''Why the World Doesn't Need Superman''

      Was Lois Lane Right?

  After more than a generation of false starts, busted deals and abandoned screenplays, SUPERMAN RETURNS in a $250 million blockbuster. Seems the Man of Steel has come back after five years in outer space seeking  the remnants of his long-destroyed home world, Krypton. During his absence, 23-year-old single mother Lois Lane pens an editorial, ‘Why the World Doesn't Need Superman,' for the Daily Planet and wins the Pulitzer Prize.

       “Great Caesar's Ghost!” What was the young star reporter thinking?  Could she have found the courage and the confidence to admit what all the rest of us were afraid to: That we don't need Superman!  

       Not in my wildest dreams did I ever see it coming.

        More than fifty years ago on a 17-inch fuzzy black-and-white television, I first beheld Superman in a Max Fleischer cartoon made nearly five years before I was born.

     And backed by a blare of trumpets…

      “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's… Superman!”

      In less than ten minutes, my life had changed forever. Fantasy and science fiction were more beautiful and more real than reality would ever be!

      One cartoon had this bald scientist operating a giant stellar magnet, shaped like a horseshoe, of course, and with its magnetic rays, it was pulling a comet closer and closer to earth.

       “Is that possible?” I asked my father.

       Dad gave me that look.

       Not many years later came THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN with real people!

       “Yes, it's SUPERMAN, strange visitor from another planet, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way!”

       Superman was my man! Forget Clark Kent. He was just Superman passing for one of us. What fun was that? Anybody could do it!

       The TV show never went off the air and it's aged a lot better than I have.

       George Reeves did not. On the 16^th of June 1959, his life ended. My last year at junior high school and just a few months before, Buddy Holly, Riche Valens and the “Big Bopper” had been killed in an airplane crash. That was “The Day the Music Died.” With the death of the man who was Superman, I understood so late in the game that he was only playing Superman.

      I had grown up in New York City looking at the Empire State Building from afar and wondering what it would have been like if King Kong had been up there for me to see. Other times I'd look to the sky and imagine Superman flying by. If I waved to him, would he see me and wave back? Those fantasies were gone forever.

       During the 60s, America was looking for its way and Superman was not. Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement took center stage while the Man of Steel's low grade cartoons and comic books rusted in the wings. Not until after Watergate was America ready for Superman, the full Hollywood treatment.

        I remember sitting in the theater, waiting in full anticipation. And when that symbolic S revealed itself, a rush surged through me. Oh yeah, this was Superman!

        The movie was hardly perfect, but I've seen the ‘helicopter rescue scene” at least fifty times since and my eyes well up every time. I needed Superman. America needed Superman and Christopher Reeve was Superman!

        “The story of Superman's origin parallels those of other cultural heroes and religious figures such as Moses, Jesus Christ, Gilgamesh and Krishna who were spirited away as infants from places where they were in danger, with stronger parallels to the lives of Moses and Jesus Christ,” declare a host of analyses, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that Superman is the ultimate American experience.

        Superman IS the American Way. He always has been. Had Batman been created by a Brit, the Caped Crusader would have flourished fighting crime in foggy London.  Spider-Man would have been at home in Mexico City or Brazilia and the X-Men would have been the toast of Europe with their special school in Paris. But the Mighty Man of Steel could only be American.

       "Just as the Greek gods represented their society, Superman is like the avatar of the United States. It's how we want to see ourselves. That's why he gets more powerful and that's why he gets more handsome. It becomes our own wish fulfillment," says Brad Meltzer, who has written for Superman in the DC Comics series Identity Crisis and the latest installment of Justice League of America.

      The heroic figure, real and unreal, evolves over time. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were the ‘supermen' of their day. Cowboys dominated American folklore for more than a century. During the Reagan admistration, the president's detractors blamed his “from the hip” diplomacy on his “cowboy” persona. In 1988's DIEHARD, the hero identified with Roy Rodgers, “King of the Cowboys.”

      No more of those “thrilling days of yesteryear” when the brave loner took on a gang of outlaws to “clean up Dodge.” The idealistic lawman has long since ridden off into the sunset.  Replaced by lawyers and cops? Civil servants? Ya' gotta be kiddin' me! The world has gotten much too screwed up for the likes of them. The United States, “the world's policeman”, had long exhausted all diplomatic options and your average superhero didn't have the chops to take on the new supervillians of the New Millennium.

