IT WAS HOW AMERICANS SPENT their evenings in the era before TV—chairs and sofas pulled around the two-foot-high Philco radio console, the brown Bakelite dial carefully tuned to Fibber McGee and Molly, Ellery Queen, Amos ’n’ Andy, or, on sixteen history-making nights in June and July of 1946, Adventures of Superman. Listeners came ready to leap out of their corn-fed lives and into their superhero’s fantastic one—his slugfests with atom men and mind games with leopard women—which was what had made the Man of Steel such a smash when he debuted on the airwaves two years before the war. What they heard instead during that first summer of peace was a tale of real-life, home-grown fiends who masked their ashen faces with white sheets, twisted their followers’ minds with Nazi-like schemes of racial cleansing, and defied Superman or anyone else to try and stop them.
The series was called “Clan of the Fiery Cross” and it was not an easy story to tell. Not then, when professional baseball, public bathrooms, and even the Army and Navy still were divided into white and colored realms. It would be another year before ex–Negro Leaguer Jackie Robinson toppled the color bar when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, and another eight before the Supreme Court declared that racially separate schools could never be equal. Jews, Asians, and Roman Catholics still saw signs saying they need not apply. The Ku Klux Klan wasn’t as powerful as it once had been, but it didn’t have to be. It already had planted doubts about anyone who looked or prayed differently; those who didn’t heed its warnings could always be reminded with a flaming cross or lynching noose.
Robert Maxwell didn’t care. He detested the Klan and had been given the keys to the Superman radio kingdom by Jack and Harry. The wordsmith turned pitchman turned radio producer knew he had to get to the kids before the haters did. He hired one of America’s most trusted education experts to tell him how. They gathered all the intelligence they could on the Klan’s passwords and rituals, its ways of corrupting politicians and its means of wrapping itself in the flag. They consulted psychologists, psychiatrists, and propaganda specialists. They tested their approach with five weeks of broadcasts railing against a fictitious organization of anti-Semitic “hate mongers.” Now was the time to ratchet up the moralizing and zero in on a real-life hate group. They even had a name for their bold enterprise: “Operation Tolerance.” Their secret weapon—the surest way to win over the children and take down the xenophobes—was to sic on them, at the speed of a radio wave, America’s most trusted and ferocious do-gooder.
“Clan of the Fiery Cross” ran for sixteen episodes of fifteen minutes each, built around a straightforward storyline. Tommy Lee, who was Chinese, rose to become the star pitcher on his youth baseball team, beating out a hot-headed white hurler named Chuck Riggs. Riggs took his beef to his Uncle Mac, who was secretly the grand scorpion of the Clan. The white-hooded Clansmen terrorized first Tommy and his family, then Jimmy Olsen and Perry White, whose newspaper had taken up Tommy’s cause. Superman stepped in just as Mac and his crew were about to finish off Olsen and White.
Every chapter ended with a cliff hanger and most featured dueling sermons from the grand scorpion and Clark Kent. “We’re a great society pledged to purify America—American for 100 percent Americans only. One race, one religion, one color,” Mac told his nephew. “Are we going to stand idly by and see these scum weasel their way into our neighborhoods and our jobs.… We’ll strike back, and the time is now, so get set for action. The fiery cross burns tonight.” Not so fast, Kent shot back: “Intolerance is a filthy weed, Jim. I told you before—the only way you can get rid of it is by hunting out the roots and pulling them out of the ground.”
