Superman Read online

  With the real world offering no solace, he created one built around fantasies. Mornings, he stood in the schoolyard until his classmates disappeared indoors, then he headed to the public library. Pulling his favorites from the tall stacks of books, he was transported into the dime-novel worlds of master detective Nick Carter, collegiate crime buster Frank Merriwell, and adventurers closer to his age and circumstance like the Rover Boys. Fred Rover and his cousins Jack, Andy, and Randy may have been in military school, but that never kept them from exploring wrecked submarines or prospecting for pirates’ gold. On weekends, Jerry went to matinees at the motion picture theater. Western megastar Tom Mix made 336 films and Jerry saw all that his allowance would allow. He also was an insatiable consumer of movies starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., as Zorro, Robin Hood, and the thief of Baghdad. And watching was not enough. Convinced he could replicate Mix’s and Fairbanks’s derring-do, Jerry darted in and out of traffic on the narrow roads of his Glenville neighborhood. “Those furious humans driving the cars, who yammered and glared insanely at me,” he said, “were mere mortals. But I … I was a leaping, twirling, gleeful phenomenon!” Back at home, with his hip healed after one of those glaring drivers sideswiped him, he climbed onto the roof of the garage holding an umbrella. “I opened the umbrella and leapt. Look out world, here I come!… I did this over and over again. Unexpectedly, the umbrella suddenly turned inside-out as I descended. I banged a knee, when I hit the ground. Just as I had abandoned berserkly dodging in and out between moving automobiles, I gave up jumping off the top of my garage.”

  As freeing as it felt to mimic his idols, better still was concocting narratives starring Jerry Siegel—not the shunned, tongue-tied adolescent the kids in the schoolyard saw, but the real Jerry, fearless and stalwart. The setting, too, was of his own making, leaving behind Glenville’s twenty-five Orthodox shuls and row after row of faded up-and-down duplexes. Crawling into bed at night with pencil and paper, he imagined faraway galaxies full of mad scientists and defiant champions. He loved parody, too, inventing characters like Goober the Mighty, a broken-down knockoff of Tarzan. He went on daydreaming in the classroom, and his writing found its way into the high school newspaper, the Glenville Torch, and onto the pages of his own Cosmic Stories, America’s first science fiction magazine produced by and for fans.

  Jerry wasn’t popular, he wasn’t strong, but one thing he knew: He was inventive. Pointing to an empty Coke bottle, he told his cousin, “I could make up a story about that.” He even tried an autobiographical novel but flushed it down the toilet after a friend suggested that perhaps not all his experiences were worthy of the label “ecstasy.” No theme stuck for long, he confessed in a later-life autobiography. And he still couldn’t decide whether good guys or bad made better protagonists.

  Clarity came on the wings of his own tragedy. It happened on an overcast evening in June 1932, just after eight o’clock, in a downtrodden strip of Cleveland’s black ghetto known as Cedar-Central. Michel Siegel was ready to head home to his family when three men whom police would describe as “colored” entered his secondhand clothing store, one of the few Jewish businesses left in a neighborhood populated by barber shops, billiard parlors, and greasy spoons. One man asked to see a suit, then walked out with it without paying; another blocked the owner’s path. Michel, a slight man whose heart muscle was weaker than even he knew, fell to the floor. A month shy of his sixtieth birthday, he stopped breathing before medics could get him to the hospital. His wife, Sarah, was a widow now, on her own with three girls, three boys, and next to no savings. Jerry, her youngest, took the loss of his father the hardest. The boy who had been bullied was bereft. Sitting on his dad’s knee and being rocked up and down had been one of Jerry’s few safe havens. “Bliss,” he called it later. “Supreme rapture.” Now his father was gone.

  The world of make-believe seemed more alluring than ever to Jerry, who was not quite eighteen. What had been a series of disparate characters with no focus or purpose now merged into a single figure who became a preoccupation. He called him “The Super-Man.” Jerry’s first story, written shortly after his father’s death, envisioned the figure as endowed with exceptional strength, telescopic vision, the capacity to read minds, and a resolve to rule the universe. Over the months that followed, this character would drop “the” and the hyphen, along with his evil inclinations, becoming simply Superman—a bulletproof avenger who beat back bullies, won the hearts of girls, and used his superpowers to help those most in need. And who, in the only artwork that survives from that first imagining, soars to the rescue of a middle-aged man being held up by a robber.

