Superman

by Larry Tye

  It was that comic book with the tombstone cover that journalists and fans had been anticipating, and that collectors thought would someday pay for their kids’ college education. And it might have, if millions of others hadn’t been thinking the same way. Superman 75 went on sale in mid-November 1992, two weeks after Bill Clinton was elected president and two months before its cover date. “Copies in New York sold out the first day as customers ranging from Wall Street business people to Greenwich Village artists swamped stores,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Much of the world mourned Superman’s passing, including humor columnist Dave Barry, who urged him to “go on the Larry King Show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.” A few fans were angry enough to call or mail in death threats to DC, one of which looked as if it had been written in blood. But New York Times culture critic Frank Rich said: good riddance. “Superman,” he wrote, “was a goner long before Doomsday arrived, as was the heroic ideal (‘very phallic, glossy, gleamingly hard-edged, hyper-masculine’ in the words of the writer Camille Paglia) he symbolized in American culture.”

  DC writers knew better, and they already had their next series of tales plotted out. It came in an eight-part package called “Funeral for a Friend,” with two stories appearing in each of the four Superman titles, followed by an epilogue. Everybody had a chance to weigh in on the lost hero. Lex Luthor II was distraught—not at Superman’s demise, but at someone else getting to claim his scalp; not in public, where he was playing the concerned citizen by planning the funeral; and not for real, since Lex II was really Lex masquerading as a nonexistent son. Jimmy Olsen felt guilty for having snapped the last photo of a dying Superman. Lois wondered how she could go on. The Kents had to watch the funeral on TV because the world didn’t know that its loss of a champion meant their loss of a son. Bill and Hillary Clinton were there, though, along with more heads of state than had ever been in one place at one time. At least as impressive was the turnout of the DC superheroes, led by Batman and Wonder Woman, all wearing black armbands with the S logo.

  Even more than Superman’s death, this funeral was the real story. It was a chance for mankind to reflect on what Superman meant to it, and for DC to remind readers why they should buy his comic books. Nobody captured the memories and meaning more movingly than Bibbo Bibbowski, Superman’s tough-talking friend and snitch from Suicide Slum. Standing in his darkened bar, the Ace O’Clubs, Bibbo communed with his divinity: “God? ’s me … Bibbo … Been awhile since we talked. I know my pal Superman is with ya now … So I guess he don’t really need my prayers.… But the rest ’o us sure do … Take good care o’ Superman … Okay, God? I miss ’im … I ’spect just about ever’body misses ’im. God? I gotta ask ya … why? Why should Superman die … when a washed-up ’ol roughneck like me goes on livin’? It ain’t right, God …… It just ain’t right.”

  In the comics, even stories about last rites and eulogies had to have action. An enigma was even better. Superman’s body was stolen from his grave by the head of the Cadmus Project, a super-secret, government-backed experiment in genetic engineering. The corpse was eventually recovered, with Cadmus’s vision of cloning Superman presumably having failed. Also falling short was the bid by Supergirl and other heroes to check the spike in crime rates that greeted Superman’s death. Jonathan Kent took his adopted son’s loss harder than anyone. He suffered a heart attack and, on the verge of death, had a vivid dream in which he rescued Clark from the afterlife. The series ended with a cliff hanger worthy of the 1950s serials, with Superman’s remains again disappearing from his grave. The clear message was: Stay tuned.

  All the Superman comic books took the next three months off, time that let readers absorb the loss, gave the press a chance to speculate on what would come next, and allowed DC writers and artists to hold an emergency summit to figure that out. “If this many people are caring about Superman’s death—we REALLY need to amp up his return!!!” Carlin told himself as he and his crew headed back to a conference room, this time at a hotel north of Manhattan, in Tarrytown. The meeting was held behind a veil of secrecy in the dead of winter, 1992, and the writers of the four Superman books had four very different ideas on who should replace him while he was deceased and on how to bring him back to life. “It was making me nervous that we’d have to pick one of the 4,” Carlin recalls, “and have 3 writers participating in a big story that THEY had less invested in.” Then Louise Simonson, one of the quartet, shouted out a solution: “What the hell … Why not do all 4?” It fit the bill as brilliantly as Ordway’s “kill him” idea had, and turned into a twenty-two-part series called “Reign of the Supermen.” The first book in the resurrection sequence hit the stores on April 15, 1993—four days after Easter. Carlin says that timing was just luck, but its appearance on tax day wasn’t. “Now,” he explained, “only taxes are certain for Superman.”

