Superman

by Larry Tye

  While there were changes between DC’s preliminary and final proposals, the switch that mattered more was the Siegels’ new legal counsel. The Hollywood studios whom he had skewered regarded Malibu’s Marc Toberoff as a Svengali who manipulated vulnerable clients. Admirers, like the heirs of Winifred Knight Mewborn, whose short story became the TV classic Lassie, called him a Robin Hood for restoring rights they had given up for next to nothing half a century before. Everyone agreed that the low-budget filmmaker turned high-stakes litigator had mastered an arcane area of copyright law and exploited it to benefit his clients and himself. In the Superman case, DC argued that Toberoff deceptively lured in the Siegels as clients, falsely promising them $15 million in immediate payouts and the chance to make their own Superman movie. His real motive, the company said in a legal filing against Toberoff, was to secure for himself the right to 45 percent of any payout the Siegels would get and the role of kingmaker in future Superman films. Toberoff called DC’s allegations a desperate “smear campaign” and part of Warner Bros.’ “last-ditch effort” to hang onto its rights to Superman, a property he believes is worth a billion dollars.

  Whoever was right, the result was that the Siegels and Jerry’s old employers were back in court. Scores of witnesses were deposed and thousands of pages of yellowing documents were unearthed that traced Superman’s development from Jerry and Joe’s earliest rendering to the latest TV incarnation in Smallville, which Toberoff claimed was a Superboy knockoff and thus belonged to Jerry’s heirs. For historians, the legal battle yielded a trove of material—from Jerry and Joe’s original $130 contract to stacks of correspondence between the young creators and their editors and publishers. It also produced Jerry’s unpublished memoir.

  The documents revealed a Jerry Siegel whose personality was at least as split as his superhero’s. One side of him was a creative and bereft boy looking to escape his real life by inventing one in fantasy. Less appealing was the angry young man who never recovered from the real and imagined wounds inflicted by the entrepreneurs to whom he had entrusted his sacred Superman. There were two Joannes as well. One was the nurturing beauty who had Jerry and Joe fawning over her. She coaxed the hard-hearted Jack Liebowitz into rehiring her husband after he had repeatedly burned bridges with the publisher, and looked after her man and girl when Jerry was an emotional wreck and there was barely cash enough to keep Laura in milk and diapers. Joanne’s other side was that of a lioness protecting her cubs. She was the mouthpiece for Jerry and Joe, writing letters to DC Comics demanding settlements, cost-of-living raises, and other benefits the aging creators lacked the gumption to ask for. If strong language was needed to get a CEO’s attention, she’d brand his company as the Gestapo. When an old classmate of Jerry’s was written up as the model for Lois Lane, implying that Joanne might not have been, Joanne had her lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter. No matter that the claims weren’t the classmate’s, but old ones by Joe and Jerry, and that by the time Joanne was posing for Joe, Lois already was part of the story. Superman over time became Joanne’s, too, to the point where she told people she planned to write her own memoir on the whole sordid history.

  The legal proceedings dragged on long enough that seven different federal judges pored through the evidence. Their preliminary rulings—in 2008, 2009, and 2011—gave the Siegels much but not all of what they wanted. They had the right to sue despite the agreements they had signed with DC Comics. They also had a right to the Superman story in Action 1 but not the cover, the Superman story in Action 4, parts of Superman 1, and the first two weeks of Superman newspaper strips, which Harry and Jack had authorized Jerry and Joe to produce on their own. That gave Jerry’s heirs ownership of Superman’s blue leotards, red cape, and boots, as well as his early powers to leap tall buildings, repel bullets, and run faster than an express train. Time Warner owned the flying superhero, the Daily Planet, Jimmy and Perry, the Kents, X-ray vision, and kryptonite, along with the overseas rights to everything. In practice the rulings meant that, for the full-fledged Superman to appear on-screen or anywhere else, Jerry’s heirs and Jack and Harry’s would have to pool their bifurcated holdings and share the profits. Just how that should happen and how much the Siegels already were owed, the court said, would have to be settled in a trial.