Superman’s political evolution on the airwaves was the reverse of what had happened in the comics. There, Jerry and Joe molded their avatar into an agitator only to have editors in New York reshape him into something tamer and less likely to offend. Robert Maxwell sprang from the same Eastern European Jewish roots as the boys from Cleveland and he was at least as idealistic, but he was older and wilier, and in those years he had almost complete editorial freedom. His radio Superman carefully picked his enemies: Nazi saboteurs, jewel thieves, witch doctors, and others unlikely to generate sympathy or controversy. He built his audience of kids, stay-at-home moms, and dads who got back home from the office or factory in time to catch the early evening broadcast. It was a full six years into his show when he finally turned Superman loose on the Klan. Even then, Maxwell’s venom was directed not at the political corruption or corporate villainy that riled up Jerry and Joe, but rather at narrow-mindedness. The distinction was critical. The new focus might alienate listeners who identified with Mac Riggs, most notably the flesh-and-blood Klansmen who at that very moment were trying to recruit kids in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Superman’s Manhattan studio. That only helped the cause. Maxwell used the threatening letter he got two days after the series started to stir up publicity. More to the point for his bosses, “Clan of the Fiery Cross” posed little risk of upsetting the advertisers who paid the bills, especially since the focus was prejudice against Asians rather than the more culturally condoned bias against blacks.
Kellogg’s, the primary sponsor, was over the moon. Operation Tolerance had given Superman a bump in the ratings. With an audience of 4.5 million listeners it was the number one children’s program in America, leaving in its wake old standbys like Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan. The Superman shows also were a boon for Pep Whole Wheat Flakes, the breakfast cereal ballyhooed by the narrator at the beginning, middle, and end of each episode. “Tolerance is rampant in Battle Creek,” Maxwell gloated to Newsweek after the airing of the hate mongers series. “Every bit of pep in Rice Krispies is tolerant.” The magazine added its own hurrah: “Superman is the first children’s program to develop a social consciousness.”
The angle that gripped The New Republic was where Superman got his dope on the Klan. Newspaper reporter Stetson Kennedy had gone undercover in the hate group, the liberal journal reported, passing its “code words” to the Anti-Defamation League, which forwarded them to Maxwell. “As a result, Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of the KKK, had to spend part of his afternoon with his ear pressed against the radio. As soon as Superman used a KKK password, Green had to send out urgent orders for a new one. The Grand Dragon is said to have taken this reverse very badly.” Kennedy picked up the story in his own book, saying he gave Superman’s producers “the Klan’s current password, and promised to keep them informed every time it was changed.” The scheme worked so well that kids invented a game they called “Superman Against the Klan,” rattling off secret passwords “a mile a minute!” Thanks to his work and the Man of Steel’s, Kennedy concluded, “I knew that the millions of kids who had listened to Superman were not likely to grow up to be Klansmen.”
It was a seductive backstory, and much of it was true. Kennedy did provide invaluable intelligence on the Klan, although he embellished what he had done and blended his narrative with those of others. Did he pass secret passwords on to Superman? None that he cited were actually broadcast, and the only thing that came close to a code in all sixteen episodes of “Clan” is when “the robed figures solemnly placed their right hands over their hearts, crossing the first two fingers of their left hands,” and muttered an “anti-democratic oath.” Journalists and authors were so taken with Kennedy’s version that no one fact-checked it against the radio script. But compelling though they were, the media accounts missed the point. The wizard hiding behind the studio curtain was not Stetson Kennedy, it was Robert Maxwell.
Siegel and Shuster’s comic books and strips already had made Superman a hero on every playground across America; Maxwell’s broadcasts made him one in boardrooms, too. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Veterans Committee awarded him special citations for leading the battle against bigots. The Mutual Broadcasting System said it was “prideful” to be Superman’s station. Sharing that glow were the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Newspaper Guild, and the Calvin Newspaper Service, most of whose readers were black. (Apparently none of his progressive boosters minded that a dining-car porter speaking dialect was about the only black face in Superman stories, or that the most prominent mention of Asians was the reminder to wartime readers to “slap a Jap.”) In New England, radio stations banded together to get permission to start their broadcasts fifteen minutes late, ensuring that young fans wouldn’t miss their hero while their parents listened to coverage of that summer’s pennant run by Ted Williams’s Boston Red Sox. “We had been getting a lot of complaints about the blood and thunder stuff until we decided to put in these social episodes,” said a spokesman for the advertising agency used by Kellogg’s, which recognized early on the dividends that could be earned from a crusade for tolerance. “Now all the parents’ organizations are congratulating us on the show. The psychologists tell us we’re planting a ‘thought egg’ in the kids’ minds.”
