lasted eleven months and nineteen days, although their official divorce wasn’t granted for another three and a half years. The divorce proceedings listed Judith as a housewife and spelled out what possessions Joe had left: three suits, a topcoat, a color TV, a lounge chair, an eight-year-old Mazda, a few thousand dollars’ worth of comic art, no job, and declining health.

  Being abandoned was nothing new for Joe Shuster and he didn’t let it spoil the fun he was having being reunited with Superman. The settlement with Warner “has meant a tremendous change in our lives,” he told The New York Times. “We’ve received marvelous recognition for the Superman movie and our names also appear in the comics. A whole new generation knows us.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Back to the Future

  HIS MISSION WAS TO SCRAPE off the barnacles. Take us back to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s primal vision, John Byrne’s bosses at DC told him in 1986, but make him a Man of Today. Rewrite Superman’s forty-eight-year history, from day one, preserving everything essential and killing all that was timeworn. Don’t worry about consistency or the rabid fanboys. Borrow anything you like from the Fleischer brothers’ cartoons, Mort Weisinger’s imaginary stories, and the Reeves and Reeve Supermen and Clarks. The choices are yours. Just make us remember why we first fell for him.

  The moment demanded it. DC Comics had just marked its fiftieth anniversary by blowing up its wider universe, setting the stage for streamlined versions of the heroes who lived on. Who better to point the way than DC’s leading man, who was about to celebrate his own golden jubilee? Jenette Kahn had promised bold change and, after a decade of tinkering, it was time to deliver. The new comics-only shops were begging for headliners. Could anyone be more compelling to their baby-boomer patrons than a harder-edged Man of Steel custom-built for the grimmer, edgier Dark Age of comics that kicked off in the mid-1980s?

  That didn’t mean it would be easy. Recasting the sacred Superman legend was as perilous as trying to jazz up the Bible or formulate a New Coke. It would take somebody with ingenuity, finesse, and a super-sized ego. Byrne had all of those, along with a proven record revitalizing Marvel’s cornerstone team of superheroes, the Fantastic Four. No matter that he was born in the British Isles and raised in Canada. Hadn’t the Salkinds shown that outsiders could not only be spot-on about an American hero but could even take him to new heights? Byrne said he was scared, but the truth was he was itching to get at it.

  Byrne delivered a Clark with flesh and spirit. No more mild-mannered wimp. The new Mr. Kent was a newspaper columnist modeled after the gritty Jimmy Breslin, with stylish round glasses, hair brushed straight back, and the tough-guy demeanor of George Reeves. “More aggressive,” explained Byrne. “Not so squeaky clean.” Superman changed in reverse, losing his time-traveling powers, freeze breath, and annoying tendency to make any job look easy. He sweated, cursed, and used the toilet. “You can’t do interesting stories with a god,” Byrne pronounced. “He used to be a superman; now he’s a superman.” The Champion of the Oppressed’s politics were moving rightward in an era when Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Rambo always drew first blood, and “shop till you drop” was the national motto. “If Reagan has done nothing else,” Byrne said, “he’s gotten us to wave the flag again. Superman practically wears the flag. I’ll be shamelessly exploiting that.” Byrne’s most radical role reversal happened in Superman’s head: After half a century of Superman disguising himself as a human—which made him stand out from Batman, Spider-Man, and other humans masked as heroes—now the earthbound Clark would be the real thing and the alien from Krypton the alter ego.

  Superman’s supporting cast underwent its own retooling. The new Lois was a woman to contend with. Her hair had gone from basic black to in-your-face russet. She could shoot an Uzi and had learned from the Green Berets how to kick a terrorist where he would feel it. When she wasn’t winning a Pulitzer Prize for the Daily Planet or signing a lucrative book deal she was fending off advances from Lex Luthor. No time for curling up with Superman or unmasking Clark Kent. Krypton, meanwhile, was more antiseptic and Superman once again was its sole survivor. No more Superdog, Super-Monkey, or Supergirl. Superboy was gone, too, with Clark not emerging as a superhero until he arrived in Metropolis as an adult, which was the way Jerry had written it. The good news for Superman was that his adoptive parents, the Kents, lived on in this romantic retelling and could revel in the man that Clark had become. The bad news was that Lex was even more deadly as a power-grabbing billionaire than he had been as a power-grabbing scientist. Kryptonite was back, but only in the form of a single chunk that had stuck to Superman’s spacecraft, and only in green.

