Superman

Ian Gordon

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813587530
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

After debuting in 1938, Superman soon became an American icon. But why has he maintained his iconic status for nearly 80 years? And how can he still be an American icon when the country itself has undergone so much change? Superman: Persistence of an American Icon examines the many iterations of the character in comic books, comic strips, radio series, movie serials, feature films, television shows, animation, toys, and collectibles over the past eight decades. Demonstrating how Superman’s iconic popularity cannot be attributed to any single creator or text, comics expert Ian Gordon embarks on a deeper consideration of cultural mythmaking as a collective and dynamic process. He also outlines the often contentious relationships between the various parties who have contributed to the Superman mythos, including corporate executives, comics writers, artists, nostalgic commentators, and collectors.      Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of Superman’s appearances in comics and other media, Gordon also digs into comics archives to reveal the prominent role that fans have played in remembering, interpreting, and reimagining Superman’s iconography. Gordon considers how comics, film, and TV producers have taken advantage of fan engagement and nostalgia when selling Superman products. Investigating a character who is equally an icon of American culture, fan culture, and consumer culture, Superman thus offers a provocative analysis of mythmaking in the modern era.  

Chapter One

Superman Mythos and History

Superman’s persistence as a figure of popular fiction for close to eighty years rests on a certain relationship to his own history and the ways in which DC has managed that history. Some of the first scholarly efforts at understanding Superman tried to account for this longevity by situating Superman as myth. This chapter, then, reads the mythic dimension of Superman against his history. In an article published in English in 1972 but originally appearing in Italian in 1962, Umberto Eco described Superman as a mythological virtuous archetype locked in a timeless state and thereby never fully consumed by his audience. A key part of Eco’s argument, and one captured in the Italian title, was that the Superman comic dissolved time in ways that made it difficult for Superman to be both a mythological archetype with a “fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable” and at the same time a figure of modern fiction in which the story happens as it is told and is marked by “the unpredictable nature of what will happen.”1 To hold this tension in check, Superman’s writers could only depict him in ways that broke down the sense of time in the story told. That is, readers had to suspend a sense of time or avoid applying reason to the time consumed in a Superman tale.

For Eco, these strictures explain in part why an omnipotent figure like Superman confined his activities, for the most part, to acts of virtue. Superman’s activities implied an ordered society, the wrongs of which could be put right by acts of charity. Superman operated in a setting of clearly identifiable transgressors such as criminal gangs, the odd mad scientist or two, and the occasional intergalactic villain for spice. As Eco concluded, “The plot must be static and evade any development because Superman must make virtue consist of many little activities on a small scale, never achieving a total awareness. Conversely, virtue must be characterized in the accomplishment of only partial acts so that the plot can remain static.”2 In effect, Superman strove to educate Americans about the timelessness of the existing order or the naturalness of an ordered state of being.

Eco does not cite specific examples of Superman stories in his piece; but in an anecdote elsewhere, he says he used two to three hundred issues of Superman comics to prepare the piece, and it seems these were the original American comic books, rather than Italian reprints.3 The majority of the comics available to Eco, writing in the early 1960s, would have been from the 1950s, along with some 1940s postwar comics. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, it is easy enough to see postwar America trying to reassure itself of the timelessness and normalness of prosperity after the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II. The lack of broader notions of virtue, beyond the small and localized, perhaps lay in a deliberate ratcheting down of Superman as an Übermensch, if not in terms of his powers, then at least in regard to his actions, as a response to criticism that he represented just the sort of ideology that America had fought a war against.4 Likewise, the context of the Cold War explains some of the notion of virtue as charity rather than, say, programmatic reform. Indeed, America generally presented its actions in the world as lending a helping hand in the spirit of charity rather than the sort of self-interest that motivated imperial powers.5

