When Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938, the world of popular fiction changed
forever. It was the birth of a new genre: the superhero story, a genre that would immediately
dominate the medium of comic books, a dominance that continues unchallenged to this very day,
and would also eventually become one of the most popular genres in the movies and on TV.
The catalyst for that change was the work of two young men from Cleveland, Ohio — writer Jerry
Siegel, who was born in Cleveland, and artist Joe Shuster, who was born in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, and moved to Cleveland with his family at age nine. Siegel and Shuster met in high school,
and began collaborating on comics and science fiction stories almost immediately. They created
Superman together in the early 1930s, but it took six years to find a publisher willing
to take a chance on the adventures of this colorful, powerful, and often strange character.
Finally, in 1938, Siegel and Shuster sold Superman to National Comics,
for which they had previously created the character of Slam Bradley.
National would go on to become better known as DC Comics, and Superman would
become one of the most recognizable and prolific characters in all of fiction.
Superman was already more than forty years old when I was born, so as long as I can
remember he’s always been pretty much as he is now — the granddaddy of ‘em all,
the superhero of superheroes. That’s one reason why it’s so interesting, and so important
when we seek to understand the appeal of the character, to go back to those early stories,
the ones written and drawn by Siegel and Shuster themselves in the first issues of Action Comics.
One thing that is immediately apparent: Superman is a social justice warrior.
Action Comics #1 begins with a single page summarizing Superman’s extraterrestrial origins,
briefly describing his powers, and introducing him as the “champion of the oppressed,
the physical marvel who has sworn to dedicate his existence to helping those in need!”
The story that follows, the first Superman comic ever published, opens with Superman
rushing to the governor’s mansion to convince the governor to commute a death sentence for a woman
set to be executed that night. Superman has discovered that the condemned woman is innocent,
and has come to the governor with the real killer under his arm. When a couple of the
governor’s attendants try to stop him, Superman brushes them aside, smashing
through doors to reach the governor and demand that he cancel the execution, which he does.
Through the rest of that story, Superman intervenes to stop a
husband from beating his wife, rescues Lois from the clutches of some gangsters,
and tracks down a lobbyist who has made a corrupt deal with a United States Senator.
The story picks up in the following issue, with Superman discovering that the mastermind behind
the crooked deal with the senator is an arms manufacturer who has orchestrated a war in South
America in order to increase his company’s ammunition sales. Superman teaches the arms
dealer a lesson by forcing him to enlist in the army of one of the warring nations.
While he’s in the country, Superman also stops a brutal army officer from torturing prisoners,
saves Lois — who is there on assignment from the newspaper — from being killed
by a firing squad — and ultimately ends the war by abducting the commanders of each army
and telling them that instead of sending soldiers to kill each other,
the two generals will settle this war by fighting each other. But instead, they agree to make peace.
Action Comics #3 begins with Superman racing to the site of a coal mine disaster. Disguised
as a miner, he rescues the men trapped in the collapsed mine. Then, as Clark Kent,
he visits one of the miners in the hospital, and learns that the accident was the result of
willful negligence on the part of the mine owner. The miners themselves all knew it was unsafe,
but kept working because they had no choice — they had families to feed, bills to pay.
Clark meets with the owner of the mine, who blames the workers for the accident and says he has no
intention of making his mine safer, proudly declaring “I’m a businessman, not a humanitarian!”
That night, again disguised as a miner, Superman crashes a party at the mine owner’s house.
The mine owner, who besides being a terrible boss is also apparently kinda nuts,
comes up with a fun idea: move the party into the mine. That way,
his rich friends can get a taste of the working man’s life, his party crasher can know what
it’s like to mingle with the social elite, and everybody can find out how the other half lives.
The wealthy party guests are equal parts thrilled and appalled by conditions in the mine.
Once everyone is down there, Superman slips away and triggers a cave-in,
trapping them all together in a tunnel. The ire of the trapped guests immediately turns on the owner,
especially when they find that none of the safety devices, intended to alert people on
the surface of an emergency, are actually working. In desperation, the owner grabs a
pick and orders Superman, who he still thinks to be one of his miners, to start digging.
Superman’s like, “Whatever. You want outta here so bad? You dig.”
So, the party guests start to dig. But, they don’t get very far before they begin collapsing from
exhaustion. Before passing out himself, the mine owner finally expresses remorse over the way he’s
treated his workers. “If only I had this to do all over again,” he cries. “I never knew — really
knew — what the men down here have to face.” Having heard the owner’s words of repentance,
Superman digs them the rest of the way out. A few days later, as Clark Kent, he pays another
visit to the mine owner. The owner declares that from now on, his mine will be the safest, and his
workers the best treated in the country! Clark is happy to hear it, but promises to himself that
if the owner’s newfound concern for his workers doesn’t last, Superman will definitely be back.