Whether or not that egg actually hatched, it was clear that Superman and his handlers had staged another triumph. They had inoculated themselves against parents, teachers, and even psychoanalysts who worried about the impact of action heroes on young minds. Thirty-five million American homes had radios in 1946, and Superman was beaming into more of them than ever, entertaining entire families rather than just the kids who read comic books. At a time when nearly all the wartime superheroes were fighting for their lives, the Man of Steel was thriving. To Superman, Inc., crisis meant opportunity, just as it had during the war.
This latest victory was particularly sweet for an old socialist like Jack Liebowitz, who approved Maxwell’s hiring and green-lighted Operation Tolerance. Jack had consciously assembled a team of artist-entrepreneurs who were youthful as well as inventive, with the audacity to presume they were shaping not just a fictional character but popular fiction itself. Jack understood that Superman’s success in radio helped ensure a growing market for his comics, and vice versa. He also understood that, as he had always said, if you were smart you could do good at the same time you were getting rich.
MAKING SUPERMAN BELIEVABLE ON PAPER was a relative cinch. Good eyes were all that was needed to see him leap and fly, defy bullets along with alien invaders, and metamorphose from buttoned-down Clark Kent in a double-breasted suit to a soaring superhero in a pajama-like uniform. Radio was different. There were no alleyways in which we could witness his makeover, no costumes or hairstyles to show us there had been a switch. Listeners had to visualize for themselves what he looked and acted like to make it work. The fact that it did—from the very first broadcast on February 12, 1940—was a tribute to the skills of the actors and producers and, at least as much, to the supple imaginations of young fans who wanted to believe.
The show’s first challenge was finding one performer who could play Superman and another for Clark Kent. The solution was Clayton “Bud” Collyer. The choice seemed obvious to everyone but him. Collyer had trained to be a lawyer, like his dad, but he paid his way through law school by singing and acting on the radio, following in the show business footsteps of his mother and grandfather, sister and brother. After two years as a low-paid law clerk he was back performing—using his mother’s maiden name of Collyer so he could preserve his birth name, Clayton J. Heermance, Jr., in case he ever resumed his legal career. By the time Superman was ready to air, Collyer was starring in two radio adventure series—Renfrew of the Mounted and Terry and the Pirates—along with a comedy, several soap operas, and three news features. That was more than enough. The idea of a comic strip on the radio was such a stretch that he made clear he didn’t even want to audition. Maxwell tricked him into doing that, twice, but still Collyer tried to get out of it.
That he didn’t was a stroke of luck for both Superman and Collyer, since they made a brilliant match for 2,008 radio shows and for thirty years in various media. Collyer drew on his training as a crooner to underscore the difference between Clark and Superman, playing the former in a tenor that oozed milquetoast, then dropping several pitches midsentence to a gravelly baritone that was just right for the world’s strongest man, yet making clear that both voices came from the same man. That preserved the essential ego/alter-ego relationship and saved Maxwell from having to hire a second actor. Being the first to impersonate either character meant the only standard Collyer had to meet was the one he was setting. Performing on the radio, where no one could see him, meant he never ran the risk of growing too old for the role. It also reduced the possibility of his being typecast, which was a fear (and reality) that would later plague TV and film actors playing Superman. Even though they couldn’t see what he looked like and there were no credits naming him, his voice was rousing enough for female listeners to flood the studio with mash notes addressed to Superman. They might have been disappointed to know that he had a wife and three children and that he taught Sunday school on Long Island. Portraying Superman “was the ultimate in unabashed corn,” said Collyer, who would later become known to a generation of baby boomers as host of the TV game show To Tell the Truth. “So many people get the least bit embarrassed by fantasy when they’re directing it or performing it and it loses all the great charm it could have, but if played honestly and whole-hog all the way, it’s great.”