To a certain extent, in Eco’s hands the notions of time and of history are conflated. Moreover, he reduces both history and time to the singular, passing over the existence of several modes of history and historical causality that correspond to different modes of time and temporal explanation. John Cheng discusses some of the way notions of time shifted in fact and fiction, under the impact of Albert Einstein’s theories, from pre–World War II concepts of linearity to postwar concepts of time as not necessarily linear.6 Eco hints that it is the idealized narrative forms and structures of Superman stories that makes the character timeless. By showing us one side of Superman, the timeless structure of a hero/superhero myth, Eco allows us to see a tension in Superman between features that are crystallized—entities such as Superman are God-like and above change—and the experience of writers and readers trying to fit that entity to lived conditions. It is a play between diachronic and synchronic aspects of Superman, with Superman understood here as a phenomenon and as a totality of many aspects: the character, the business of producing comics/television/film (trademarked brand name and copyrighted), and the work of distributing, consuming, and using the marque. Eco might have been right in principle about the totalizing nature of the Superman myth, at least that version extant when he wrote, but there are so many socially and historically relevant variations on the Superman theme that it is useful to pause and think about the application of his methodology.

Eco considered ideal abstractions of Superman as a heroic figure and read them semiotically and symbolically, but his analysis centered on a limited set of Superman comic book stories, even if that amounted to ten years’ worth of comic book stories. Eco shows us how these Superman stories structure a myth, in this case the Superman myth, and if we follow Giambattista Vico, we can see this myth as a particular needs projection of 1950s America.7 But what Eco does not show us is the construction of Superman. That construction is a history that can be tracked and traced, and although like all history it is not possible to offer a complete blow-by-blow account of the development of Superman, it is possible to trace every shift and turn in the comic books and most of the other incarnations of Superman.8 And thanks to court cases, many documents on the early development of Superman are widely available. To be sure, this is not the story Eco was trying to tell, but it is the story of Superman.

Eco’s 1950s Superman was somewhat crystallized within a limited version of virtue. But Eco’s interpretation does suggest that, as limited as Superman’s virtue might be according to the prevailing social order, numerous possibilities for storytelling focused on virtue existed under different conditions. So Eco’s Superman is, then, not totally timeless but can act as an instructive tool for what passes as virtue in society, and Superman’s popularity at any given time is probably in direct relationship to his creators’ success in capturing a dominant mood. In effect, Superman is a product by which we consume virtue. Nonetheless, such an approach assigns to Superman an a priori status as virtuous, with him being a fixed point of reference. And indeed Superman is virtuous, and that is fixed because he is a work of fiction. The tension in Superman, then, is this: he has fixed qualities like virtue, but he has existed since 1938 and has a history that involves a degree of change and development. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion that myth recycles earlier versions of the myth as part of its status is a useful observation because it reminds us that such figures must contain the earlier versions of themselves.9 In this chapter, then, I examine some of the ways Superman manages this feat.

Early Superman

The earliest version of Siegel and Shuster’s comic book Superman had a different notion of virtue than that encountered by Eco. Superman of the first two years of Action Comics was somewhat of a reformist liberal, albeit one given to direct action. In his early years, Superman saved a woman who had mistakenly been condemned for murder, confronted a wife beater, prevented the United States from becoming embroiled in a European conflict, destroyed slums to force the government to build better housing (well, modern high-rise apartment blocks), tore down a car factory because its shoddy products caused deaths, and fought a corrupt police force. In this version, his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, tied Superman’s virtue to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal politics, America’s 1930s isolationism, and the reality of life in Cleveland, where they lived. This somewhat-anarchic Superman captured an audience of young fans who probably reveled in his short-cut solutions to social problems and defiance of conventional authority. But this Superman was short-lived.10

Beginning in the latter half of 1940, a combination of factors transformed Superman into a symbol of more general American cultural values in that his individualism was tied to consumerist values. Superman’s metamorphosis resulted from the confluence of his success as a comic book character, which brought added attention and opportunities for his creators and publishers, and the way the creators and publishers clashed over realizing the value in those opportunities. This success, and the more general success of comic books, also brought a morality campaign directed at comic books. A heightened patriotism with the growing realization that America would be drawn into the European war also colored this period. This transformation naturalized many aspects of Superman and produced the “timeless” character of which Eco writes. The process of change was traumatic and difficult for Siegel and Shuster. The early Superman with all its raw edges was very much their vision of the character. The rapid success of the character, marked among other things by the introduction of a daily comic strip in January 1939, brought with it fresh demands and a need for change. Correspondence from 1938 to 1941 between Jerry Siegel and Jack Liebowitz, the business manager and later coowner at Detective Comics, shows the tensions in this process.