As you can tell, these early Superman stories have a pronounced and unapologetic social conscience.
The Supes of Siegel and Shuster isn’t overtly political — he never espouses any specific
ideology, he can’t be pigeonholed as, say, a socialist, or an anarchist. But it’s obvious
that his sympathies lie with the poor, the working class, the marginalized, the powerless — he fights
for them, not for the wealthy and powerful people who are shown to be the cause of their misery.
But, Siegel and Shuster’s early Superman stories are defined by more than just their often pointed
social commentary. They’re also frequently just . . . weird — deliriously, delightfully weird. For
example, take the very next issue: Action Comics #4. The Superman feature in this one begins with
Supes witnessing a hit-and-run accident and running after the driver responsible. He finds
the guy, who is drunk, passed out, his car stalled across train tracks as the train fast approaches.
We get a quick cutaway to establish that one of the guys driving the train is also
getting drunk. With how social-issue-oriented the previous stories have been, you might assume that
this adventure of Superman will carry some kind of pointed message related to the evils of drinking,
or at least drinking while driving a car or a train. But you would be wrong.
Supes pulls the driver away just as the train smashes into his car. But, I guess
the excitement was too much for him, because the driver immediately suffers a fatal heart attack.
Superman climbs in through a window of the stopped train, and just so happens
to overhear a conversation between a college football coach and two thugs, whom he hires to
play for his school’s team and take out the star players of the opposing team in an upcoming game.
“A crooked coach hiring professional thugs to play football,” says Superman to himself
after the men have left. “Sounds like just the sort of set-up I like to tear down!”
So, what’s Superman’s plan? Confront the coach and convince him not to go through with it?
Scare off the hired thugs? Nope! He’s gonna disguise himself as a member of the opposing team!
He goes through newspaper clippings of the players, finds one — Tommy
Burke — who kinda looks like him, puts on some make-up to enhance their resemblance,
and takes Tommy’s place on the Cordell University football team.
“But, Steve,” some of you are probably asking, “If Superman is pretending to be Tommy Burke,
what about the real Tommy Burke?” I’m so glad you asked.
The real Tommy Burke is walking home after having just been dumped by his girlfriend,
when he runs into Superman, who now looks exactly like him. Superman stabs Tommy with a needle and
he falls unconscious. When he wakes up, he’s in his own apartment, but drugged and unable
to move. Superman — who again, looks exactly like Tommy — says to Tommy, “Don’t worry, I’m
just gonna assume your identity for a few days. Everything’s cool! See you later!” and leaves!
. . . What?
Superman shows up to football practice disguised as Tommy, immediately gets in a fight with one
of the other players, ends up swatting him across the locker room and knocking him out.
The coach kicks him out of practice. But, Superman feels bad for giving Tommy a bad reputation,
so he goes out onto the field anyway and winds up impressing the coach by catching an errant pass
and running for a touchdown, despite having the entire team hanging onto him at one point.
Word gets around that Tommy Burke,
a lowly substitute before this, is suddenly the greatest football player in the world,
and the head coach of Dale University, the guy Superman saw on the train hiring the thugs,
decides he’d better take Tommy out, just to be sure his team wins the big game. So, he sends his
thugs out and they kidnap Tommy — the real Tommy, who is still lying drugged in his apartment.
The thugs take Tommy to a deserted house and tie him to a chair. Oh no, they moved him to a
secondary location! Superman, who witnessed the kidnapping, follows them to the house
and watches through a window. Does Superman burst in and rescue Tommy? No, actually
he’s happy that the thugs have taken Tommy off his hands, and leaves him there!
This is all to keep someone from cheating to win a college football game. In case you forgot.
The day of the big game arrives. The Dale coach and his thugs are shocked to see Tommy,
who they thought they kidnapped, practicing with the Cordell team. So, one of the thugs is like,
“Don’t worry, coach — I’ll stab him during the game. That’ll take care of it!”
Superman, as Tommy, is playing the game and kicking ass, scoring touchdowns left and right.
Meanwhile, the real Tommy has recovered from the drugs Superman dosed him with,
escaped from the house the kidnappers took him to, and made his way to the stadium. At first,
he’s enraged to see his imposter playing in his place, but when he realizes that the fans,
including his ex-girlfriend, are going nuts for “him,” Tommy starts cheering, too.
One of the thugs tries to stab Superman as planned, but the blade just snaps off
against his impenetrable skin. Superman knocks out the thugs. At halftime, the crooked coach
tenders his resignation. At the same time, Superman runs into the real Tommy Burke,
and they switch clothes — Tommy has apparently completely forgiven Superman for assaulting,
drugging, and replacing him without any explanation.
