Kistler's History of Superman - Intro

This essay is part of my Superman Files and covers Superman's early drafts and origins.

He has been nicknamed the Man of Steel, the Last Son of Krypton, the Metropolis Marvel, the Man of Tomorrow and even "Big Blue" to his pals.It doesn't matter if you've never touched a comic book or seen the cartoons or movies or TV shows. You know the name Clark Kent because he has become an American icon. Whether you see him as a silly hero in a circus outfit or as a metaphor for an angel who comes from the sky to save us all, you can't deny the impact and effect he's had on so many people.

This is the story of Superman, both within and behind the comics.

IN THE BEGINNING: FROM VILLAIN TO HERO

During the 1930s, the United States of America had this little thing we call “The Depression.” Times were extremely tough for folks all around during this period. This was a time when more than a quarter million teenagers became drifters, taking up odd jobs in other states to send back money to the same parents who couldn't afford to house them. Think about that.

It was in this era that two boys from Cleveland, Ohio named Jerome "Jerry" Siegel and Joe Shuster spent their teenage years. A time where corruption was all around and odds seemed to be against anyone trying to make a decent living wage.

As if the times weren't hard enough, the Siegel family also suffered a deep personal loss. On Thursay, June 2, 1932, Jerry's father Mitchell Siegel was minding his clothing shop when it was assaulted by robbers. The robbery attempt ended in Mitchell's death. Although a shot was fired, it was said that Mitchell Siegel died of a heart attack brought on by the event and not by a bullet.

With this event and the harsh state of the world at the time, is it any wonder then that Jerry and his best friend Joe would decide to create an escapist hero wrapped up in bright primary colors who was strong, bulletproof and invulnerable to ... well, eventually, just about everything?

Siegel and Shuster loved science fiction.Together, they published a fanzine called Science Fiction, with Joe as art director and Jerry as editor. The January 1933 issue of Science Fiction gave readers a story by the two friends called “The Reign of the Super-Man.” In it, the title character Bill Dunn was a bald homeless man who became evil after he was granted powers in an experiment by a mad scientist named Dr. Smalley.

Later that year, the hero Doc Savage (nicknamed "the Man of Bronze") was introduced in the pulp magazines that were popular at the time. Doc Savage's fan base was rivaled only by that of another pulp hero, the Shadow.After hearing about these heroes and reading a Detective Dan comic strip, Jerry Siegel said "it occurred to me that a Superman who was a hero might make a great comic book character." He and Shuster did a new Superman comic strip with this premise. They submitted it to the publisher of Detective Dan, who immediately rejected it. Depressed, Shuster destroyed all the original artwork he drew for the story,saving only the cover.

I'm not gonna lie. The fanboy in me wants to weep as I read over that last sentence above. But then I remember that I'm a guy and that, despite enlightened times, it's still kinda weird for a guy to cry over comics, so we'll move on.

The two kids were not to be defeated. Superman just needed some improvement, surely. And so, the boys went back to the drawing board. In the summer of 1934, it is said that a young Jerry Siegel spent a whole night writing up the basics behind what we now know as the classic Superman origin story.

The story depicted an alien scientist named Jor-L who discovered that his planet Krypton would soon explode, though no one would heed his warnings. Jor-L had sent his only son Kal-L to Earth in an experimental rocket so that he would survive the planet's destruction. Kal was found and raised by an elderly couple, the Kents. Because of his alien heritage, Kal-L could leap several city blocks at once, had bullet-proof skin and incredible strength. This ability was inspired by the hero Jon Carter of Mars, a popular science fiction adventurer. Said Siegel, "Carter was able to leap great distances because the planet Mars was smaller that the planet Earth; and he had great strength. I visualized the planet Krypton as a huge planet, much larger than Earth."

Taking the name Clark Kent, the adult Kal-L walked as a normal man among us, ready to help ordinary people when they needed it. When he wasn't charging into danger, he worked as a newspaper reporter at the Cleveland News and his co-worker/romantic interest was an aggressive woman named Lois Lane.

By the next morning, Siegel had written a few weeks worth of newspaper-style comic strips, which Shuster started drawing as soon as he looked them over. The two friends didn't realize they were building a saga that would outlive them both.

DISGUISING A HERO

Since Superman was to be an extraordinary being, it was important that he look the part. By this time, the pulps were becoming popular with characters who had distinctive looks. The Shadow and The Spider were two vigilantes in flowing cloaks and large-brimmed hats. Doc Savage and Flash Gordon both wore outfits that showed off their muscles. The comic strip hero called the Phantom wore a bodysuit that told you exactly how well built he was (and, in fact, he was the first heroic character to wear a skintight outfit).