Joan Alexander was Collyer’s co-star and opposite. She needed the work playing Lois Lane at first to support herself and later to provide for her daughter after she left a troubled marriage. She got the role early on, lost it when Maxwell decided he didn’t like her, then disguised herself in a wig and showed up at the audition for her replacement. “The producers hired her!” her daughter recalled sixty years later. “They were astonished to find out they had rehired the woman they’d just let go. This time she kept the part forever.”
Jackie Kelk had nailed down the role of Jimmy Olsen by season two. Like Alexander, he needed the part, but like Collyer, he had to fit it around other acting jobs. The solution: Kelk’s Jimmy was written into the action four days a week, while on day five—Thursdays, when Kelk was rehearsing with The Aldrich Family—Jimmy was AWOL and a character named Beanie Martin took over as copyboy.
As critical as those and other main characters were, the narrator was more so, especially after Jackson Beck took over the job. He saved Maxwell from needing to have his actors self-consciously stop the action to explain what they were doing or why. Beck set the scene and caught up listeners who had taken a bathroom break or sneaked into the kitchen for a snack. In between his narrations he played as many as four other roles in a single episode, from villains to Beanie the copyboy, which was even more impressive since most of the broadcasts were live. He also was an accomplished huckster, working with his sidekick, Dan McCullough, to weave into high-energy plots messages about Pep cereal, “the eighteen-karat breakfast dish that sparkles with sunny cheerfulness.” For Kellogg’s, those pitches were what the show was all about, and why they kept Beck around for some 1,600 broadcasts.
The maestro who assembled that extraordinary cast and launched Superman onto the airwaves was Robert Maxwell, the orchestrator of Operation Tolerance. Who better to reconfigure Superman for a new medium and to refresh radio by introducing its first superhero than a thirty-two-year-old artist-entrepreneur who had reinvented himself? Born Robert Maxwell Joffe, this oldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants had taken the pen name Bob Maxwell to protect himself and his family when, in his early twenties, he wrote stories with titles like “He Had Push” for Harry Donenfeld’s bawdy and bloody pulp magazines. The brashness of the tales and their author caught Harry’s eye and he drafted Maxwell into Superman, Inc., first to oversee the licensing of toys and other products, then to bring the superhero into the world of broadcast. Before he hired writers or actors, Maxwell sat down with Harry and Jack’s masterful press agent, Allen Ducovny, to put together audition discs that would sell the show to prospective sponsors. They couldn’t have picked a better moment. Few families had television sets in the early 1940s and almost none had the money, gasoline, or motivation to go out. Radio was the era’s hottest medium, with its comedies, harmonies, and mysteries helping to take people’s minds off the lingering agony of the Depression.
A new show required another origin story. It had to be familiar enough to loyal comic book and strip readers that they wouldn’t see it as tinkering with the legend, and it couldn’t presume any preexisting knowledge of Superman lore, since part of the point of a new medium was to attract new fans. So whereas Action No. 1 described Superman’s home planet as distant and destroyed by old age and Superman No. 1 simply called it doomed, the inaugural radio show brought the action closer to home and gave more telling details. Krypton was in our own solar system—hidden from us by the sun—and it was that sun’s gravitational pull that overpowered the planet and made it “explode like a giant bubble, destroying every living thing on it!” Superman grew up on his way to Earth and by the time he stepped out of his spaceship, in episode two, he was ready to save his adopted planet.
Superman’s war against the Nazis also looked different on the radio. In the comics, he stayed in his civvies and fought on the home front. On the airwaves he was commissioned as an undercover Secret Service operative. He still lived by clearly delineated rules, just as he had in print, including doing all he could to spare the lives of his enemies. And he came into America’s living rooms with an opening sequence that would become the signature of Superman on the radio and later on TV, even though it has been altered over time and the first paragraph was borrowed from the animated cartoons. So familiar was the refrain that children across the forty-eight states could recite it as readily as the Pledge of Allegiance:
“Faster than a speeding bullet,” the narrator intoned. “More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”
Man: “Look! Up in the Sky!”
Second man: “It’s a Bird!”
Woman: “It’s a Plane!”
First man: “It’s Superman!”