  While all that was playing out in public, behind the scenes checks continued to arrive each month from DC to Joanne. By the end of 2010 the payments had exceeded $3.8 million, including coverage of Joanne and Jerry’s medical bills, which had peaked at $89,000 the year he died. When a Superman TV show or film did especially well, there was a bonus of between $10,000 and $50,000. The agreement signed in 1975 had called for cutting off benefits to Joanne fifteen years earlier, but DC said it would keep them coming in spite of Jerry’s death and Joanne’s bid to reclaim the ownership of Superman. In 2001, the company said it would continue paying so long as Joanne was working toward a settlement of the copyright dispute; settlement talks broke off in 2002, but again DC kept sending the checks. Annual payouts that had started at $20,000 were up to $126,000 at the end.

  Even as Warner Bros. lawyers have been arguing with Toberoff and hoping for a settlement, they are steeling themselves for October 2013, when Joe Shuster’s nephew, Warren Peary, will try to restore his uncle’s Superman copyright and make the same claim the Siegels have. After Joe died in 1992, DC agreed to clean up his $20,000 in debts and pay his sister, Jean, $25,000 a year for the rest of her life, which so far has yielded her more than $500,000. In return she promised not to sue. But Jean’s son, Warren, never gave his word, and he hired Toberoff to sue DC for what he thinks the Shuster heirs will be entitled to under an amended federal copyright law. This time the lawyer and his client would split the rights 50–50, giving Toberoff a total stake of 47.5 percent in the Siegel-Shuster holdings, compared to 27.5 percent for the Siegels and 25 percent for the Shusters.

  Is that excessive? Toberoff is entitled to that much, some legal authorities say, since his firm isn’t charging a fee and is absorbing the huge costs of the multiyear lawsuit. Others say any contingency share over one-third is excessive and that Toberoff should have persuaded his aging and ill clients to take the tens of millions DC has offered even though he believes they deserve and can get more. “The whole purpose of these termination provisions [in federal law] is to give authors and their heirs a second bite at the apple, to enable them to finally profit from the market value of their creations,” says Toberoff. What about the fear—voiced not just by DC and Warner Bros. but by fans—that the lawsuit could impair and even end the Superman franchise itself by clouding the question of who owns the hero? “The notion that this could be the death of Superman is nonsense and studio counter-spin,” Toberoff says. “It’s clear that this is simply a financial matter. The Siegels are ready and willing to relicense their recaptured copyrights to Warner Bros. at a price that properly reflects the market value.”

  Toberoff also tried to strike a deal with Jerry’s son, Michael Siegel, saying he had an investor who was interested in buying out Michael’s interest in the Superman copyright, which would have been 25 percent of any settlement agreed to by Joanne and Laura. But Michael died suddenly in 2006 from complications of knee surgery—without having approved Toberoff’s proposal, which was a fraction of what he would have received under DC’s settlement offer, and without a will to pass on his share of a future payout. Michael had never gotten the annual payments that Joanne did and he would never see a penny from his father’s role in creating Superman, which was par for Michael’s course. Jerry was in the Army for much of his only son’s early life. After he and Bella got divorced, when Michael was four, Jerry seldom visited, and he stopped paying child support when he hit hard economic times. Michael became a plumber, like Bella’s father, and lived with Bella in Cleveland until she died, just four years before he did. Near the end each took care of the other and both felt abandoned by Jerry.

  It was a strange way for a son who never got over the loss of his father
to treat his own son, but Jerry was wrapped up in his own troubles and his new family. Jerry told everyone who asked how proud he was of Laura, his own Lois Lane and Supergirl, but seldom mentioned Michael. Michael kept a low profile and seldom talked about Superman or his father, who was a cherished native son in Cleveland and would eventually have his birthplace restored, with a plaque dubbing his street Jerry Siegel Lane and the cross street Lois Lane. What little Michael did say about Jerry, to friends and others, showed how torn he was. He didn’t want to be angry but couldn’t help it. He was crushed every time Jerry was supposed to pick him up at Howard Johnson’s for a custody visit but didn’t show up. He wished his dad had been around to see what an athlete he was, which was something Jerry had wanted to be but couldn’t. It hurt, again, when Michael turned up as an afterthought in Jerry’s will. “Even in death,” the aggrieved son wrote, his famous father “continues to shun me! Why?” Michael likely died without knowing the high hopes Jerry had had at the beginning for his firstborn, high enough that he named him after his own hallowed dad.

