Superman is today probably one of the worldâs most instantly and widely recognizable pop culture icons. 1 Created at the height of the Great Depression by writer Jerome âJerryâ Siegel and artist Joseph âJoeâ Shuster, two young Jewish men living in Cleveland , Ohio, Superman was a near-instant success. He first appeared in Action Comics #1, cover dated June 1938, but was on the stands already in April. 2 Each issue of Action, which contained one Superman story apiece, soon sold over 900,000 copies a month. His own title, Superman, soon sold somewhere between 1,250,000 and 1,300,000 on a bimonthly publication schedule, while most other comic books at the time sold somewhere between 200,000â400,000 copies. 3 Superman has since starred in hundreds, if not thousands of comic books, as well as numerous adaptations into other media. He has featured in radio serials, feature films, live action and animated television series, and even a musical, while his likeness has graced almost every kind of commodity imaginable. Further, he inspired a slew of imitators almost as soon as he appeared. This flurry of superhero publication is now commonly recognized as the beginning of the âGolden Ageâ of US superhero comics, an era that lasted roughly between 1938 and 1954, and the impact of which still reverberates around the globe.
Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland on October 17, 1914, to Lithuanian Jewish parents. He is often described as a shy loner who spent most of his time in the fantastic worlds of pop culture and dreamed of making a mark in pop culture himself: he wrote for his high school paper; tenaciously tried, and failed, to get published in established pulps; and made several attempts to self-publish his own magazines. In high school, he was introduced to Joe Shuster, born in Toronto on July 14, 1914, to a Dutch Jewish father and Ukrainian Jewish mother. Siegel and Shuster quickly bonded over their love of other worlds and started collaborating on stories and their own science fiction magazine. They even produced a full-length comic book . Despite several false starts, they had moderate success. Their real break, however, came in 1938, when they finally sold a comics story about their superheroic Superman, after years of pitching that character to unreceptive publishers. 4
Superman first appeared in a story published in Action #1, with which any study of Superman and his creators must begin. The story had been created in 1934 as a comic strip, not a comic book feature, and sent to publishers. Accounts vary as to how it was brought to the attention of Actionâs publishers years later, but either publisher Max Gaines or his assistant Sheldon Mayer was asked by their colleagues at Detective Comics (DC) if they knew of anything that could work as a lead feature for a new comic book. Gaines or Mayer suggested Siegel and Shusterâs strip, which they had both seen when the character was making the rounds in the comics business. 5 Siegel and Shuster were sent their old strip and told that if they could quickly adapt it for a comic book, it would be published. 6
The Action #1 story is an arguably haphazard and chaotic narrative that nonetheless proved highly successful. It starts with a one-page origin story, discussed in depth in Chap. 4, before thrusting readers, in medias res, straight into the action: a man in a gaudy red-and-blue costume is seen carrying a woman through the night. He is on his way to a governorâs mansion, to bring this woman to justice for a murder and to free another woman, who is about to be wrongfully executed for that same crime. Bursting into the mansion and meeting with the politician, the strange strongman secures the innocent womanâs freedom and then, after a change of location, immediately proceeds elsewhere to stop an incident of domestic violence. Next, in the guise of his stuttering alter ego, journalist Clark Kent , he convinces Lois Lane , a coworker, to go out with him. While on their date, the brutish Butch Matson pushes Clark aside and tells Lois that she will dance with him, âand like it!â When Lois refuses, Matson kidnaps her and complains that he let the âyellowâ Clark off too easy. Enter Superman again, who hoists the kidnappersâ car into the air, shakes them out of it, and overtakes the fleeing Matson, whom he then leaves, disgraced and petrified, dangling from a telephone pole. In a final vignette, Superman turns his attention to the nationâs capital. There, he overhears a senator promising Alex Greer, âthe slickest lobbyist in Washington,â that a bill âwill be passed before its full implications are realized. Before any remedial steps can be taken, our country will be embroiled with Europe.â In short order, the superhero captures Greer, and Supermanâs first appearance ends on a cliffhanger, with the hero running along telephone wires with the terrified lobbyist in his arms. 7