It was decided that Superman would follow suit. Since his primary abilities were his strength and resistance to injury, Superman was given a costume designed to reflect what a circus strongmen would wear: brightly colored tights with trunks on the outside. A cape was added to give a sense of dynamic movement, particularly during scenes in which he would be leaping across great distances.

Siegel and Shuster decided against the mask since the Superman identity was really the truth of who the character was and "Clark Kent" was a disguise, the super-human hiding among us. To emphasize this, it would be Clark Kent who would disguise himself, not Superman.

Now, for years we’ve all heard the jokes about “how stupid must people be to not recognize it’s the same guy just without glasses?” Well, we have to remember when Superman showed up there were no security cameras. It was the1930s. Celebrities were photographed, yes, but only by professional photographers after stories. They weren’t photographed every moment they left the house or stepped out of a grocery store by anyone with a disposable camera or a cell phone so that TV shows could talk about them every night. There was no television yet!

Unless your photo was clearly taken and displayed in the main headlines, you were not seen by the public really. It’s been said Roosevelt would never have been president today because he would have been filmed and photographed in his wheelchair all the time. Sure, Clark's disguise wouldn't work today. But it was the 1930's. If Superman had existed and been photographed, it's doubtful such black and white newspaper photos would be all that clear on his features (especially considering how fast he moved at times), so people would have no reason to immediately stop and say "Hey, doesn't this slightly blurry character Superman look just like that guy with the glasses and hat that I passed once on the street and whom I never looked at closely because he doesn't do anything to stand out in my mind?"

In those early stories, few people ever actually saw Superman. The criminals who fought him saw him, of course, but he was not really a public figure. He often operated at night and avoided media attention for the most part. There weren't any press conferences and several people in the stories doubted he existed, so much so that one of the first issues of Action Comics involved a con-artist attempting to convince people that he was the Man of Steel instead, banking on the fact that there was no real Superman who would dispute his claim. Until Lois Lane came, who'd personally met the hero a couple of times, no one challenged the man's identity and they were ready to take him at his word after seeing him wear his make-shift costume.

See my point? It was a stretch that Lois couldn't tell, absolutely, but it wasn't such a far out idea that people in general wouldn't know that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Siegel said that the name "Superman" came directly from Nietzsche. "Krypton" is the name of an element, but interestingly enough it is also resembles the Greek word kruptos which means "hidden" and is certainly in line with our character using a secret identity and coming from a mysterious world.

There have been different claims as to where the name "Clark Kent" came from. Some have claimed that this was a reference to his predecessors, the heroes Clark "Doc" Savage and Kent "The Shadow" Allard (more commonly known by his "Lamont Cranston" alias). But DC Comics Editor Julie Schwartz asked Jerry Siegel directly and got quite a different answer. Siegel explained, "I named Clark after the most romantic movie idol of the age, Clark Gable. My wife’s brother-in-law is Kent Taylor, a movie actor from back in the 40s."

It is interesting that Superman seems to be a reverse of Flash Gordon, in that Gordon was an Earthman who became a hero to an alien world. And like the popular the Lone Ranger, Superman was an orphan. Also, the character definitely consisted of obvious nods to Doc Savage. Doc Savage was known as "the man of bronze", whereas Superman would become "the man of steel." Savage was supposed to be the epitome of human achievement, being both brilliant and possessing a Herculean body. Likewise, Superman would display incredible superhuman abilities and great brain power thanks to his "super-brain" because the people of Krypton (as originally conceived) were supposed to be pinnacles of human perfection, evolved beyond us.

Many of you probably know that Superman has an arctic base (temporarily relocated from time to time) called the"Fortress of Solitude." Well, Doc Savage was known to have a secret lab in the arctic that was called, wait for it ... the Fortress of Solitude.

But back to how Superman got started. After writing up the origin, Siegel and Shuster went out to get their boy published. They were turned down by literally seventeen publishers. Sheldon Mayer, an editor at the McClure syndicate, absolutely loved the idea but couldn’t convince his boss to publish it. In the meantime, Shuster and Siegel created other characters that were published by DC Comics instead. More "realistic" characters such as the Federal Men and the supernatural investigator Dr. Occult. In these stories, they sneaked in a few of their Superman ideas just to test them out on readers. One story featured a character named Jor-L and another featured Dr. Occult wearing a red and blue outfit that to day's Superman fans would find very familiar. Sadly, Superman himself was still rejected time and time again.

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN ...

In April of 2007, the Siegel family found a photostat copy of a rough draft of the Superman comic strip that was not drawn by Joe Shuster but instead by a man named Russell Keaton. Along with the copy of this strip, there was also a copy of a letter sent to Keaton.