  Like Michael, Joanne died without seeing a dime of settlement money. With her passing in February 2011 at the age of ninety-three, the checks from DC were cut off as agreed back in 1975, which presumably gives Laura more incentive to settle her lawsuit. Warner, meanwhile, has two extra motivations to meet its June 2013 target for a new Superman movie: The judge in the Siegel case has made it clear that any delay could be interpreted as holding back on potential earnings for the heirs, and in the fall of 2013 Warren Peary will be asking to reclaim Joe Shuster’s copyright. Other comic book creators have been following the suit in hopes it helps them, while other publishers and studios hope it doesn’t threaten their ownership rights. Superman fans, too, are keeping a close watch—praying that if the two sides can’t settle, the judge shows the wisdom of Solomon by ensuring that the bid by the heirs of Superman’s creators to reclaim him does not kill him.

  OFFSCREEN, THE FIRST DECADE of the new millennium looked like the worst of times for Superman. Readership continued to sag for comic books generally, and specifically for Superman titles. The bestselling of those, Superman, had fallen from 720,000 copies a month in 1966, to 98,000 in 1986, to just 62,000 in 2006. Circulation was down again early in 2011, to 42,000, with optimists hoping for a rebound and realists noting that Action and other Superman titles were faring even worse. The remaining audience was dedicated to the point of fanaticism, a trend that was self-reinforcing. No longer did casual readers pick up a comic at the drugstore or grocery, both because the books increasingly required an insider’s knowledge to follow the action and because they simply weren’t being sold anymore at markets, pharmacies, or even the few newsstands that were left. Cost was another constraint: Superman comics that sold for 10 cents in 1938 were $2.99 to $3.99 by 2011, an increase that was about twice the rate of inflation. The core fan now was a worldly-wise twenty-six-year-old who was shelling out a thousand dollars a year for new comics. And it was a he; females made up barely 10 percent of the readers. Comic books had gone from being a cultural emblem to a countercultural refuge.

  Superman’s fortunes had soared with those of the comic book, but he didn’t crumple when the comic book did. That was partly because, after seventy years, he was as recognizable an American trademark as Mickey Mouse or the Playboy bunny and more resilient than either of them. He had his own Graceland in Metropolis, Illinois, which celebrated its native son with summertime festivities that drew thirty thousand people and were as much grassroots love-fests as the ones that Memphis organized for Elvis. When VH1 compiled its list of the two hundred greatest pop culture icons of all times, Superman ranked second—behind Oprah Winfrey and just ahead of Elvis Presley and Lucille Ball. The superhero was back onstage in Dallas, a featured attraction in Warner Bros.’ bustling store in Shanghai, a prominent player in movies as eclectic as Kill Bill and Hollywoodland, the focus of college courses on everything from sociology and immigration to gender studies, and a centerpiece of exhibitions at Jewish museums in Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam. In the Philippines, a thirty-five-year-old man had extensive cosmetic surgery to make himself look more like Superman. Collectors still traded his oldest stories; a copy of Action No. 1 sold for $1 million in February 2010, a record for any comic, and another copy smashed that mark two years later with a sales price of $2.2 million. Even the cheapest of his old trinkets, if they were in good enough condition, could fetch fat prices: $150 for a 1943 Superman-Tim birthday postcard, $750 for a 1945 Pep cereal box with the picture of a Superman button, $3,500 for a 1948 Superman felt beanie, and $20,000 for a brass ring that could be had in 1941 for two bottle caps and ten cents.

  Music is a touchstone in any culture, and Superman’s omnipresence in the American songbook underlined the chord he had struck. The Crash Test Dummies despaired that “the world will never see another man like him.” Donovan boasted that “Superman or Green Lantern ain’t got a-nothin’ on me.” The Kinks wished they “could fly like Superman,” while Hank Williams, Jr., said his “friends all call me Superman.” Herbie Mann professed his love and ours for the hero. Bluesmen sang about him as wistfully as country boys, rockers, balladeers, and big bands. Rappers, too, although they were less sentimental. “You could be my boyfriend, you surely can, just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman,” the Sugarhill Gang recited in “Rapper’s Delight,” the first hip-hop single to crack the Top 40 Hits. “I said he’s a fairy I do suppose, flying through the air in pantyhose, he may be very sexy or even cute, but he looks like a sucker in a blue and red suit.”