Narrator: “Yes, it’s Superman! Strange visitor from another world, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in 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!”
The last four words, which were added in the summer of 1942 and became part of Superman’s motto, were chosen with the help of a child psychologist to ensure they touched the right chords. Superman, of course, had always fought for patriotic principles, but it was only with the nation at war—and Americans thinking more than ever about why their country was worth fighting and dying for—that the idea of a distinctly American way of believing and acting took hold in the public mind and the Superman mythos. Yet again, Superman was reflecting and refracting his era in a way that helped define it.
But words alone wouldn’t do. Listeners needed to visualize the action. So as the narrator talked about a speeding bullet, the radio audience heard a burst of machine-gun fire. Locomotive? Let’s hear the roar of a passing train. The biggest challenge for the three sound effects men was Superman taking flight. At first a hand-cranked wind machine had to suffice, but the artifice grew more convincing with the addition of several recorded sounds: a wind tunnel playing in reverse, a plane diving with a deafening roar, and a newsreel of an artillery shell whizzing through air during the Spanish Civil War. For Superman’s landing, the sound guys slowed by hand those recordings, the way disc jockeys do today. When the record stopped, listeners were assured that Superman was back on solid ground.
A radio writer’s mission was different than Jerry Siegel’s had been in the comics. Jerry aimed strictly at kids. Radio writers started with young people as the target, but their scripts also had to appeal to grown-ups, who made up more than a third of the listeners. The best way to reach both, advised the show’s first director, was to assume the best in each. “Kids can detect the patronizing tone of an adult who tries to reach down to their mental age, and they resent it,” said Jack Johnstone. “You’ve got to be perfectly natural.” Another challenge: How to keep the pot boiling when everyone knows that nothing can hurt your hero. “A railroad train runs across his chest. It doesn’t hurt him, it hurts the train! Where do you get the suspense from?” asked scriptwriter Edward Langley. “I was a young writer in my twenties. So I asked a guy I knew in his fifties.… He said: ‘The one thing Superman can’t do is strike a match on a cake of soap!’ That was the kind of ‘peg’ that you used—to try to use what he can’t do.… They were wide open to anything, as long as you could make it suspenseful and interesting. Topics didn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
That challenge got a bit easier in the spring of 1943, when Superman finally got a worthy adversary. It happened while Clark Kent was interviewing Dr. John Whistler at the Metropolis Museum. The scientist showed the journalist an unusual green meteorite that made Kent suddenly feel “as if every ounce of strength had been drained out of me.” The narrator explained the game-changing implications: “Superman for the first time in his life faces an enemy against which he is entirely powerless.” That enemy, a radioactive fragment of the planet Krypton, prompted Superman to recall his birthplace, his parents, and how and why he had been sent to Earth. It was the first the world heard of kryptonite, although Jerry Siegel’s twenty-six-page story on K-Metal was sitting on the library shelf at Detective Comics and could have been read by the radio scriptwriter. It would take another six years for the deadly metal to make its way into the comics and another two before a nation that was still at war, and understandably nervous about the mention of anything involving radiation, would hear much more on the radio about the glowing green element.
When kryptonite returned to the airwaves it became the centerpiece of an epic battle between Superman and the Atom Man. At seventy-seven episodes, this struggle was the longest in all of the Superman radio series. The face-off began in September 1945, less than two months after America dropped its “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and the world was thrust into the Atomic Age. Perfect timing. The final story aired the following January, two days before the inaugural meeting of the United Nations. In between, the villainous Scarlet Widow stole from the Metropolis Museum the single known sample of kryptonite, only to see a Nazi scientist named Der Teufel (German for “the Devil”) steal a chunk of it. Determined to “succeed where Hitler failed,” Teufel fed his kryptonite to Heinrich Milch (a.k.a. Henry Miller), turning him into Atom Man, whose radioactive powers were too much even for Superman. Miller seemed unstoppable, as the narrator warned: “Superman is pitting all his strength and speed against the one force on earth which is mightier than he is—the force which twice brought him within the very shadow of death. Can he possibly win this time, when he fights for his very life, and for the lives of those he loves? Monday brings the smashing, dramatic climax of our story, fellows and girls—and a startling surprise, so don’t miss it.” When Superman triumphed the next evening, he told a grateful Metropolis police inspector, “You don’t owe me anything. I’m fighting for the same things you are—the end of tyranny and intolerance—all the things that Miller and the Nazis stood for.” Inspector: “Then I’ll only say thank heaven that the worst threat America ever faced is over.”