  · · ·

  SUPERMAN MAY HAVE BEEN A product of the 1930s and Jerry Siegel’s teenage imagination, but his DNA traces back twenty-five hundred years to the age of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. The evidence is there in the Book of Judges and the parable of its last and most exalted jurist, Samson. With the Israelites desperate to free themselves from forty years of enslavement by the Philistines, God offered up a strongman who killed a lion with his bare hands and then, using nothing more than the jawbone of an ass, slew a thousand enemy soldiers. The Philistines managed to capture this extraordinary being, gouging out his eyes and bringing him to their shrine in shackles to dance before them, humiliated. But in an act of self-sacrifice and backbone that would set a yardstick for every super-being who came after, Samson brought the enemy’s temple crashing down around them as he proclaimed, “Let me die with the Philistines!”

  Masterful as the Hebrews were at fashioning powerful and noble warriors, no one outdid the Hellenists. The very word “hero” comes from the Greek heros, meaning “protector” or “defender.” The Greek pantheon of demigods began with Perseus, famous for slaying monsters from the sea and the land. There was Jason, who led the heroic Argonauts on a quest for the golden fleece; Euphemus, who could walk on water; Caeneus, who was invulnerable to swords, spears, or any weapon known in his day; and Hermes, speediest and cagiest of the gods. The ultimate exemplar of the Greek ideal of heroism was Herakles, the defender against evil and tamer of beasts, whom the Romans would adopt and rebrand as Hercules. Like Superman, Herakles signaled his special powers in infancy, grabbing by their necks a pair of deadly serpents that had crawled into his cradle and squeezing the life from them. And like Superman, Herakles devoted his days to rescuing ladies in distress, battling a shifting cast of villains, and searing a place in the public imagination as an embodiment of virtue.

  Each era that followed produced its own mythic figures that reflected its peculiar dreams and dreads. In 1752, Voltaire anticipated the genre of science fiction and poked fun at contemporary dogmas in his tale of Micromegas, a 120,000-foot-tall super-genius who traveled here from a far-distant planet. Micromegas rendered his verdict on Earth: It’s not nearly as special as its inhabitants think. Half a century on, nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley gave us Victor Frankenstein, who tapped his collection of dead body parts to build an eight-foot monster with yellowing skin. More even than Voltaire, Shelley reflected the tremendous leap from Hebrew and Greek legends built on superstition to a more modern reliance on science as the wellspring for fantastic literature. Likewise, her monster foreshadowed Jerry Siegel’s early vacillation between Super-Man and Superman. Should his standard-bearer be a contemptible villain, an unwavering hero, or something more ambiguous like Dr. Frankenstein?

  History’s most infamously ambiguous blueprint for the hero was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which translates literally as “overman” and colloquially as “superman.” With God dead, Nietzsche argued, man would be tempted to look for salvation in an afterlife or from a society that was naively egalitarian. The real place to look, he said, was among mankind’s talented few—its Caesars and Napoleons—who were ready to rule decisively and efficiently. “What is the ape to man?” Nietzsche asked in 1883. “A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman.” Some interpreted Nietzsche’s answe
r as a Buddha-like call for humans to reach for an enlightened state; others saw a clearheaded if cold assessment of the unequal allocation of human talents. Adolf Hitler used Nietzsche’s argument to bolster not just his theory of a master race of Aryan supermen, but also his obsession with rooting out Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others he saw as subhuman. Whether Hitler appropriated Nietzsche’s message or perverted it, the lesson for all hero-framers who followed was clear: Be careful. Whatever your intent, madmen can fuse their nightmares onto your dreams. Fairly or not, history will hold you accountable.