    “The world doesn't need a savior,” wrote Lois Lane to win journalism's highest honor. Oh, really? Religious fundamentalists on opposite sides of  the earth are at war with each other and their own governments because these fanatics are convinced only the right God can save us.

     Imagine if Superman had not taken his heavenly pilgrimage to wander in the cosmos for five years. There would have been no 911, no killer tsunami, no Katrina and with Superman on our team, the US would've won the World Cup going away!

     But the American Constitution enforces the separation of Church and State. The last superpower has never had a holy warrior hero and never will. “The cowboys are dead. Long live the cowboys!” America no longer needs a superhero because we have become a superhero! 

     And supervillains around the planet cringe at our coming.

      “Look! Up in the sky! It's missiles! It's planes! It's America's ‘shock and awe'!

      “Yes, it's America, high-tech visitors from another hemisphere with powers and abilities far beyond those of the rest of the world! America, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with its bare hands, and who, disguised as a mild-mannered democracy for a great, multi-ethnic people, fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice. That's the American Way!”

      The United States has entered the 21^st Century as a world unto its own and not unlike the mythical Krypton, surrounded by dozens of lesser planets. Compared to Americans, all other earthlings are backward, ignorant, weak and poor. As the lone superpower, it is our divine destiny to decide Truth and Justice for all.  

     “The medium is the message,” declared Marshall McLuhan. Comic books, cartoons, movies, radio shows and even a Broadway play; t-shirts, board games, action figures and countless other toys, Superman has done it all everywhere. His new marketeers will saturate the planet with his image and generate billions in profits.

      Is that Superman's "message?"

      Said McLuhan: “We become what we behold.”

      Of course we no longer need Superman. We are Superman.

SUPERMAN RETURNS

Over SUPERBOY's Dead Body

Who killed the original Boy of Steel?

       The new $250 million SUPERMAN movie should do half a billion bucks worldwide plus billions more in licensing deals.  According to the lore and the Neilsen Ratings, SUPERMAN is that kid on TV's SMALLVILLE--the youngster the Man of Steel used to be before he became a full-time superhero, right? 

      Wrong! The TV Clark Kent is an imposter, a usurper cooked up by Warner Brothers to dodge royalty payments to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the teenagers who created Superman more than seventy years ago. Their Superboy, the original Boy of Steel, was purged out of existence,  so much so that his very image is forbidden to be shown on TV in the US.

       Surprised? You shouldn't be. Way back in the day, when a Roman bigwig took a sudden fall from power and was summarily executed, the mob would roam the city streets, tearing down the statues of the disgraced one and grounding his likeness into dust. His every portrait painted on temple walls would be completely covered over or eradicated, as if the individual had never existed.

       The Russian Communists took Party history a step further. Following a “show trail” of the condemned “enemy of the state,” after he was shot and the body cremated, his presence would be airbrushed out of all future pictures and posters and his name erased from all records, beginning with the official encyclopedia.

        “That can't happen here,” they used to say. Well, it did.

        But before there was SUPERBOY, there was SUPERMAN.

        "We had a great character," Siegel remembers, "and were determined it would be published." 

        One summer night in 1934, Siegel came up with almost all of the Superman legend as we know it, wrote weeks of comic strips by morning, and had Shuster drawing it all the next day - including the creation of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman's distinctive red, yellow, and blue costume.

        "I suggested to Joe he put an 'S' in a triangle," Siegel says.  Shuster added the cape to help give the effect of motion to Superman.  Together they chose primary colors for his costume because they were, Shuster recounts, "the brightest colors we could think of."

      Over the next three years, their Superman strip was turned down by every comic syndicate editor in the country until Sheldon Mayer at the McClure syndicate "went nuts!  It was the thing we were all looking for!" 

      Mayer couldn't convince his boss, M.C. Gaines, to publish it - but when DC Comics publisher Harry Donenfeld called Gaines looking for material for his new title, Action Comics, Gaines sent him Superman.

         Donenfeld showed it to his editor, Vince Sullivan, who bought it, saying, "it looks good... it's different... and there's a lot of action!  This is what kids want!"