  Back in the world of Metropolis, it was just days after Jonathan Kent had dreamed about Superman’s soul following him back to the world of the living. Suddenly, four Superman look-alikes were sighted across the city. The Cyborg Superman was one-quarter human, three-quarters machine, and with his wiring and skeleton showing he was 100 percent creepy. Claiming to be the real thing, he announced, “I’m back.” The Metropolis Kid was a teenage clone of Superman, constructed by the Cadmus Project using genetic material from Superman’s stolen corpse. He loved sunglasses and women and hated being called Superboy. The Last Son of Krypton was a solar-powered alien who had some of Superman’s memories but none of his warmth or aversion to killing. Steel, the last new arrival, was an ironworker who used his expertise in weapons design to fashion a suit of armor, mighty sledgehammer, and S shield. Superman had once come to his rescue and told him to “live a life worth saving.” He was. He had tried to assist Superman in fending off Doomsday and now he was helping safeguard Metropolis. He had no superpowers, made no claim to be Superman, and was African American, which was still an oddity in the world of comics.

  Each would-be hero battled demons and laid out his worldview in a separate comic book—Cyborg in Superman, the Metropolis Kid in Adventures of Superman, the Last Son in Action Comics, and Steel in Superman: The Man of Steel. The first issue of each came with a poster of that hero. Readers got to decide for themselves over more than five months which, if any, seemed a worthy successor to the dead superhero, or whether one of the four might actually be that hero in disguise. In the end, succeed though they did in picking up parts of Superman’s mantle, the more his replacements tried to take the place of Superman the clearer it became why he had reigned for so long. None had the real hero’s blend of empathy and strength, brains and a story so compelling that readers prayed it never would end. The series’ name, “Reign of the Supermen,” turned out to be more ironic than literal, calling to mind the miscreant a teenage Jerry Siegel gave us in “The Reign of the Super-Man.”

  The final stories exposed as evil imposters the two Supermen who had made the strongest claim on being the real one. The Cyborg had hatched a plot to conquer the Earth, with help from Superman’s old enemy Mongul. The Last Son of Krypton turned out to be the Eradicator, an ancient Kryptonian originally created as a weapon and re-created by Superman’s robots after he died. The Eradicator drew his energy from Superman’s stolen body, but his wreckful intentions slowly mellowed, and in the end he joined with the Metropolis Kid, Supergirl, and the Green Lantern in standing up to the Cyborg. As the battle unfolded, the real Superman returned to life just in time, via the birthing matrix that had empowered the Eradicator. While the explanations for how that happened came from science fiction, the very fact of his rebirth affirmed writers’ and readers’ faith in humanity and, for many, divinity. The Christ-like nature of his journey could not have been clearer—from a noble death to the discovery of his empty tomb, the resurrection itself, and his making clear that he was back to redeem mankind.

  The narratives dreamed up at the two DC conference summits were paying off in w
ays that were easy to tally. While they couldn’t hope to reach the stratospheric levels of Superman 75, the “Reign” issues sold more than a million copies a week month after month, which was better than Superman had done since the 1940s and better than he has done since. “That became our most successful year in the history of DC,” remembers Kahn, “and probably in the history of comics.” It was a gold mine not just for the company but for its writers and artists, all of whom were earning royalties that, thanks to publishing sales and licensing spin-offs, were bigger than anyone could have imagined. It also was a reminder that both storytelling and marketing were essential to Superman’s success, just as they had been when Jerry Siegel teamed up with Jack Liebowitz.

