Superman

by Larry Tye

  In his regular line of comic books, meanwhile, Superman was changing with the times, as he had every decade since his birth. His costume underwent tinkering, as did his haircut and his powers, which now included making himself invisible and teleporting across dimensions. His Reagan-era boosterism and bellicosity were tempered to fit the Clinton era of lowered U.S. rhetoric and America as the single superpower. There also were new characters, many of whom came from the childhood worlds or adult fantasies of their writers. Bibbo Bibbowski, Superman’s pal from Suicide Slum, was the reincarnation of Jo Jo Kaminski, a hard-as-nails softie whom Jerry Ordway had adored growing up in Milwaukee. Elliot Maggin managed to insert into his stories names of girls he was dating.

  Such stories were more likely than ever to play out over months and even years, which let writers develop intricate plots and subplots that they weaved in and out of Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Action. For readers, this meant purchasing every title and issue if they wanted to keep up, which was more than okay with DC. Such ongoing narratives had been around since the 1930s, but they became more frequent in the 1960s, were ramped up again in the 1970s and 1980s, and by 1991 DC had added a numbered triangle to the covers of each primary Superman series to let fans know the order in which they should be read.

  More remarkable and counterintuitive was the injection of race into Superman stories and into the staff at DC, which for twenty years had struggled with its reputation as the home of heroes who were both white and white-bread. Now the “Reign of the Supermen” story arc had parachuted a black man, John Henry Irons, into the middle of the most popular comics narrative ever. He was the least egocentric of the four replacement heroes and the easiest to warm to. When the real Superman came back, Irons—known as the Man of Steel, or by Superman as simply Steel—got a comic book of his own. That led to appearances on two cartoon shows, a role on a BBC radio series, and a feature film in which Irons was played by the biggest Superman fan of all, Shaquille O’Neal.

  Was the comic book Steel a credible African American character and role model? Louise Simonson thought so when she and artist Jon Bogdanove dreamed him up, seeing him as embodying Superman’s spirit if not his powers. She didn’t want to make him a racial stereotype or a generic good guy, which would have been the kiss of death in an escapist medium like the comics. “Steel was a character who had made a mistake in inventing weapons, doing what he thought was a good thing until they fell into the wrong hands, and he felt guilty about it,” Simonson says. It seemed to work for more than three years—until plans for the Steel movie picked up steam and her bosses at DC started paying more attention. “I was told I was fired because I had sent Steel into space and he should be an earthbound character,” Simonson says. “I think I was fired because if there was any publicity related to the movie they didn’t want a middle-aged white woman being the face of Steel.” Christopher Priest, who took over, is African American, but he says he “wrote John Henry a lot whiter than Louise wrote him. I made him droll.” It didn’t matter, Priest adds, because few at DC still seemed to be paying attention, and not many readers were, either. As for making Superman more appealing to black readers, Priest says that would have been difficult sixty years into the legend. Superman, he explains, “represents white culture in an intensely megalomaniacal way. To many blacks, he is not Superman so much as he is SuperWhiteMan. There’s no sign on the comics shop window that reads WHITE POWER, but the sensibility is implied.”

  Not to everyone. Growing up in the 1950s, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “used to watch Superman on television every Monday night, sitting in a galvanized tub in the kitchen while my mother did the laundry.” To Gates, the African American literary critic, filmmaker, and scholar, “Superman was America’s big brother, getting us out of every scrape. Watching him was as soothing as the warm, soapy water in our tin tub.” Celebrity weatherman Al Roker was even more dazzled growing up in Queens, reading about Superman in the comics and watching him on TV: “There was something about this guy, the fact that he’s theoretically invulnerable, that he can’t be killed, that he’s a stranger from another planet.” His hero’s being white didn’t enter into it, says Roker, who is black. “He was, after all, an alien, which was as different as being African American or Jewish.” No one was or is more of a fan than Shaquille O’Neal, the fifteen-time NBA All-Star with size 23 shoes, who had more than five hundred framed Superman comic book covers hanging in his home in Orlando, Superman logos engraved in the headlights of his silver Mercedes, and a Superman S tattooed on his left bicep. When he dies, the sports star wants to be entombed in a mausoleum “with Superman logos everywhere.” While he relishes being a role model to kids, especially black ones, Shaq has looked to Superman as his own role model since he was seven. He is drawn to the Man of Steel mainly because he is a force for good, but he also identifies with his hero’s split personality, which made O’Neal even more anxious to star in the film Steel. “Shaquille is corporate, nice-looking, soft-spoken, wears suits, and is very cordial to people, whereas Shaq is the dominant athlete,” he explained. “It’s kind of like Clark Kent and Superman. During the day, I am Shaquille, and at night I am Shaq.”

