Superman

by Larry Tye

  It was in December 1996 that Clark and Lois got married for real, with no equivocations or caveats. It happened in the same week on TV and in the comic books, with Superman part of the bargain. It was for better as well as worse, since the union of an intrepid reporter and a mettlesome superhero was sure to carry double doses of good and evil.

  In the comics, the union occurred in a ninety-six-page Superman issue called “The Wedding Album.” DC gave a role to everyone who wanted one and had contributed to the nearly sixty years it took the wedding trio to make it to the altar, which added up to an unheard-of thirty-five writers, pencillers, inkers, letterers, and colorists. The plot was simple, although the scripters had been thinking about it at least since that summit in 1991. Clark and Lois had split up a year before but Lois thought better of it, returning home from her assignment as a foreign correspondent and agreeing to marry a ponytailed Clark, who had temporarily lost his superpowers as part of an attack on the Earth by a sun-eating demon. Time was made for the bridal shower, gown and tuxedo fittings, and apartment hunting, but not much attention was paid to Superman, making clear this was Clark’s affair. The entire Superman family was at the ceremony. Jimmy was best man and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lucy, Lois’s kid sister, was maid of honor. The wedding was held at the Metropolis Chapel of United Faiths, a big tent of a church, and the service was conducted by a cleric who looked a lot like Jerry Siegel. In the pews was the creative talent who had drawn and written Superman’s chronicles. The story ended the only way a love triangle could: with Clark kissing Lois and, superimposed on that image at twice the size, Superman kissing her, too.

  The TV wedding was staged in season four’s third episode, appropriately named “Swear to God, This Time We’re Not Kidding.” As always when it came to Superman and his bride, the wedding almost didn’t come off. The problem this time wasn’t at the studio but in the script, where a scary-looking female prison escapee dubbed the Wedding Destroyer was willing to do anything to undermine Lois and Clark’s bliss. They managed to stop her and got married on a mountaintop, but the wedding itself was short enough on particulars that real fans had to refer to the comic book version for the full story—and its aftermath spelled the series’ demise.

  Call it the Moonlighting Effect. That popular 1980s TV show lost viewers once sexual tension gave way to sex. With Lois & Clark, interest had started to fade even before domesticity set in, perhaps because of the false starts and stops with the wedding. By the time the nuptials actually happened, only 7.5 million viewers were watching, as opposed to the 12 million who had tuned in the previous season to see Clark marry Lois’s clone. With competition stiffening from the rival networks, ABC dropped the show at the end of that season even though it meant having to pay Warner Bros. more than $40 million to cancel the last season of its contract. “Maybe we shouldn’t have had them get married,” said Robert Singer, the show’s executive producer. “But people seemed to be clamoring for that. I guess we bent under the pressure.” Jenette Kahn, who had dreamed up the series at her offices at DC Comics and sold Warner on it, says that at the time “marriage was the natural progression. Retrospectively, marrying them off took away some of the excitement of the relationship.”

  Hatcher, who played Lois, credits the show with making her believe “I was that special,” and she went on to a series of movie and TV roles before settling in with the wildly popular Desperate Housewives. Cain had less success after Lois & Clark, but he said he wasn’t disappointed to see the show canceled even though he was earning a reported thirty to sixty thousand dollars an episode, or more than fifty times what George Reeves had. He didn’t relish the regimen of living on steamed chicken and vegetables and counting every beer he drank, which is what it took to keep a form that could be shoehorned into his blue-and-red spandex uniform. “There comes a time when you get tired of it,” he confessed, adding, “I’ve been in that costume far, far longer than anyone in history.” It was true, as least in one sense. With his show running an hour compared to Reeves’s half-hour, Cain had nearly doubled the airtime of his longest-lasting predecessor. Was he afraid of being typecast after Superman? “That’s the dumbest thing in the world,” he said. “Everybody who’s ever been President of the United States—except for four guys—are all dead. So you shouldn’t be President of the United States because you might die?”

  SUPERMAN WAS ALWAYS a multimedia character, but in the old days that meant one or two formats at a time and those could be tracked with a pencil and ledger, the way Jack Liebowitz did. Now media came in countless segmented forms, and Superman’s new boss as of 1990 was the world’s largest media conglomerate, Time Warner, Inc. At first, executives at the parent company saw DC as a distant and not especially interesting cousin. What did comic books mean to buttoned-down titans who spent their days fretting about media behemoths like Time magazine and Warner Bros. studios? But the “Death of Superman” bonanza and the success of Lois & Clark had them rethinking the relationship and looking for ways that comic book characters like Superman could contribute across the Time Warner family.

  The potential was there to see at Six Flags Magic Mountain, the amusement park near Los Angeles that had the world’s tallest and fastest ride, called “Superman: The Escape.” Where he was escaping from was unclear, but kids with queasy stomachs had to be thinking getaway when, in just seven seconds, the roller coaster accelerated from zero to one hundred miles per hour—going backward. It also rose 415 feet, which was thrilling heading up and terrifying coming down. Why name it after Superman? Perhaps because anything that powerful conjured up images of the world’s fastest, most powerful hero. Or because Time Warner owned Six Flags.