  The nearly yearlong death chronicle left a lingering imprint on Superman, too. His hair had grown to shoulder length during his time away and it stayed that way through most of the 1990s. He had more powers now, including being able to survive in space, which was a partial about-face from his depowering by John Byrne. Another reversal was the return of Superboy, who again got his own comic book and a place in the wider DC universe. Steel did, too, although his didn’t last as long, and the Eradicator and Cyborg would eventually be back. How would Jerry Siegel have felt about his successors erasing his hero, even temporarily? Mike Carlin worried about that, so he asked and Jerry gave him a splendid answer. “He said, ‘I love what you guys are doing,’ ” Carlin recalled, “and it didn’t matter what anyone else thought.”

  EVEN AS SUPERMAN WAS being resurrected in the comic books, he was back on TV in 1993 in a series bigger than any he had done since George Reeves went off the air. It was called Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. As the title suggested, the show was more interested in the relationship between the two journalists than in the adventures of the superhero, and at least as interested in Lois as in Clark. Money also played a role in that formulation: Down-to-earth entanglements were cheaper to film than flying sequences and other superheroic special effects.

  Teri Hatcher portrayed a Lois who was a lot like the one from Superman’s earliest days and the one Margot Kidder played in the movies: feisty and ambitious, sexy, and, at first at least, disdainful of her Daily Planet colleague Clark Kent. Hatcher was a known quantity from the soon-to-be-number-one TV show in America, Seinfeld, or at least her breasts were: Jerry Seinfeld ended his relationship with Hatcher’s character after being told her buxom build was the product of implants, then he lamented the decision after he learned they were real. It was just the sort of legend that Lois & Clark creator Deborah Joy LeVine relished. “I didn’t want her to be this sweet woman, I wanted to make her more of a businesswoman who was getting that story no matter what,” recalls LeVine. ABC “thought she was too bossy, too bitchy, not nice enough. I used to get notes from the network saying she’s unlikable, which of course was not true. I used to say, ‘Guys, don’t you get it? Clark puts on a cape and it doesn’t really matter what she says to him.’ ”

  Dean Cain’s Clark was less the one Jerry Siegel imagined and more John Byrne’s remake. Gone was the good-natured bumbler. In his place was a confident, funny hunk in the person of the six-foot, 190-pound Cain, a former football star at Princeton whose dating résumé included actress Brooke Shields and Baywatch siren Pamela Anderson. Another Byrne carryover: Clark was the dominant personality, Superman his alter ego. Breaking with tradition was easier if, like LeVine, you hadn’t grown up with it. In her childhood home, Shakespeare passed for popular culture and comics were verboten. “Just doing a show about a heroic guy who helps people was not that interesting to me,” she says. “I was much more interested in what his problems were emotionally, how he falls in love with Lois, who is pretty horrible to him. I told ABC I didn’t want to do Superman but I would love to do a show that was a love story between this alien and this Earth woman he knows he probably never will be able to have a real relationship with. I wanted to do it as a romantic comedy.”

  LeVine had other ideas on how to rewrite the myth. She wanted James Earl Jones to play Perry White, and she says he was “very interested,” but “the fact that he was black was anathema to a lot of people” at the network and studio. They rejected her choice for Jimmy, too. “I didn’t want him to be so wide-eyed and naïve. I wanted him to be more of a player.” As for Perry, the most noticeable change she could manage was having him mumble “Great shades of Elvis” instead of “Great Caesar’s ghost.” Rather than upending the lore the way she had hoped, LeVine had to settle for tinkering around the edges.

  Timing, however, was in her favor. America needed a break and a hero in the fall of 1993. It was still reeling from the Branch Davidian fiasco in Waco, Texas, which left dead close to eighty men, women, and children. A Somali warlord slaughtered twenty-three United Nations peacekeepers, a car bomb at the World Trade Center killed six and injured a thousand, and two Los Angeles police officers were convicted of violating the civil rights of Rodney King, whose vicious beating had been videotaped by a bystander. TV, as always, brought us the gruesome images, then offered viewers who stayed tuned a great escape. The fantasy diet for 1993 included Murphy Brown, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, and, the most romantic and escapist of all, Lois & Clark.