It seems that Shuster, becoming discouraged, decided to distance himself from the character in 1934 and so Siegel looked for a replacement. Eventually, he sent a letter to Keaton, who expressed some interest. In Siegel's follow-up letter, he outline what was, at the time, the origin story of Superman. Keaton then drew a strip based on the outline, which Siegel hoped could be sold to Bell Press Syndicate.

Now here's the interesting things, boys and girls. This early origin story of Superman, these early strips that Keaton drew, do not feature a tale of a baby who winds up the sole survivor of Krypton. Possibly after seeing that the story was rejected several times, he decided that the hero's alien origins made him unpalatable for publishers and figured it was time for a different idea.

In this alternate story, the baby that will grow up to become Superman is actually born on Earth in the far future. As this future version of Earth is in its death throes, a scientist (described as "the last man on Earth") sends his young son to 1935 via a time-ship. To make sure that his son knows where he came from and why he was sent away, the scientist leaves a message in the time-ship.

The boy is then discovered by Sam and Molly Kent, who wonder why a baby has been left in a strange metal case. They take him to an orphanage, but the baby quickly frightens the staff with his unnatural strength and agility (due to the fact that by his native time, mankind has evolved into a race of supermen). Not wishing to see the child condemned as a freak or treated poorly, the Kents decide to adopt him and name him Clark.

Because he speaks a language from the future, the Kents don't understand the boy and believe he must be from some exotic country. Likewise, they can't understand the strange note sent with him by his father. Nevertheless, they feel that this boy is important and it occurs to them that ordinary people could benefit from having a protector with such advanced physical traits. The Kents make a deliberate decision to raise their adopted son, their "Superman" as Molly call him, to believe in altruism and in using his abilities to help rather than hurt others.

Sadly, by the time Clark Kent grows up, he no longer understands the language himself and so he can't discover the truths of his origin or why he seems to be more physically advanced than any other human being around him. All he knows for sure is that, deep within, he knows that his home is gone.

People in the community figure out that Clark has strangely enhanced strength and speed (though it's not clear if they realize he operates on a superhuman level). As a result, mothers forbid their children from playing with young Clark and he finds himself seen as a freak. In his letter to Keaton, Siegel specifically states this is to make Clark sympathetic despite his incredible power, that he felt alienated from his peers (pardon the pun).

The truth of this alternate origin was broken by a man named Jeff Trexler and the photostat documentation can be found here. Interestingly, the idea of Superman being a man from the future rather than Krypton was also used in a popular Elseworlds story (the title of which I will not share in case you come across it in the future and wish to be surprised).

Of course, Bell Press Syndicate didn't buy this version of the story and later on Shuster and Siegel became partners again, returning to their idea of a powerful alien. But imagine if Siegel and Keaton had succeeded. Imagine if Keaton and Siegel had published the exploits of a very literal "Man of Tomorrow." How might the comic book industry and the super-hero genre have changed?

At the Baltimore Con in 2008, I posed this question to Geoff Johns, acclaimed writer of various stories starring the Flash, Superman, Green Lantern, and the Justice Society of America, as well as the crossover Infinite Crisis.

Me: "Recently, we found that one of Jerry Siegel's original ideas was to have Superman's origin be that he was from a dying Earth of the future rather than from the dead planet Krypton. How do you think that would have changed the character and do you think he would've still become timeless?"

Geoff Johns: "I don't know if he would. There's something about leaving a world that's completely destroyed. If you're from the future, I bet there'd be a lot of stories of him going back all the time. [Cliches like] erasing his own existence somehow."

Me: "Hooking up with his mom."

Geoff Johns: "Exactly, [Superman would become] his own great-great-great-great-grandfather."

Me: "Eww."

I agree with Geoff JOhns on this point. By making Superman an alien, by giving him an origin more akin to Moses and giving him a heritage that is wholly alien, completely an immigrant from the stars, I think you make him more universal. As just a guy from the future, you might eventually wonder is he an American or a Scotsman or a Frenchman or German or whatever.

What's more, you may think to yourself that we don't need to learn lessons form the fate of his planet because just by being here, in the past, his presence no doubt drastically changes the course of human history (especially when you consider how many people and heroes he inspires). But by giving him a dead world that can never be brought back, he becomes more tragic. There is no way to change what happened to Krypton. Like us, he is forced to deal with the past and use it to help him move forward into the future. Like us, he deals with consequences rather than preventing tragedies from happening in the first place.

Just my thoughts.

Okay, we've talked enough about how it started in the pre-publishing stage. Let's move on to when Superman finally made his debut to the world!

Continued in History of Superman Part 1.