That quality of Superman-ness
Wise, benevolent superhero morphs to meet our needs
Of all the superheroes, it seems most fitting that Superman should have revealed himself in a dream, zooming through his creator’s head in a single night of frantic inspiration.
“I am lying in bed when suddenly it hits me,” wrote his co-creator Jerry Siegel years later. “I conceive a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I ever heard tell of rolled into one. Only more so.”
The result, first seen 75 years ago brandishing a car above his head on the cover of Action Comics #1, was different only in degree from the body-stockinged blue streak who has returned to our screens in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
Siegel and Canadian co-creator Joe Shuster’s Superman was a comparatively earthbound creature whose powers extended to leaping about 200 metres, running “faster than a streamline train” and deflecting damage from anything smaller than a “bursting shell” — all attributes that speak volumes about the time and the conditions in which he was born.
Borrowing liberally from the pulp heroes Doc Savage, John Carter and the genetically engineered strongman Hugo Danner, the first Man of Steel was a wish-fulfilment dream of human power in an age of overwhelming machinery and armament.
Time would transform him into the beneficent alien demigod familiar to modern audiences, but by then the concept of Superman was already hovering, impregnable, in the Platonic realm of ideas.
Siegel and Shuster’s early comics cast Superman as a defender of the little guy, pitting him against hoodlums, lobbyists, profiteering industrialists and other enemies of the working class. The approach of war offered wider horizons for his talents.
By D-Day, his name adorned vehicles across the Allied war effort, while actors playing the character could be heard on U.S. radio soliciting for blood drives and war bonds. Soldiers read Superman comics at the Normandy landings, as their hero gamely battled “Japanazis” and “Japoteurs” in fourcolour adventures of his own.
Militant America took him to heart as the square-jawed symbol of its growing role as world policeman, but the character soon soared above questions of national identity. In vain did the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham protest, in the mid-1950s, that Superman comics gave children “fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune.”
That familiar blue streak — Bird? Plane? — had split the skies of popular culture, and a gap had been filled that no one knew existed.
In 75 years, Superman’s appeal has remained broadly constant despite the changing fortunes of the media that carry him. Comics fall from favour, TV series and embarrassing films come and go, but Superman T-shirts still sell.
Unlike the generations of superheroes spawned by his example, the Man of Steel never loses what the comics writer Grant Morrison has called “that essential, unshakable quality of Superman-ness the character possesses in every incarnation, which is divinity by any other name.”
Batman, a hero whose psychic roots lie deep in bereavement and psychosis, can be turned at a writer’s whim from camp self-parody to delusional obsessive or hard-boiled vigilante, but Superman is always Superman, wise, benevolent and unswervingly assured of the moral high ground.
This combination of goodness and power can leave writers struggling to create dramatic tension. Siegel and Shuster laid the groundwork with Clark Kent, who put a human face on the invulnerable alien. Subsequent caretakers invented Kryptonite to bring their hero to his knees. By the 1980s, writers had evolved Superman’s powers to the extent there was literally nothing he couldn’t do — planet-juggling? time travel? No problem.
Superman’s myth has also proved open to interpretation and appropriation. The character’s been claimed as a symbol of Jewish identity, Christian solidarity and Buddhist incarnation.
But one of the most attractive theories about Superman’s lasting appeal comes from the Scottish comics creator Morrison. In his book Supergods, he proposes that the mass-media frenzy for superheroes addresses a deep and specific cultural need.
As technological progress and medical science rushed forward, he suggests, we looked to superhero myths for guidance in approaching our own enhanced scope and reach.
The heroes offered, he concludes, “a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just and more proactive people we can be.”