  Another sign of the changing times for Superman was when, in a three-part series in 1998, he traveled back in time to take on the horrors of the Holocaust. It was the kind of story Jerry and Joe probably wished they had done from the start in 1938, although the world knew much less then about what was happening in Germany, and editors would have been reluctant for Superman to step in, just as they were for him to get involved in a war he couldn’t stop. While there was a minor flare-up over why the word Jew wasn’t used in the 1998 stories, there was no question who the victims were and how much Superman and his writers wanted to help. Before he was transported back to the present, Superman did manage to break up a Nazi rally in America and free some of those trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. “I’m not a golem and I’m no angel … but it’s time Superman got busy,” Clark told a community elder and two young boys who were stand-ins for Jerry and Joe. Jon Bogdanove, who drew and co-wrote the series and was so taken with Superman that he named his son Kal-El, said, “I wanted to do a story that didn’t just look in the style of Jerry and Joe, but could have been a story that they would have done.”

  All the comic books and books, TV shows and licensed products, added up to a mixed balance sheet for DC. An optimist would have reveled in the records that the death stories set and the revenues flowing in to Time Warner from licensing and subsidiary products. Realists worried that comic books—the core business built by Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld—would never again be the moneymakers that they had been. In 1991, DC accounted for slightly more than 28 percent of the nation’s comic book sales, with Marvel topping 46 percent. In August 1992, DC for the first time fell to an embarrassing albeit temporary third place, with 17 percent of the market compared to Marvel’s 39 percent and 18 percent for the short-lived upstart Malibu Comics. Specialty comic book stores, which in the late 1980s were the industry’s savior, were in trouble, in part because they got stuck with so many nonreturnable copies of special series like the ones on Superman’s death and Batman’s crippling. By the late nineties, two-thirds of the stores operating earlier in the decade had shuttered their doors and direct-distribution sales had plunged from $900 million to $300 million. Even market leader Marvel was slashing production, laying off staff, and, in 1996, filing for bankruptcy protection. Superman’s death and resurrection yielded spikes in sales, but the abiding death story was what was happening to comics in an age of video games and high-tech toys.

  The silver lining for Superman, if not DC, was that he remained king of whatever hill was left. A Gallup poll taken around the time of the death stories showed that just 25 percent of respondents saw him as passé, compared to 60 percent who wanted him brought back to life. The nationwide survey, which included people age eighteen and older, showed Superman to be more popular than all the other superheroes combined�
�with 44 percent picking him as their favorite, 8 percent liking Batman, and just 5 percent choosing Spider-Man. Thirty-nine percent knew Superman came from Krypton and 66 percent said Lois Lane was his girlfriend. By comparison, just 13 percent of Americans knew that Delaware was the first state and only 34 percent recognized John Adams as the second president, according to another Gallup survey done a year earlier. “The public,” the pollster concluded, “evidently knows more about Superman than it does about American history.”