      In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signed away all rights to Superman to National Periodicals (later DC) for a purported $130. Because Siegel and Shuster had created the character independently, their work did not qualify as work-for-hire. That same year, Siegel submitted his SUPERBOY to DC's Detective Comics (Which would soon star BATMAN) and got turned down. Then in December of 1940, Siegel authored a complete Superboy story, which set forth the basics of the character – his family life, his small town upbringing, and concealing his powers and true self while using his powers to help others.    Again DC rejected it. With letters in February and July of 1941 and August of 1942, Siegel continued to pitch SUPERBOY to DC without success.  

     Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 had SUPERMAN fighting WW II. So was Siegel, who enlisted in 1943.  The first appearance of SUPERBOY in 1944, credited to Siegel, who was serving in the Pacific Theater, began with… 

       “Thousands of followers of the great SUPERMAN have asked the answers to these questions: ‘What is the story of SUPERMAN's origin?'—And 'What was SUPERMAN before he grew to man's estate—was he just an ordinary boy or was he a ‘SUPERBOY'?

       “In this story you will find the answers to those questions---and, we believe, you will look forward to the further adventures of the youth who was destined to become the idol of millions as the great SUPERMAN! For these stories will deal with SUPERBOY!”

      And ended with…”Clark Kent secretly fashions a colorful red and blue costume and thus is born…SUPERBOY!”

      When Siegel returned after the war, he protested, but wound up writing many SUPERBOY stories throughout the years.

      “SUPERBOY, the Adventures of Superman when he was a boy” featured a young hero who was not a protégé or a sidekick and learned to use his powers with little adult guidance. (An influence on Spider-Man?) The only major characters to appear in the early years were Jonathan and Martha (or "Ma and Pa") Kent. The 8th issue of Superboy saw the first adventure of "Superbaby," a character which extended the "Junior Superman" concept to that of a super-powered toddler. The 10th issue of Superboy featured the first appearance of Lana Lang, a character that would become a romantic foil for both Superboy and for the grown-up Superman. The stories also had a comfortable "retro" feel to them, set in a nostalgic never-land writers recalled from their own childhood years.

     With SUPERMAN raking in heretofore unimaginable grosses, in 1947, Siegel and Schuster sued to get their rights back, but lost, and then appealed.

      In 1948, the New York State Supreme Court limited their settlement to $60,000 each, at the time a large amount for someone, but very small compared to the multi-millions in profits their employer was generating annually. After the bitter legal wrangling, Joe Shuster left the comics business.

       But the judge made a Solomon-like “split the baby in half” ruling, giving Siegel and Shuster the rights to Superboy on the grounds that the Boy of Steel was a separate character. Half a superhero being better than none, this put Siegel and Shuster in an almost parental quandary: as long as their creation remained a boy, it was theirs. But once it became a man, it wasn't. The duo reportedly sold Superboy back to DC for $100,000, but DC removed the creators' credits from their characters.

     For years afterward, Superboy was the main star of Adventure Comics. In addition, in 1949, he got his own comic. Both series continued through the superhero lean years of the 1950s, and well into their '60s revival and was used to introduce such concepts as Krypto the Superdog and Bizarro, so those story elements would seem to have already been in place when encountered by the adult Superman. 

     When Superman appeared in a Broadway musical “It's a Bird,” Shuster raved about the star-studded premiere but when ask what he thought of the show, Shuster replied, "Oh, I couldn't afford to go..."

     Time passed, and in 1966 Siegel again tried to regain the rights to Superman -- and again failed. By the mid-70s, Siegel and Shuster reportedly became destitute.

      In 1975,  Siegel issued a press release vehemently attacking DC and Jack Liebowitz, the DC employee to whom the two teenagers brought their Superman, and outlining the pair's mistreatment at their hands, and placing a "curse" on the upcoming "Superman" film.  Bad PR was the last thing Warner/DC wanted and not only restored the creators' credits for Superman but put the two on a pension of $35,000 a year.

     Thus was created the mythic status of their story in the then-fledgling American comics community—of two teenagers who created one of the most powerful fictional icons in the world, except that they sold the rights to the evil corporation in order to see publication. Cue montage of years of destitution and depression. This myth, inscribed deeply in the American comics community (not to mention being an example in every law school class on copyright law), influenced Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. It is equally seen in Rich Veitch's neglected classic The Maximortal.