  Superman was appearing at Carnegie Hall, too, where the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performed the five-part Metropolis Symphony, with Krypton, Lex, and even Mr. Mxyzptlk getting movements named for them. Superman was also back in the theater, although not on Broadway. In 1992 the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut restaged the 1966 musical It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, and a year later the show appeared at Theater Three in Port Jefferson, New York. The Man of Steel even had his own Nintendo video game, Superman 64, although video kids gave it a thumbs-down and The New York Times called it a poor fit: “In Virtual Metropolis, Superman is out of his element. He lacks the reflexive grace of characters born and bred in the video game universe so he seems befuddled and trapped.… Suddenly, you realize that Superman from behind looks just like Al Gore with a cape. After that, it’s hard to take him seriously.”

  It was easier to take him seriously in the cartoon show that inspired the video game. This was produced by Warner Bros. and broadcast on Time Warner’s WB Television Network, beginning its run in 1996, just before Lois and Clark got married on competing ABC stations. There wasn’t much overlap in viewership, with the cartoons targeting the Saturday-morning Froot Loops audience of preadolescents while Lois & Clark aimed at their older siblings and parents. At first called just Superman, then Superman: The Animated Series, these cartoons may have been the character’s best ever. They used animation techniques that the Fleischer brothers couldn’t have imagined, borrowed half their story line from Jerry Siegel and the rest from John Byrne, and picked up an Emmy nomination. The series lasted through the end of the century, with the last episode being broadcast in February 2000.

  When he wasn’t starring in his own TV program Superman was guest starring in someone else’s. Hawkeye Pierce referred to him at least a dozen times in the 1970s and 1980s on M*A*S*H, and the prankish Army surgeon spent an entire episode dressed as the Man of Steel. In the 1990s, Seinfeld went M*A*S*H several episodes better. In a 1994 show called “The Visa,” George observed that Jerry’s “whole life revolves around Superman and cereal.” The next season, in “The Marine Biologist,” Jerry told Elaine that “when Superman saves someone no one asks if he’s trying to hit on her.” Elaine: “Well, you’re not Superman.” Jerry: “Well, you’re not Lois Lane.” Seinfeld’s obsession
with Superman, the ultimate man of action, was ironic given that Jerry’s show was, by design, “about nothing” and that his career and life were all talk, almost no action. That was precisely Superman’s appeal: It would have been difficult for the comedian to dream up a better straight man for contrast. So strong was the bond that in 1998 Jerry teamed up with an animated Superman for an American Express TV commercial in which Superman tried to help Lois when she forgot her wallet at the market, but his uniform had no pockets to carry money in and Jerry had to rescue her with his AmEx card. The ad made Superman as regular a guy as Seinfeld, and it made enough money for him, Time Warner, and American Express that they would do it again six years later in a pair of four-minute web-based commercials directed by film maven Barry Levinson.

  Superman’s handlers would not let him shill just any product. Jeeps were in; liquor was not. Also in were causes to which DC thought that Superman could be of service. That was the case in 1996 when it collaborated with the Defense Department and UNICEF in publishing a special comic book in which Superman swept down and saved two boys about to step on a landmine. The safety lessons were written in Serbo-Croatian, printed in both the Cyrillic characters used by Serbs and the Roman ones used by Muslims and Croats, and half a million copies of the comic were shipped to Bosnia and Herzegovina. More of the same lessons, in Spanish, would be shipped to war zones in Central America. Why Superman? “He is a citizen of the world,” explained Jenette Kahn.

  Canada knew that, but Canadians liked to think of Superman as one of their own, since Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, so in 1995 Canada Post issued a Superman stamp in honor of Joe. The U.S. Postal Service followed suit three years later, making clear that whatever else he was, the Big Blue Boy Scout was as all-American as baseball and jazz. The fifteen-stamp set of which Superman’s was a part honored icons of the 1930s, from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to Jesse Owens. But rather than choose FDR’s hometown of Hyde Park, New York, in which to unveil the series, or Owens’s birthplace of Oakville, Alabama, it picked Superman’s home, Cleveland, Ohio. It was the Man of Steel’s picture and life story that headlined the Postal Service’s press release, and he was front and center on the special-edition comics sent to three hundred thousand classrooms nationwide. The first book in that series became DC’s largest-circulation title ever, reaching more than 10 million people and helping teach Americans of all ages a little bit about their history.

  Comic book collectors had less noble intentions. There had been hobbyists since the beginning, most of whom loved the Superman stories and art and who traded issues with one another. The trend was fueled in the 1970s and 1980s with the opening of specialty stores and publication of limited-edition books. By the early 1990s, the landscape looked decidedly different. Collectors now could cash in and even achieve a certain status by showing or selling a special issue or artifact. Many illustrators were selling their original art while Christie’s and Sotheby’s were staging “comic art” auctions, with bidders wearing business suits and thinking of vintage Superman books as commodities not unlike pork belly futures. No wonder. A copy of Action Comics No. 1 fetched $54,625 at a Sotheby’s sale in 1994, which was more than the auction catalog price and more than what a copy of the first Batman brought in (a surprise only to Batman boosters who had argued for years that Bats had left Supes in the wings).