  That prehistory was especially resonant in 1932, the year Michel Siegel died and The Super-Man was conceived. America’s flirtation with science fiction had, by then, mushroomed into a craze. The only medium that mattered was the written one, with AM radio still in its chaotic early era, FM a year away, and network television but a gleam in its designers’ eyes. Action and adventure were still essential, but better still was a story that drew on pseudoscience and a hero endowed with superpowers. Popeye the Sailor Man had both, which let him chase Bluto and Sea Hag all over the planet, popping open a can of spinach whenever he needed to recharge his muscles or fend off bullets or aliens. Buck Rogers’s oyster was outer space, where his swashbuckling was such a hit that he spawned an interplanetary imitator: Flash Gordon. Alley Oop started out in the Stone Age, in the kingdom of Moo, and ended up in a time-traveling machine. And when it came to brainwashing there were no rivals: Ask any teenager in the 1930s, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” and they answered as one: “The Shadow knows.”

  The Shadow, an avenger with the power to cloud men’s minds so they couldn’t see him, was born on the radio and would catch fire everywhere, from magazines, cartoon strips, and comic books to TV, film, and graphic novels. A more typical launching pad was the funny pages, where tens of millions of readers followed Popeye, Tarzan, and their chums every day in black-and-white, and on Sunday in full color. The adventure strip was taking off in 1932, which was just the right moment given what readers were seeing in the rest of the newspaper.

  Who wouldn’t want to escape his circumstances, if not his planet, with the world economy in free fall? One in four Americans had no job. The British had just tossed into jail the conscience of the world, Mahatma Gandhi. Millions of Soviets were starving to death. Almost as unsettling was the human-scale drama of a twenty-month-old toddler: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., son of America’s beloved aviator-inventor, was discovered missing from his crib the evening of March 1. The “crime of the century” riveted the nation, as a note from kidnappers told the Lindberghs to “have $50,000 redy” and assured them that “the child is in gut care.” Gangster Al Capone promised that if he was let out of jail he would crack the case, while President Herbert Hoover vowed to “move Heaven and Earth” to find the infant. It was truck driver William Allen who actually did, two months after the abduction. Stopping to relieve himself in a grove of trees five miles from the Lindbergh home, he discovered the remains of a baby. The skull was fractured. The left leg was gone, along with both hands, and the torso had been gnawed on by animals. But the overlapping toes of the right foot and a shirt stitched by his nursemaid identified the body as the Lindbergh boy.

  Escape indeed. Some kids chose dance marathons—known as “corn and callus carnivals”—to blot out the news and test whether they could keep fox-trotting or waltzing for twelve, twenty-four, or even thirty hours. An easier way to take flight during that decade of despair was through science fiction, and especially through a new trio of mythmakers. Each understood that while Herakles suited the needs of ancient Greece, and Frankenstein was monster enough for the 1800s, the twentieth century’s expanding horizons of technology, medicine, and cognition required a paladin who was more expansive, more imaginative, more today. Each saw his hero not as a gift from God but as a triumph of fantastic science. All three could claim to be Superman’s patron saint if not his progenitor.

  First on the scene was Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. His protagonist, John Carter of Mars, was actually from Earth, and more precisely Virginia. Carter had served in the Confederate Army and then struck gold in Arizona, but before he could spend it he was killed by Apaches. Instead of in heaven, however, he ended up on the red planet, or rather on its fantastic double that Burroughs dubbed Barsoom, where he stayed forever young and strong enough to defend his new planet from beastly villains. Burroughs introduced Carter to the world in the 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, which foreshadowed Superman in ways substantial and small. John Carter traveled in space and was invulnerable. His strength on Mars came from the planet’s having less gravity than Earth, the flip side of what would happen to Superman when he reached Earth from Krypton. And the name Krypton came from the same line of the periodic table of the elements from which Burroughs plucked the name Helium, one of the empires on Barsoom.

  In 1930, two years after Burroughs came out with his sixth Mars-Barsoom novel, Philip Wylie published a book called Gladiator with a hero named Hugo Danner. Danner’s father, biology professor Abednego Danner, concocted a serum so effective in turning tame animals into ogres that he could not resist trying it on humans. The easiest subject at hand was his pregnant wife. It worked, and she delivered a son with the strength of Samson, the speed of Hermes, and skin, like Caeneus’s, that was impervious to injury—a package similar to the one Siegel would unwrap eight years later. Hugo’s powers were hinted at in the crib, as Superman’s would be; both were cautioned by their fathers to use their gifts judiciously; and the two authors settled on the same superlative to describe their creations: “superhuman” for Wylie, “superman” for Siegel.