    SUPERMAN, The Movie, restored the Man of Steel to superstar status, but in the new Hollywood mythos, SUPERBOY never existed. Smallville and Lana Lang, but no Boy of Steel.

     It would be the super-shape of things to come.

     A Superboy story called "The Legion of Super-Heroes" in a 1958 issue of Adventure Comics featured three super-powered teenagers from the 30th century who offered Superboy membership in their super-hero club, the Legion of Super-Heroes. Although this was intended as nothing more than a one-shot tale, the characters went on to spin off into their own series in Adventure Comics beginning in 1962. In the 1970s, the Superboy comic began regularly featuring the Legion until the title was officially renamed first Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and finally Legion of Super-Heroes in 1980, ousting Superboy from the comic altogether. It was the most successful spin-off of the Superman titles and has endured throughout various incarnations over the years.

A new series called New Adventures of Superboy ran from 1980 to 1984, and a four-issue miniseries called Superman: The Secret Years (featuring Superboy in his junior year of college, and how he changed his name to Superman) was published in 1985.

       In 1986, DC's 50^th anniversary, John Byrne was hired to thoroughly revamp the Superman lineup. Byrne considered Superboy “dead weight,” that the stories lacked tension and nothing surprising could ever happen because the reader knew that Superboy was going to grow up to become Superman.

      "I have taken my standard 'Back to the Basics' approach," John Byrne said about his work on Superman. "It's basically Siegel and Shuster's Superman meets the Fleischer (1940s' cartoons) Superman in 1986."

     Many key elements of the Superman legend were discarded. Superman would be the only Kryptonian who survived the destruction of Krypton, for example, and he will never have had a career as Superboy or a dog named Krypto. 

       "I'm trying to structure this in such a way," Byrne continued, "…We're not tossing everything out…But we are trying to structure the series in such a way that we can ignore those characters we want to ignore."

         At first Superman would not know that he is an alien being. 

       "That kind of bothers him a bit," Byrne said: "he doesn't know where he's from. Ma and Pa Kent found him in the rocket.  They think maybe he's from Russia.  They don't want to think the American space agency put a baby in a rocket and shot it into space.  Pa Kent thinks maybe he's a Martian but Ma won't buy that."

        He does not have any super-powers when he arrives on Earth from Krypton.                      

       "He's about eight years old when he first discovers he's invulnerable, he's about 13 when the 'X-ray vision' first turns up, and he's about 18 the first time he flies.  It's a natural sort of progression," said Byrne.

         Superman derives his powers entirely from the energy of the Earth's sun, which his body stores like a solar battery.  As he grows older, his body stores more energy, and thus he becomes more powerful.

         Byrne believed that Superman's super-powers basically consist of being able to do anything a normal human being can do, but to do it better. Hence he is stronger that a normal Earthman, for example, and he can see farther.  He still can see through solid objects, but although he calls this power "X-ray vision" for convenience's sake, he does not actually project X-rays from his eyes.  Instead he uses a combination of his telescopic and microscopic visions to "see through the atomic structure" of an object and focus past it, "as a camera focuses beyond the dust on a lens."

        Nonetheless, Superman's powers are still virtually the same, although they will no longer be at the seemingly near-infinite level they have been in past stories. However, Superman will no longer be able to exist indefinitely without oxygen.  If he travels outside the atmosphere, he must first fill his lungs up with air. (So how did he survive for five years in space in SUPERMAN RETURNS?) His costume is no longer indestructible in and of itself; Superman's body will instead generate a force field that renders any material with which he is in close physical contact, such as his costume, virtually indestructible as long as it is within the field.

        Byrne had considered not giving Superman the power of heat vision, but changed his mind, saying, "Well, it's a manifestation of all the solar radiation that he's absorbed, and I gave it a different visual."  His heat vision will now manifest itself as a red glow within his eyes.

            In Byrne's new version of Superman's past, Clark begins secretly using his powers to prevent disasters after his powers reach a certain level, but he does not have a public career as Superboy.  As seen in the first issue of Man of Steel, Clark does not begin a public career as a superhero until he has become an adult and is mobbed by people after he is seen using his powers to rescue a "space-plane" on which, by the way, Lois Lane is a passenger. (Originally, the "space plane" was a space shuttle, but that was changed after the recent Challenger space shuttle disaster.) Clark returns home to his parents, and they help him to design his costumed identity of Superman.  As Superman he can perform super-powered feats, and escape unrecognized to his everyday identity of Clark Kent, who now begins wearing glasses to keep from being recognized as the now famous Superhero.