Tommy rejoins his team for the second half and is knocked unconscious during the first play.
When he regains consciousness, his ex-girlfriend throws her arms around him, tells him he was
wonderful, but makes him promise to give up football, because it’s just too brutal.
Tommy’s like, “Sure, okay.”
And they all lived happily ever after — thanks to Superman.
One of the oddest, most downright bonkers Superman stories ever published, and there’s not a bottle
city or a fifth-dimensional imp to be found. So, yeah. They weren’t all Afterschool Specials.
Siegel and Shuster worked on Action Comics regularly for its first two years.
Then, in 1940, Joe Shuster left the title and moved on to other jobs.
Apart from a few odd jobs here and there, including a handful of Superboy stories
published in More Fun Comics beginning in 1945, he never drew Superman professionally again.
Jerry Siegel stuck around, writing Action Comics with other artists until 1943,
when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Honolulu, and wrote
for Stars and Stripes, and was discharged in January 1946, four months after the war ended.
Later on in ‘46, Siegel and Shuster sued DC in an attempt to win back the rights to Superman.
They lost. The court ruled that DC had lawfully purchased the rights. However,
the court also found that Jerry Siegel still owned the rights to Superboy — which
DC subsequently purchased for ninety-four thousand dollars.
After that, DC stopped crediting Siegel and Shuster as the creators of Superman.
Twenty years later, they tried suing DC to get their rights back again, but again the
court ruled against them. Jerry Siegel, who had returned to DC as a writer in 1959, was dismissed
from the company for a second time. They both soon fell into debt, as work became harder and harder
to come by. The men who created Superman, the champion of those in need, were now in need of a
champion themselves. And their enemy was the very company to which they’d sold their creation.
In 1975, Warner Bros. Studios announced it was producing a live-action Superman film.
Siegel and Shuster, with the support of their old colleague, legendary Batman artist Jerry Robinson,
along with other notable comics artists like Neal Adams,
began a publicity campaign to bring attention to their difficult financial situations,
and what they felt to be the poor treatment they’d received from DC.
How was it fair, they and their supporters argued,
for DC and Warner Bros. to make millions of dollars off of Superman,
when the artist and writer who created him were due to receive nothing?
The publicity worked — DC agreed to pay Siegel and Shuster an annual stipend for the rest of
their lives, along with health benefits, and restore their credit as the creators
of Superman in the comics, and the movie. When Superman: The Movie opened in theaters in 1978,
cheers broke out from knowledgeable fans at some screenings when the “Superman
Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” credit appeared during the opening titles.
For decades, critiques of superhero stories have reduced them to power fantasies. And that’s
not an unfair critique — oftentimes, power fantasies are exactly what superheroes are.
However, not all power fantasies are the same. Superheroes can appeal to people who want to
project themselves into stories where they’re bigger, stronger, and tougher than anyone else,
where they have the ability to impose their will on others, force people to do as they please,
give them what they want. Those aren’t the healthiest impulses, and I understand
why someone might take a dim view of superhero stories that encourage readers to indulge them.
But, those earliest Superman adventures by Siegel and Shuster are power fantasies of another kind.
They’re fantasies for those who would like to imagine, even if only for a few minutes,
that people like them might have some control over their own lives,
or that the most powerful people in our society — the war profiteers and robber barons,
the corrupt and callous few who stand with their boots on the necks of the many, might someday
be forced to face justice for their crimes, and make things right for the people they’ve harmed.
This Superman, this first Superman, this Superman who changed the world,
is the fantasy that there can be an individual strong enough, brave enough,
and enlightened enough to fight for the common people, with the common people, and win. In the
eight decades that have passed since his first appearance, Superman has lost his activist streak,
become far less of a social crusader. He’s gone from someone who would unhesitatingly
smash the unjust status quo to someone who has all too often been seen as a defender of it.
He has returned to his roots as a two-fisted defender of the people now and again, though not
as often as I would have liked him to. There are endless, different takes on Superman, in comics,
on the radio, on TV, in the movies, and as this series goes on I’m going to talk about many of
them. But, I kinda think that social conscience, that working class solidarity, that drive to be an
ally to the marginalized and underprivileged, should be viewed as one of his superpowers,
no less important than his invulnerability, strength, speed, or ability to fly.
Because when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, they didn’t just create a man of steel,
or a last son of Krypton, or a big blue boy scout — they created a social justice warrior.
That, like Siegel and Shuster themselves, deserves better than to be forgotten. It’s important —
important enough to make the difference between a pretty good Superman, and the Best Superman Ever.