  DC and other companies targeted this new market by manufacturing comics aimed at the new breed of collectors with their get-rich-quick fantasies. Some books had gimmicks like glow-in-the-dark covers; others, like the Superman death special, came hermetically sealed in plastic. The latter paid off in two ways: It cost twice as much as the normal comic book, and anyone who actually wanted to read it had to buy a second copy, since the first would stay in mint condition only if the seal remained unbroken. But ultimately it was a comic book’s scarcity that gave it value, which made the mass-marketed collector’s edition a contradiction in terms and ensured that the Death of Superman books would, in the end, be worth no more than the cover price. By the end of the 1990s the collector’s market was stronger than ever, but only for truly rare comics starring time-tested heroes.

  Even as auction houses were soliciting bids for old Superman classics, a stable of DC writers was trying to create new ones. Kingdom Come showed how good the new crew could be. It was a comic book series published in 1996, and two years later a different author turned it into a no-pictures book. In both, Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, attacked the Daily Planet, killing everyone but Lois. Then he finished her off, too. A superhero called Magog killed the Joker, yet was acquitted by a jury that believed he had done the world a service. The only one who objected was Superman, who even after losing Lois maintained his credo that murder couldn’t be justified. He was so disillusioned at the jury’s verdict and Magog’s new celebrity that—in this story, at least—he retired for a decade, coming back only when the world seemed about to self-destruct. After a long battle pitting one set of superheroes against another, and eventually against the United Nations, Superman finally picked up the pieces of his old existence, then, in a confirmation of his faith in the future, conceived a child with Wonder Woman. The Man of Steel imagined his baby as “a battler for truth … justice … and a new American way. I can hardly wait to see it for myself.”

  The plot was complicated, action-packed, and beside the point. The real aim of the series and book were for Mark Waid and Elliot Maggin, two of Superman’s most loyal and skilled disciples, to reaffirm first principles. Superheroes weren’t gods, the writers told us, but with their strengths came responsibilities they couldn’t walk away from the way Superman had. Rules mattered, too, including ones that seemed quaint, such as murder being wrong even when the murderer meant well and the victim deserved to die. Never forgetting anything was Superman’s greatest burden, especially while he was mourning Lois, and his ability to inspire hope in others was more powerful than his X-ray vision. Waid underlined the spirituality of his tale by making his narrator a minister. Maggin called the mantra about truth and justice Superman’s “personal Torah.” Both writers treated the superhero as if he were real. “You absolutely have to, otherwise you’re just writing a cartoon,” explains Waid. While he and his bosses originally conceived of Kingdom Come as a story about the broader DC universe, they soon realized that “Superman is such a strong character that any story with Superman in it becomes a Superman story. He is a first among equals. If he retires, if he gives up, if he surrenders, nobody else wants to get out of bed. A world without Superman would be a world in which everybody else who’s followed in his footsteps would just throw up their hands and go, ‘Why go on?’ ”

  Another landmark from the era was Jeph Loeb’s 1998 Superman for All Seasons. Each of its four issues was a season of Superman’s life, and each was told from the perspective of a new narrator. Jonathan Kent spoke of a father’s love for and legacy to his son. Lois Lane described the coming to life of her superhero. Lex Luthor explained the genesis of a vengeful rival. Lana Lang talked about Superman becoming comfortable with his two sides, the human and the heroic. Like Maggin and Waid, Loeb was a devotee and wanted to get back to fundamentals. For him, though, the heart of the character was the Kansas-bred Clark Kent, who “made a choice to put on a costume and realized he had a greater destiny.” Loeb thought that having him marry Lois was a mistake, that it made her and Superman more predictable and less interesting. He also wanted to make clear how Superman differed from other characters he had worked on, including Batman and Spider-Man. “Spider-Man tells us that even heroes are human and can be hurt, and that you can be a superhero. Batman tells us this is a dark, terrible thing and you don’t want to do it. He says, ‘I’m here to scare the hell out of you,’ ” explains Loeb. “Superman is here to say, ‘This is as good as we can be. I’m not going to preach to you. I’m not going to tell you this. I’m just going to show you through my actions that, as in the line from the Superman movie, “There are good people.” ’ ”

  Th
is was what every DC partisan had dreamed of since the 1960s, when the world split into DC versus Marvel people, Superman versus Spider-Man. Here, thanks to writers like Waid, Maggin, and Loeb, was a Superman who was not just in touch with his motivations, as Spider-Man was, but with his and our aspirations. Spider-Man had been telling us what he thought and felt in a way that seemed self-indulgent and even narcissistic. Now Superman was showing us in a way that made us want to listen and follow. “I don’t want to relate to a superhero,” twenty-three-year-old Chris Clow, a political science major at Western Washington University, says in explaining why he prefers Superman to Spider-Man. “Superman continues to inspire me not because I can relate to him, but because I aspire to act as he does. He, and by extension the storytellers that have given him life, have taught me how to live well. Not financially, but socially. Spiritually. Morally. And I am better for it.”