In only 13 short pages, Siegel and Shuster launched what would become a pop culture revolution with Superman, introduced several themes that would accompany the character for years to comeâsocial justice , masculinity , and national politics âand created an icon that has since become the subject of much speculation. Because of Supermanâs lasting influence and because Siegel and Shuster were Jewish, Superman is nowadays frequently claimed as a âJewishâ character in a popular and academic literature that, I will argue, unintentionally contributes to a forgetting of the complex, and oftentimes fraught, history of identity formation in the USA in the twentieth century, and instead serves to promote Jewish identity in the contemporary USA; indeed, because of his primacy among superheroes, Superman has recently become a linchpin in the discursive creation of a âJewishâcomics connection ,â a supposed deep and lasting influence of Jewish culture and tradition on superhero comics. Several common tropes recur in this construction, and they have all gained wide traction; as this book will show, however, none of these claims holds up to critical scrutiny, but through their popularity and constant repetition, they have created an âinterpretive sedimentation ,â by means of which a form of Judaizing, or âJudeocentric ,â reading has become firmly embedded in the commentarial tradition and has caused more and more aspects of that reading to be created and read into the text itself. 8
Since Superman has been claimed to be so many different things, this book will engage in a critical dialogue with the extant literature about Jews and comics and look at what he, the Man of Steel himself, can say about othersâ ascribed identifications of him. In what follows, I will present a critical reading of the âJudeocentric â literature on Superman and the so-called Jewishâcomics connection , juxtaposed with a contextual revisionist reading of the âoriginal characterâ as he was represented in his early years. This juxtaposition serves two purposes: first, it aims to provide a corrective to an ongoing diffusion of myth into accepted truth; second, it aims to provide a corrective to the study of Jewish-created superhero characters like Superman, characters whose possible Jewishness has heretofore been largely ignored in the majority of academic comics scholarship. 9 Combined, these perspectives make the argument that critical study, informed by historical formations of American Jewishness , can help further the understanding of these charactersâ genesis and continued cultural roles for the benefit of both Jewish studies, American studies, cultural studies, and comics studies.
In these pages, Superman will speak for himself, as it were, and is therefore humanized in the choice of pronouns: his characterization under Siegel and Shuster will be read in relation to the context in which he first appeared and analyzed from an intertextual perspective, in an attempt to discern if and how his creatorsâ Jewishness might have played into his creation and characterization. The original Supermanâs identity, it will be argued, is best read in terms of how it tries to redefine the nation in a slightly more inclusive way that also conforms to a common Americanizing tendency within the Jewish American community at the time. It is also argued that Supermanâs conformity to common representational conventions caused his stories and creators to perpetuate deracializing and marginalizing US formations of race, class, and gender.
Framing Superman
In one recent formulation, Superman was said to be âseen by pop culture scholars as the ultimate metaphor for the Jewish experience .â 10 Others have claimed that Superman should be regarded as a golem , 11 or an extraterrestrial Moses , and his creation has been claimed to be a response to the rise of Nazism in Germany. 12 Alternative interpretations present him as a juvenile power fantasy 13 or a Christ figure in tights. 14 In fact, Superman has been something akin to all of these things, and much more, at one point or another in his long life; indeed, the title of the 1998 series Superman for all Seasons is an apt description of the Superman metatext , a concept that comics scholar Richard Reynolds defines as âa summation of all existing texts plus all the gaps which those texts have left unspecified.â 15 Combined, these elements constitute an eternally incomplete chain of continuity, unknowable in its entirety since, even if someone were to read every single Superman publication to date, the serialized nature of superhero comic books assures that new texts are added every month, each of which can potentially change a seriesâ present and past. The resulting metatextual flow contains myriad versions of the character, similar in many respects and radically different in others, that together provide ample support for a wide variety of interpretations. But no character is static, no characterization eternal, and no series or theme timeless; without clearly defining which parts of the metatext will be used before analyzing Superman, or any other similar character, one risks anachronistically proj...