  This was not the first time Superman had needed a remake. That had come in the early 1940s, with Jerry and Joe doing the work. Mort was the architect of change in the 1960s and Julie Schwartz oversaw 1971’s powering down and tossing out of kryptonite. Those revisions were the equivalent of a haircut and nail trim. Byrne performed open-heart surgery, cleaning out arteries that had hardened over the decades and recasting the hero and his universe. The makeover was unveiled in a six-part miniseries called The Man of Steel, released in the summer and fall of 1986. DC then sent Superman on a three-month vacation, suspending his comic book adventures for the first time since 1938. When they resumed in January, the company signaled the milestone and its marketing savvy by launching a new version of the Superman title and starting it off with No. 1. Byrne wrote and drew that and Action Comics, and a year later he was writing the old Superman book, too, which had been renamed Adventures of Superman.

  There are several ways of judging an overhaul like Byrne’s, starting with whether anyone notices. Everyone seemed to, beginning with America’s most influential newspaper. The New York Times published four stories—one just before the six-part miniseries, one just after, a third after Superman’s hiatus from the regular comic books, and even an editorial, which said to DC Comics, “We write as friends. We like your plan to modernize Superman.” The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, and a lineup of other publications added stories of their own. The last time the comics industry had gotten that kind of coverage was in the 1950s, when it was under siege by Dr. Fredric Wertham and the PTA.

  Another measure of change is whether it lasts. Most of Mort’s adjustments in the 1960s disappeared when he did in 1970. Julie’s remake in 1971 wa
s gone in a year, as was his Superman writer. Byrne’s backstory became Superman’s defining one for the next eighteen years. It would form the basis for two television series, two TV cartoon shows, and a BBC radio play, and was translated into Chinese. All that meant cash in the DC tills. So did the million copies the first issue of Man of Steel sold, which was the kind of circulation Superman hadn’t seen in thirty years. Sales came down to earth once the regular comic books were back on the racks, but at a level above where they were before the remake.

  The reaction from longtime readers was harsher and quicker. This was the early days of email, and complaints flooded Byrne’s computer. How dare you? they asked, although dare wasn’t their four-letter word of choice, and most told rather than asked. “Excoriated” is how Byrne describes the reaction. Thanks to the advance publicity, “anal retentive fanboys” let him have it “even before the work saw print.” Paul E. Akers was slightly kinder in his guest column in The Washington Post, arguing that, thanks to Byrne, “the comic book hero, once virtually a deputy of the deity, has fallen to the source of secular superhumanism. Thus confused, comics today try to do almost everything but the one thing they can and should do: tell a simple, imaginative story.” Critics drowned out supporters like Russell Hexter, a high school senior from Armonk, New York, who started out skeptical about the need for a reboot but told The New York Times he was delighted to find a Superman who was “more believable and more weak, more like you and me.” Over time sentiment has shifted toward the Hexter view, with fans upset by later changes wishing that Byrne would come back, but in 1986 and ’87 it was difficult to hear anything but the anger.

  Byrne took it to heart. He was equally upset with DC for killing his ideas to keep Superman’s Kryptonian mother alive long enough for her to give birth on Earth to Superbaby, bring back a still-learning-the-ropes Superboy, and make other changes he was promised he would be free to undertake. “Double-crossed” is the word he uses, although DC executives say they gave him more money and freedom than anyone had had since Jerry Siegel. And like Jerry, Byrne remained scarred by the wall he had run into. “My time with Superman should have been a dream come true, but it was closer to a nightmare,” he says twenty-five years later. “Virtually everything I contributed to the character has been expunged—deliberately—so, in the end, I qualify as little more than a footnote.”