  It wasn’t just that people recognized the hero’s name. He was their main man. He made them soar and moved them to imagine the best in themselves. Bill Necessary of Tyler, Texas, fell in love with Superman when he saw Christopher Reeve’s first movie. Today, the forty-seven-year-old cleric is known at his Catholic church as “Superdeacon” because “of my great love for the character and for the fact that I always wear an S t-shirt under my clergy shirt.… I have around 80 different versions of the S.” Donald Wurzelbacher, a religious studies teacher in Cincinnati, is fifty and the father of four—a son named Kirk Allan, after Kirk (Superman) Alyn; a daughter named Kara, after Kara (Supergirl) Zor-El; another daughter whose middle name is Therese, after Teri (Lois Lane) Hatcher; and his oldest daughter, who was born on Christopher Reeve’s birthday. The last is a matter of chance, but the first three are matters of love, as is the basement in Wurzelbacher’s new home, which is dedicated to Superman memorabilia from as far back as the 1940s.

  Ken Cholette, a corrections officer in Massachusetts, grew up in the 1960s watching reruns of the George Reeves Adventures of Superman. When he got married in 2008, his wife surprised him with a wedding cake topped by a statue of Superman carrying Lois Lane, which she had had shipped from Japan, and the couple walked down the aisle to John Williams’s theme song from Superman: The Movie. His first Father’s Day gift was getting the Superman S painted on a stone in their front yard. Best of all, Cholette says, “she bought me a belated wedding gift: The Superman tattoo that I now wear proudly on my right forearm.”

  What makes grown men feel such connection to and even ownership of a fantasy character from their long-past childhoods? “It’s the belief that with all the things that are wrong in the world there is still one thing that can’t be corrupted,” explains Cholette. “Superman is something that stands for everything that is good and decent.” Wurzelbacher finds it sad “that many young people today seem to want a DARK hero.” Superman, he adds, not only isn’t dark but has shown other superheroes the light. “There would not be other superheroes if it weren’t for Superman.” Necessary’s love is simpler and closer to home: “When I was a freshman in high school, Superman: The Movie came out. I was in the balcony of the Tyler Theater on opening night, Dec. 15, 1978. I think that was when Superman became my favorite hero. I could so relate to Clark Kent. I wore glasses, I stuttered and was clumsy. I was even the manager of my high school football team, just as young Clark was in the film. That film sealed in my heart that, like Clark, I could always do good for others. I may not have his powers, but I could have his heart!”

  WITH SUPERMAN ENTERING HIS seventh decade in the 1990s, it isn’t surprising that many of those who were with him early on were getting old and some were dying. For those who believed that a curse of Superman brought misfortune to his friends and handlers, there was more evidence.

  Joe Shuster was the first to go, with his heart giving out in the summer of 1992, just as DC writers were plotting Superman’s death. Joe had been living in a one-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles, surrounded by the clutter of his life and Superman’s. There was sheet music from the Broadway musical, enlarged photocopies of his earliest Superman sketches, and clippings from Reader’s Digest that he needed a magnifying glass to read. Just signing his name had become a chore; his right hand trembled and his left was unable to grasp a pencil. His great escape was classical music, which he listened to on his collection of turntables, tape decks, and CD players, the sound pulsating through any or all of his dozens of stereo speakers. Jerry lived nearby and they got together for dinner regularly until Jerry had his heart bypass surgery.

  Just what things were like for Joe near the end became clear in a letter his sister, Jean, wrote to Time Warner three weeks after his death. “I was shocked to learn that Joe did not only not have much money in the bank but that he had almost $20,000 in credit card debts and unpaid bills,” she wrote. He had three bank accounts, one with $23,773, the others with $167 and $11. He had no life insurance. What he did have was tax returns documenting that Time Warner had, as Steve Ross promised, increased his pension to $80,000 a year. Where did it all go? His closets were stuffed with sports jackets and other clothing. Stereo components were stacked floor to ceiling in every room. Joe, Jean said, apparently had become “a compulsive buyer triggered by years of deprivation.” He showered everyone in his orbit with gifts, including his “ladyfriend” and her son. He also made out a $1,200 check every month to Joanne Siegel. “She had been taking 20 percent of his income as an agent’s commission,” Jean wrote, “for getting pay raises for Siegel and Shuster.” Jean asked that Time Warner help her out and it did, agreeing to give her $25,000 a year for the rest of her life. It also arranged Joe’s memorial services, as it would for Jerry.