  The last in the triumvirate of early-twentieth-century science fiction exemplars was Clark Savage, Jr., known to the world as “Doc.” His first tale hit the newsstands in February 1933, just as the Depression was reaching its nadir, President Franklin Roosevelt was about to declare a holiday that would close every bank in America, and Jerry Siegel was putting the finishing touches on a superhero he would nickname the Man of Steel. It helped to have as a model Doc Savage, a.k.a. the Man of Bronze. Savage’s name rightfully suggested brute strength, but he also was endowed with the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes, the tree-swinging grace of Tarzan, the scientific-sleuthing acumen of Dick Tracy, and the morals of Abraham Lincoln. Doc crafted a hero’s code of conduct that would offer a prototype for Superman and his crime-fighting cohorts: Do not kill your enemy if you can help it. Do not get entangled with women. Do find a remote getaway—he and Superman both picked the Arctic, and both called their getaways the Fortress of Solitude—where you can take a break from saving the world.

  On the eve of his birth, then, Superman’s world was awash in heroes. So keen was the ferment and the determination to be noticed that the word the Greeks had given us no longer was enough. Now authors and publishers were beating the drums for their champions by inflating their adjectives—thrilling, marvelous, amazing, and soon, the most singular and separating descriptive of them all: super, short for superlative. This new breed of hero started out with the models of strength and courage from the past, then added twists—interplanetary adventure, space-age gadgets, time travel—to spark the imaginations of readers reared in a world of automobiles, airplanes, and skyscrapers. Most had followings measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. None—not the buff Doc Savage or the brooding Hugo Danner, the soaring John Carter or the elusive Shadow—had whatever alchemy was needed to separate them from the crowd. As saturated as the market seemed, America was readier than it knew for a hero sized to the age of the metropolis.

  · · ·

  JEROME THE LONER GOT IT. He may not have been much of a student at Glenville High, where it took him five years to graduate, but Jerry Siegel was a scholar of science fiction and pop culture. He saw the lightning in the air and was determined to bottle it. Being in Cleveland put him far enough away from Oz that the only place to realize his dreams was in his imagination and his writings. Being a
loner, with few friends and no girlfriend, let him be single-minded in those pursuits. Being a kid gave him just the right vantage point.

  As early as junior high he was poring over the pulps, the ten-cent magazines that were the successors to Britain’s aptly titled penny dreadfuls and forerunners to the comic book. Pulps took their name from the coarse paper they were printed on, and they took stories from just about anyone. A few were long-lived gems like The Maltese Falcon and The Shadow, which ran the length of a novel and had heroic narratives; more were trashy tales of sex and mayhem. The earliest pulps had appeared in the 1890s, and by the 1920s some were selling a million copies an issue to working stiffs anxious to escape their vanilla lives or kids with an extra dime and an appetite for wars and westerns. Jerry brought his everywhere, including study hall, which earned him a visit to the principal and a warning to “never, never, never again transgress in this unspeakable manner … or else.” But the message he was getting from trade magazines was more persuasive, with announcements that authors nearly as young as he were being published in the pulps, while Reader’s Digest trumpeted the big money that comic strip writers were making.

  High school was the ideal testing ground for Jerry’s fevered imagination. The Torch dubbed him the “master of deduction” and ran stories by him that aped his favorite writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He sent handwritten features and letters to the Sunday Buffalo Times and at least one was published, a piece titled “Monsters of the Moon.” He corresponded with other wannabe writers. Over time he got bolder, launching The Fantastic Fiction Publishing Company, naming himself president, and putting out a typewritten journal called Cosmic Stories. He had but one writer, himself, although in what would become a pattern he took on a pen name, Charles McEvoy. Jerry’s explanation for this: “Jerome Siegel did not seem very literary to me.” A more likely explanation: A boy who saw himself as a pariah wanted to shield himself from brickbats, and perhaps from anti-Semitism.