          Although Byrne did not directly say so, Pa Kent comes up with the idea for the costumed identity of Superman because he remembers the many costumed superheroes of the 1940s.  In the DC continuity that has emerged as a result of Crisis on Infinite Earths, all of DC's superheroes live on the same Earth and there is no longer any record of there being a Superman in the 1940s.  Hence, in this new DC history, Superman was not the first superhero.  He is no longer the source of inspiration - his career now begins long after those of the heroes of the Justice Society of America and their contemporaries in the 1930 and 1940s.

           "What I've done is to reverse the flow," said Byrne, "so instead of starting with Superman, we have built to Superman." 

          Hence the appearance of the 1940s superheroes now precedes the appearance of Superman himself.

        Byrne claims that his depiction of Clark Kent was inspired by George Reeves' Clark Kent on the 1950s television series.  "I loved the way he played Clark Kent," Byrne said, "He was grittier, tougher.  He wasn't the mild-mannered reporter.  He had some guts to him, and that's the way I'm trying to play Clark.

        "There won't be as much difference" between the personalities of Superman and Clark anymore.  "Clark's not as timid anymore."

          Clark's importance to Superman is a major reason why Superman has no Fortress of Solitude in the new continuity.  Byrne says, "Superman doesn't collect souvenirs," as he did in the previous continuities and stored them in the Fortress.  The Fortress and what was in it "all go by the board; it's all nonessential.

         "I'm throwing in a little twist of the knife in every issue," said Byrne, "so if you think you know" the Superman mythos, "there's going to be something in there to let you know that you don't.   

         “I try to imagine Superboy being published today, in this Internet Age. And all I can see is page upon page of posts from people demanding that Clark graduate from high school, go to college, and of course---become Superman! Precisely the same thing, in fact, we have seen happen to Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl (Twice!) and most of the other “kid” characters. Requiring, of course, that we get a new Robin…and a new Wonder Girl, etc, etc.---none of which would have been necessary if people—fans and pros alike—remembered the lesson of Superboy.”

         Times change and so do markets. One stays in tune or the dance is over. But could this really be the end of Superboy? Was this Truth, Justice and the American Way?

         Not so fast.

        That didn't stop Superman movie producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind from launching a Superboy TV series on October 8, 1988, two years after the character was rubbed out of existence; nor, despite many cast changes, did it stop that show from lasting four seasons for a total of 100 episodes. To capitalize on the “original Superboy” they had liquidated, from 1989 to 1991, D.C Comics published a new comic series based of the TV series The Adventures of Superboy which concluded in a 'One-Shot Special', which wrapped up all the adventures and stories from the previous issues, as having been day dream fantasies from the 'post-crisis' (Earth-1) young Clark Kent. None of them had actually taken place, only in his imagination. 

      One does need an imagination and a scorecard to follow all this. Superman's geneology grew from a simple family tree in a dense rain forest and then in came the lumberjacks who selectively cut it to pieces.

      There is still a Superboy in DC Comics, but the current one isn't a younger version of Superman — in fact, other than his wearing a knock-off of Superman's costume, his relation to the Man of Steel is unclear. Nowadays, the adventures of Superman when he was a boy are pretty similar to those of most boys — ball games, hikes through the woods, and maybe the occasional hot date — because the young Clark Kent, according to the current mythos, was just a regular kid.

     In 1993, DC introduced a new, modernized Superboy, a teenaged clone of Superman, who was featured in an eponymous series from 1994 until 2002.

     Due to DC Comics' complex “Multiverse”, several other Superboys have appeared, most notable of which is the ruthless psychopath Superboy-Prime.

     Shuster died in 1992; Siegel passed away four years later. But their heirs were not about to let go of their legacy. Warner/DC had killed Superboy and then made money off his TV ghost. But just when the multi-billion dollar media giant thought they had a way to bury the Boy of Steel forever…

*****

WHO KILLED THE HEARTBREAK KID?, a mystery novel by Mel Waldman, Ph.D, was published by iUniverse in February 2006.  It can be purchased at http://www.iUniverse.com/bookstore/ or http://www.bn.com and at http://www.amazon.com and other online bookstores or through local bookstores.

*****

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