  In 1995, the bad news involved the actor millions still thought of as Superman, Christopher Reeve. Eight years after his final Superman film, he was competing in an equestrian event. His horse inexplicably stopped as they approached a three-foot jump and he was thrown, landing on his head and snapping his spine clear through. “This is called a hangman’s injury,” he would explain in his memoir. “It was as if I’d been hanged, cut down, and then sent to a hospital. I was heard to say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and that was it.” He lost all movement from the neck down. The world was shocked. How could something like this happen? How could it happen to Superman? The children of baby boomers were asking the same questions the boomers themselves had asked thirty-six years before, when George Reeves shot himself.

  The difference was that Christopher Reeve not only would survive, he would offer a different and in ways more compelling model of the hero after his accident. His odds of having any function at all were daunting after doctors used wires to essentially reconnect his head to his body. In despair, he thought about suicide. But his wife, Dana, helped him believe in himself and his potential to recover. He exercised beyond exhaustion. He used electric shocks to stir his moribund nerves. He was rewarded with a wild success: He moved an index finger. His doctors were startled; other patients were inspired. Continuing the backbreaking work of rehabilitation, he regained sensation above his neck, around his shoulders, and down his left leg and arm. From a wheelchair, he directed an HBO film that was nominated for five Emmys. He played the lead in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He wrote an autobiography that spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He lobbied for federal funding of stem cell research and he became the leading advocate for people with spinal cord injuries. “ ‘What is a hero?’ ” he wrote. “I remember how easily I’d talk about it, the glib response I repeated so many times. My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous act without considering the consequences.… Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”

  Reeve was not the only one from the Superman movies who was suffering. In 1990, Margot Kidder had a serious car crash that left her in a wheelchair for about two years. That was just the beginning for the actress whose Lois Lane had seemed almost as invincible as Superman. After several surgeries and unsuccessful appeals to her insurance carrier, she declared bankruptcy. She had been married and divorced three times. In 1996 she was back in the hospital, this time a psychiatric one, after being found in the backyard of a suburban Los Angeles home, bedraggled and disoriented, claiming she had been stalked and attacked. “She was frightened for her life,” a police spokesman said. “W
e do not feel there has been a crime at this time.” The explanation was bipolar disorder. Since then she has reengaged in the world and in politics, and she has introduced her grandson to Superman. “It’s the first movie that little boys really get,” she says. “For little kids, mostly boys, it’s their introduction to morality and I think that’s a pretty powerful thing.”

  Reeve and Kidder both confirmed and refuted the chestnut about the Superman curse. Yes, unimaginably bad things happened to them, but what did that have to do with Superman? Yes, they had been typecast, but to themselves as well as to the public, any future role seemed like a footnote. It was their assignments with the Man of Tomorrow that stuck in their minds and America’s. They believed in his story and became part of it. For Reeve, Kidder, and most of the artists associated with Superman, he was more of a blessing than a curse.

  It was true even for Jerry Siegel. His heart had been giving him trouble for years and it gave way in January 1996, after a short illness. His last years were relatively comfortable. He had moved to Marina del Rey, a seaside enclave of Los Angeles, into a waterfront apartment much nicer than the one Joanne had complained about. He was collecting the same pension Joe was from Time Warner along with reimbursements for steep medical bills, and occasionally he got the acknowledgment he craved from Superman’s latest midwives. It had happened during a visit to the Lois & Clark set, when Joanne was introduced to Teri Hatcher, the 1990s model for Lois. It happened again when the Siegels were guests of honor at a dinner of the DC creative team during the Death of Superman run. “The fact that he was so gracious to us at all was amazing, given the past history with legal issues over Superman,” says Jerry Ordway, whose shout-out had launched the death project. “None of us would have had jobs without that amazing literary creation.” Paul Levitz, DC’s second-in-command, was equally touched: “There was an intergenerational blessing going on.”