  That first season fell short on some expectations but exceeded others. Its time slot, 8 P.M. on Sundays, saw more American households with their TVs on than any other time during the week or weekend, and more of those sets were tuned to Lois & Clark than to Steven Spielberg’s ballyhooed science fiction series seaQuest DSV. The problem was that far fewer were watching the new Superman series than the old standby Murder She Wrote. Yet it was advertising money that mattered most to the networks, and advertisers were more interested in high-spending eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds who were watching Lois & Clark than in Murder She Wrote’s over-fifty audience. The bottom line: By the end of the second season, ABC was charging advertisers $132,000 for a thirty-second spot on Lois while CBS was getting just $116,000 for ads on the more popular Murder.

  That was no accident. Warner Bros. and the network purposefully wooed those young, profitable viewers. Erotic innuendo was one key. They tried to craft a Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy–style on-screen electricity, updated for a more modern, less restrained, and less clothed era. Publicity placards showed Cain and Hatcher embracing in their undershirts. AOL promoted pin-up posters of Hatcher that set a record for Internet downloads, making her as much a part of the fantasy life of young men in the 1990s as Noel Neill had been for GIs in the 1940s. Cain was equally appealing to their female counterparts, earning his own reputation as the thinking woman’s sex toy. And fans tapped into the exploding World Wide Web to let producers know what they liked, what they hated, and what dialogue and plots they had scripted in case the show’s writers were interested. The marketing teams were smart enough not to write off older viewers even as they were trolling for young ones: Phyllis Coates and Jack Larson were back for cameos, to the delight of parents and grandparents who had watched them alongside George Reeves in Adventures of Superman.

  LeVine got to see Coates, but she was no longer around by the time Larson guest-starred. The final episode of season one was the writer-producer’s last, and the full-blown romance she had imagined wouldn’t take hold until she was gone. By the end of the first season Lois still was infatuated with Superman but had almost married the ultra-rich, super-evil Lex Luthor. Their wedding was interrupted when Superman burst in, exposing the cunning groom’s true persona and watching as Lex seemingly jumped to his death. By the start of season two a male producer was in charge and the show was more action-oriented. The ratings went down, Clark and Lois started dating, and, in the final episode of the year, Clark proposed marriage.

  The TV show finally was catching up to the comic books, where Clark and Lois had gotten engaged five years before and where Mike Carlin and his team had been biding their time since 1991. Their wait was not over. At the start of season three, Lois signaled to Clark that she knew his secret identity when—true to her
profession as a reporter—she answered his proposal with a question: “Who’s asking, Clark or Superman?” Then she turned him down. By the seventh episode she had changed her mind and proposed to him, although that was not the last word either. The wedding was postponed twice—first when television scriptwriters were told to wait for them to get hitched first in the comic books, then to make it even more romantic by delaying it until Valentine’s Day. But in a story arc that was part science fiction and part cartoon, Clark ended up marrying a frog-eating clone of Lois while his real fiancée was kidnapped by Lex, who had miraculously survived his fall and been pardoned for his crimes by a cloned president of the United States.

  Loyal Superman fans would have known that getting their hero wed wouldn’t be any easier than getting him killed. Clark had married Lois for the first time in the Superman comic strip, in a walk down the aisle that started in September 1949 and didn’t finish until February 1950. It took another two years for Clark to summon the courage to tell her that he was Superman, and as he did, he awoke to realize that their courtship and nuptials had been a dream. In 1955 the wedding story was in the comic books and it was Lois who was dreaming. They tried and failed again in 1959, and sixteen times in the 1960s. Their record in the 1970s and 1980s was better: six swings, five misses. The one wedding that took, in 1978’s fortieth anniversary issue of Action Comics, seemed as if it, too, was going to fizzle, since Clark was under a spell that caused him to forget his heroic side and Lois only discovered it during their seaside honeymoon. She got the spell lifted and offered Superman a way out of his vows, but, shockingly, he and his handlers didn’t take the bait. Lois and Clark/Superman actually tied the knot a second time, Krypton style. The only catch was that this was the Earth-2 Superman at a time when most of the comic books were following the adventures of the Earth-1 version.