Ahh, but it wasn’t over. Two more pieces of kryptonite were somewhere in the city, and to track them down, Superman had to enlist the help of Batman and Robin. That meant confessing to them his secret identity, the first time he had ever done that. Showing his full self would pave the way for Superman to forge with Batman his first true friendship, one based on an honesty he couldn’t afford with anyone but his foster parents and the sharing that was possible only with a fellow superhero, who understood the anxiety and exhilaration that came with the job. So effective was this radio collaboration in defeating the Atom Man that the Dynamic Duo was back again for more than a dozen other guest appearances. Being able to rely on them as stand-ins proved particularly useful when Superman was taken out of the action by kryptonite—and when Bud Collyer wanted to go on vacation.
It was on the radio, too, that Superman learned to fly. He was aloft by the second episode in 1940, which was three and a half years earlier than his flying debut in the “Million-Dollar Marathon” story in Action, although in the early years of broadcast his power of flight waxed and waned from adventure to adventure. Radio’s immediacy and Maxwell’s brashness once again let Superman dive into a topic that comics writers would only slowly tease out. Kryptonite seemed like a good idea, so give it a try. Same with turning a high jump into full flight. What didn’t change was Superman’s boyish delight each time he tested his aerodynamic abilities, as he did in May 1943 when he was battling the Ku Klux Klan. “Up in my arms with you, Chuck,” Superman said to the young ballplayer Chuck Riggs. “Are we going to fly?” Riggs asked. Superman: “We are. Hang on now.” Riggs: “Oh boy—flying with Superman, I must be dreaming.” Superman: “Here we go. Up, up, and away! Is that your house down there, Chuck?”
While some of the radio firsts involved expanding and curtailing his powers, others filled in what was quickly becoming the best supporting cast a superhero ever had. An intrepid copyboy showed up at Clark and Lois’s newspaper as early as Action Comics No. 6 in November 1938. He was given a bow tie but not a name or an ongoing role; he would make three more cameo appearances through the end of 1939. Jimmy Olsen was introduced to the world in April 1940, on a radio episode called “Donelli’s Protection Racket.” He was a red-headed, freckle-faced boy who worked at the paper. His mother had run a candy store since his dad died three years before, and a local mobster named Donelli was trying to extract money from her. Jimmy turned to Clark and Superman for help. Over the next several episodes we learned more about Jimmy: He was a Boy Scout but couldn’t find his way out of the woods; he perpetually annoyed his boss by calling him “chief” even as he asked to be promoted to real reporter; he reacted to everything good and bad by gasping “Holy smokes”; and he had a knack for getting into trouble and counting on Superman to bail him out.
Perry White, too, came alive on the radio, fencing with Jimmy from the start and eventually making his way into the comics. The editor was first identified as Paris White, but his first name evolved to one more suited to his gruff demeanor even as his newspaper was changing from the Daily Flash to the Daily Planet. Inspector Henderson—first called Charles, then William—was Clark’s best source and Superman’s closest ally at the Metropolis Police Department. He was made for the radio and was intended to reassure parents that Superman was a friend of the police and not the vigilante he started out as. It took seven episodes on the airwaves for Lois to appear, which was a long time compared to her debut in Action No. 1, but she was the only adult female character on any afternoon action-adventure radio show.