By all accounts, Siegel, who had shopped Superman around to much rejection, was relieved at first to find a home in Action Comics. But six months after assigning all rights to Superman to DC Comics, Siegel sent a letter to DC that Liebowitz said took his breath away. In the letter of September 26, 1938, Siegel asked for, and just stopped short of demanding, fifteen dollars per page for Superman. If Siegel felt hard done by, so too did Liebowitz, who wrote on September 28, “the amount of increase you demand does not hurt me as much as your attitude in the entire matter.” Liebowitz went on to suggest that Siegel took such a stance because he was an inexperienced young man. Siegel, for his part, replied on September 30 noting that Liebowitz had explained “many things” to the writers’ “complete satisfaction” and returning the new contracts for comic book page rates and for the syndicated comic strip. But whatever goodwill existed at that time seemed to have evaporated rather quickly. Several letters from Liebowitz and later from the DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth stress again and again the need for organization and quality control in the production of both the comic strip and the comic book. In April 1939, Liebowitz suggested to Siegel that he and Shuster move to New York so they could be “at a moment’s touch” with everything that they did. Liebowitz continued, “I think with a daily routine in an office, you will be able to accomplish a great deal more away from the distractions of working at home.”11

Much of this correspondence reads like a textbook case of the point Roger Chartier, a French cultural historian, makes that we need to distinguish between “text” and “print.” “Text” involves authors writing, and “print” involves publishers publishing. The two may be linked, but they are not one and the same. What writers intend for their work and the ways in which publishers market it may be at odds.12 And to this point, we can add that publishers of serial narratives need to control production, quality, and delivery of that narrative, and this will potentially bring them into conflict with creators. The process of creating Superman was a complex piece of business. Liebowitz reminded Siegel to “invest now in building for the future” and not to become complacent with his “present monetary results.” The McClure syndicate and DC Comics were active partners in shaping Superman, constantly giving Siegel and Shuster notes on aspects of the character and rejecting work as substandard. Because Siegel seemed to create on the fly, Liebowitz urged him to submit synopses of continuities so they could be edited. In 1940, Liebowitz suggested that Siegel consult a dictionary, where he would find that “haemophilia is a tendency to profuse bleeding even from slight wounds” and not, as Siegel thought, a condition of “a person with lack of blood.” And in this same 1940 letter, Liebowitz sent Siegel a synopsis for a Superman story that he asked Siegel to write “the detailed panel script for,” which was probably the first time a Superman story originated with someone other than Siegel. And again Liebowitz complained about Siegel’s inability to produce the promised five stories a month, calling him “a Superman in reverse.”13 This correspondence between publisher and author reminds us that this sort of cultural work is cooperative and subject to the demands of the structure of production and distribution. To ensure that the latter two parts of this equation flow smoothly, publishers also needed to be sure of their market.

Liebowitz’s January 1940 letter to Siegel noted “that at the present time there seems to be a concentrated drive against movies and comic books which parent-teachers groups and womens [sic] clubs claim are harmful for children.” The solution to this potential threat to Superman’s future lay in an “editorial policy with a view of obtaining the approval of parents, while still not sacrificing the adventure and the thrill Superman has always brought to children.” Toward the end of 1940, DC Comics instituted an advisory board of psychologists and child educators in response to this public campaign and the legislation in some states against comic books that transgressed public morals. New guidelines for Superman stories prohibited, among other things, the destruction of private property. What we see here is the process that made Eco’s virtuous Superman and a development that is traceable and situated in specific conditions. And that virtue was defined in particular terms. In an editorial in the October 1941 issue of Action Comics that introduced the new editorial board, DC explained, “a deep respect for our obligation to the young people of America and their parents and our responsibility as parents ourselves combine to set our standards of wholesome entertainment.”

At the same time, Superman himself had become an important piece of private property. In mid-January 1940, Liebowitz wrote to Siegel that DC planned “to go after various licenses” and that the company had set up a publicity department. He suggested that Siegel do no further interviews, such as the recent misleading interview he had done with the Cleveland Plain Dealer boasting of fo...