THE SHAPE OF A CAPE
Superman soars the highest when he escapes the pitfalls of parody and pretension
PHILIP MARCHAND
This is the great age of the buff, the devotee, the man — and most of them are male — whose restless mind can only be stilled, it seems, by near total absorption in some cultural product or activity of limited importance. The (Star) Trekkies set the pattern.
It was inevitable that Superman would call for super buffs. Case in point: According to journalist Larry Tye, author
of Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most
Enduring Hero, there exist “forensic experts and researchers” who have spent a lifetime looking into the death of George Reeves, ill-fated star of the television show
Adventures of Superman. Presumably they view a lifetime spent on solving the mystery of Reeves — did he commit suicide, or was he murdered? — a lifetime well spent. Even Tye, a lucid writer and journalistic pro, seems slightly unhinged by his subject. Superman, he maintains, “helped give America the backbone to wage war against the Nazis.” This is an astounding piece of historical information. If true, it raises the question of why today’s Superman can’t help give America the backbone to wage war against debt, unemployment and the entitlements problem.
Of course, Tye means merely that the figure of Superman helped boost the morale of American GIs, that he functioned as their “security blanket” — a more reasonable, though still large, claim. But even when he sticks to the ground of non-fiction — Superman is a literary character, after all — Tye is prone to hyperbole. He calls the trio of Clark Kent, Superman and Lois Lane, “literature’s most gripping love triangle,” for example, although what we have here is not a love triangle but the old hero in disguise device, used by Shakespeare, among others, for characters considerably more gripping than the Man of Steel.
There is no doubt, however, that the figure of Superman has had an astounding life in popular culture — primarily in the medium of comic books, but also on radio, television, movies, theatre and through an endless list of products, including “Superman bubble gum, squirt guns, lunch boxes, underpants, jammies, moccasins, horseshoes, and a Krypto-Raygun complete with bulb, battery, lenses and seven strips of film that let (children) flash onto a wall images of their idol in twenty-eight action-packed poses.”
His primary creator, Jerry Siegel, a shy, bullied teenager from a heavily Jewish neighbourhood in Cleveland, was a fan of pulp magazines who sought relief from his oppressive surroundings by inventing fantasy figures endowed with all the strength he lacked. When his beloved father, a tailor, died at the hands of thugs, Jerry’s imaginary heroes crystallized into a figure he called “The SuperMan,” a being gifted, Tye writes, “with exceptional strength, telescopic vision, the capacity to read minds, and a resolve to rule the universe.” The artist who drew The Super-Man was Joe Shuster, another awkward son of a poverty-stricken Jewish tailor. Born in Toronto, Shuster moved with his family to Cleveland sometime around his 11th birthday and met his destiny in the form of Jerry Siegel.
Canada has made some attempt, on the basis of Shuster’s birth and early years in Toronto, to claim Superman for its own with a Canada Post Superman stamp in 1995. In opposition to this appropriation of voice, Tye writes, “The U.S. Postal Service followed suit three years later, making clear that whatever else he was, the Big Blue Boy Scout was as all-American as baseball and jazz.” The notion of Superman as Canuck is indeed far-fetched; his ethnic roots point in another direction entirely. In his preface, Tye states flatly that Superman is Jewish, and later in the book mentions several clues indicating his Semitic origins. Here again Tye, like enthusiasts who seem to believe that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, forgets that Superman is the creation of several generations of artists and writers, some of whom have made free with his biographical details. In one period of his existence, Superman might well have been Jewish — in the imagination of the particular comic book artists who were then breathing life into him.
On March 1, 1938, two publishers named Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donnenfeld bought the rights to Superman, a character who made a sensation almost from the moment he appeared on the newsstands. In later years the two former teenaged scribblers who created Superman would be involved in endless litigation with the various owners of the Superman franchise, but in the short term Shuster and Siegel had steady jobs putting out the Superman comic books. Whatever the woes they endured were largely self-inflicted — at one point, in the late 1940s, having lost his job and lost a lawsuit, Shuster moved into an apartment in Queens, “among broken venetian blinds, sofas with springs poking through, and boxes of yellowing Superman comics.” Shuster had a very imperfect sense of survival since boyhood, when his greatest joy consisted of listening to his father read from the funny papers. In the end, Siegel and Shuster were rescued financially, in part because of the publicity generated by their sad stories.
Meanwhile the Superman juggernaut rolled on, in various spin-offs, including movie serials, a radio show and a television show, all highly successful. Superman also survived the Great Comic Book Scare of the postwar era, a crusade launched by a psychiatrist and notorious quack named Fredrik Wertham. Wertham discovered all sorts of perversity in the comic books, including the Superman comics. “They arouse in children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune,” Wertham declared. “We have called it the Superman complex.”
More threatening ultimately was the rise of Marvel Comics and their main protagonist, Spider-Man. In 1962, SpiderMan made his appearance, “a new breed of superhero,” according to Tye, “insecure, vulnerable and weak.” Comic book fans would henceforth be divided between readers of Marvel Comics and devotees of Superman. In response to this challenge, and to the general decline of comic book circulation in the 1960s, continual efforts were made to retool the Superman persona. It was through a different medium, however, that Superman regained a prominent place in American pop culture. The 1978 movie, Superman, with the inspired casting of Christopher Reeve as the hero, was a huge success. “He brought to the part irony and comic timing that harked back to the best of screwball comedy,” Tye writes. “He had dramatic good looks and an instinct for melding humanism with heroism.” The result, according to Tye, was that the movie escaped the twin pitfalls of parody and pretension.
Sequels inevitably followed, and just as inevitably, each one marked a decline from its predecessor — Superman II was still exciting and intelligently constructed but Superman IV was termed “one of the cheesiest movies ever made” by the Washington Post. As time went on, the misfortunes of Reeve and Kidder — the latter was diagnosed as bipolar after being found wandering disoriented through the suburbs of Los Angeles — combined with the memories of the George Reeves suicide, prompted talk of a Superman curse. Tye dismisses this as a “chestnut,” but the hard fates of so many key figures involved in the construction of this universally known character, this sunny, positive and preternaturally powerful demigod, is too powerful an irony to be denied. Who knows? It may be bad for your health to live with Superman for any length of time.
This is not to deny the basic simplicity and appeal of the Superman myth. “What makes grown men feel such a connection to and even ownership of a fantasy character from their long past childhoods?” Tye asks near the end of his book. What makes a Superman buff, in other words? A fan by the name of Ken Cholette gives as good — albeit simple-minded — an answer to this question as any. “It’s the belief that with all the things wrong in this world there is still one thing that cannot be corrupted,” Cholette observes. “Superman is something that stands for everything good and decent.”