  While his place in American lore was rock-solid, what sustained Superman as a Man of Tomorrow rather than a dusty icon was the same alchemy that had brought him alive three-quarters of a century earlier: the resonance and relevance of his story. That magic was dramatically displayed in Superman: Red Son, a miniseries published by DC in 2003 that challenged not just the premise of the Man of Steel as a symbol of the red, white, and blue, but the outcome of the recently concluded Cold War. What if his rocket ship had taken a slightly different trajectory and, rather than landing in a Kansas cornfield, it had come down on a collective farm in Joseph Stalin’s Ukraine? What, writer Mark Millar wondered, would it mean if instead of the bold S on his chest Superman sported a hammer and sickle? The tale was part Mort Weisinger, part George Orwell. Superman managed to virtually eliminate poverty and ignorance behind the Iron Curtain, along with any vestiges of resistance to the Communist Party, which now presided over a global empire with six billion supplicants. America, not Russia, was economically and politically imploding in the brave new order. Its last hope lay with its most brilliant scientist and new president, Lex Luthor. It was a new way of seeing not just Superman and his supporting cast but our world and ourselves.

  Millar wasn’t the only one reimagining Superman’s roots. Mark Waid got to replot Superman’s interplanetary beginnings and terrestrial circumstances in Superman: Birthright. “Who am I and why am I here?” the hero asked himself. And, in terms more suited to science fiction fans, “Am I an Earthman or a Kryptonian?” His answer, laid out in twelve comic books published in 2003 and 2004, was that embracing his alien heritage wasn’t just a possibility, it was his destiny. Along the way Waid gave us a Superman who was less defensive of the status quo and more like the rebel that Jerry Siegel had envisioned. It was a vision compelling enough that it would supplant John Byrne’s reboot and become the defining mythos, at least until the next big reboot seven years later.

  Superman and Batman teamed up anew in a comic book called Superman/Batman that premiered in 2003 and explored their mutual empathy and antipathy. They still were DC’s most glittering stars, and their differences still offered an illuminating lens on what made each special. Superman played Dudley Do-Right to Batman’s Dirty Harry. Metropolis was Central Park and 59th Street at ten on a sunshiny morning on the first day of spring; Gotham was the Lower East Side in the middle of a rainy night in November. Now the two worlds and two heroes, who had for
ged their friendship on the radio in the 1940s, were united in a single book whose kickoff issue was ominously entitled “Public Enemies.”

  Crackerjack stories like those generally debuted in the comics, but many were collected into graphic novels and novelizations. Some were written by Superman pundits like Jeph Loeb, Mark Waid, and Cary Bates, who were aching for a chance to remind us why their hero mattered. Others came from newer hands like J. Michael Straczynski, who dispatched Superman on a year-long trek across the country to reconnect with the American way, and David S. Goyer, who took Superman in a different direction by having him renounce his American citizenship. Even Stan Lee, Marvel’s longtime boss and DC’s old-time nemesis, kicked in with a comic book called Just Imagine: Stan Lee’s Superman. With no facts to rely on, Superman stories had always been about imagination. They also had been about the Metropolis Marvel giving a mouthpiece to the dreams of his starry-eyed writers and to the star-gazer in all of us. “Hold fast to dreams,” Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes had admonished, “For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.”

  In the summer of 2011, DC made a bold gambit to expand its narrowing audience of comic book readers by recasting and simplifying not just Superman but its full lineup of superheroes. In the Superman series, the Man of Steel and his alter ego once again were bachelors, Lois was back on the dating scene, and the touchstone red briefs and blue tights were replaced by high-tech ceremonial armor. Action Comics, meanwhile, was relaunched with a new number 1 and a Superman who was younger, sported jeans and a T-shirt along with his red cape and S logo, and was still finding his way in his new world. It was the most daring makeover in years, one aimed at teenagers and adults rather than the adolescents of old, and early returns were bullish: Sales of the reconstituted comics were the highest in twenty years, with both print and digital versions doing brilliantly.