There were actually several Superman radio series, not just one. They ranged from fifteen to thirty minutes, and aired three to five times a week. The shows were meant to be kid-friendly, although for thirteen weeks in 1949 a crime version aimed at adults ran on Saturday evenings. The Mutual Broadcasting System aired the program for most of its run and Kellogg’s was by far the longest-lasting sponsor. The end came in March 1951, which was sooner than most fans wanted but more than a year later than for competing shows like Captain Midnight and Tom Mix. Because tapes of the old shows became available only recently, the radio Adventures of Superman hasn’t gotten the attention from historians and fans that his exploits on TV and film have. But it was radio that lifted the hero from a devoted audience of comic book fans into a broadcast universe that reached nearly every corner of the nation. The radio series came onto the scene two months into 1940 and it wound down fifteen months after the decade did. In between it joined Kilroy and the Slinky, Citizen Kane and Rosie the Riveter, as hallmarks of 1940s America.
HIS SUCCESS IN OTHER MEDIA made it inevitable that Superman would find his way to the big screen. It was equally certain, as the 1930s came to a close, that America someday would produce an animated cartoon star who was not a funny, furry animal. The two trends collided in the Miami studios of a pair of Austrian-Jewish animation geniuses, the brothers Max and Dave Fleischer.
It wasn’t the Fleischers’ idea. They thought building a “realistic” cartoon around Superman was a lousy idea given the problems they had encountered the only other time they tried to do that, with Gulliver’s Travels. What they did best was conspicuously unreal characters, like Betty Boop, Popeye, and Koko the Clown. So when they were approached by Paramount Pictures, which owned the screen rights to Superman, Max and Dave had to think about it. They told Paramount that they could produce the ten-minute movies, which theaters craved as lead-ins to feature films—but given the unusual animation requirements and special effects they would have to charge $100,000 per episode, or four times the going rate. “They thought that would be the end of the project—but it wasn’t,” said Richard Fleischer, Max’s son. “Paramount said: ‘Okay, go ahead.’ ”
The brothers were right: It wasn’t easy. Special lights were needed to extend shadows and depths and create the right dramatic touch. They tried oblique angles, freeze-framing, double exposures, and other camera techniques that heretofore had been the domain of live-action films and the high-priced Walt Disney Studios. Rotoscoping—a technique the Fleischers had pioneered with Koko in which real-life figures were traced in ink, frame by frame, much as comic book artists sometimes did—made the animated figures believable. Max and Dave’s composers knew what Superman, Lois, and the others should look like, thanks to model sheets provided by Joe Shuster. Their voices came from the world of radio, with Bud Collyer playing Superman and Joan Alexander reprising the role of Lois. Composer Sammy Timberg supplied the theme music. The plot lines—thieving robots, rampaging dinosaurs, and jingoistic Japanese saboteurs—were familiar to fans who knew Superman from comic books, comic strips, and the airwaves. So was the sound of an exploding Krypton, which was generated by amplifying the sound of an apple being ripped apart by hand. The films borrowed the expressionism of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and the futurism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, blended with the Fleischers’ unique feel for scale and vision. To put together a single ten-minute cartoon took a full six months, or twice as long as the normal Fleischer production.
Did it work? Time magazine didn’t think so, branding the Fleischer productions “the movie cartoon at its worst. Superman looks and acts like a wooden puppet. So do all his playmates.” The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, writing forty years later, was equally dismissive: “The Fleischers show so little aptitude for—or interest in—realistic animation.” Both were right in their own way. There was precious little dialogue and the characters seemed as stiff as Joe’s drawings. That was their genius. The Fleischers managed to bring into two dimensions and full motion the same simple strength that Joe had captured on paper, and it was that rendering that led animation historians to deliver a judgment decidedly different from that of newsprint reviewers. “These films are among the best fantasy cartoons ever produced,” said Leonard Maltin. “SUPERMAN stands as one of the Fleischer studio’s finest achievements.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed, nominating the first of the Fleischers’ seventeen Superman films for an Academy Award as the Best Short Subject (Cartoon) in 1941. While it lost out to a Disney feature, the nomination sent a message to skeptical critics.
Whatever the experts said, the verdict from fans was boisterous and unanimous. “Some 20,000,000 Supermaniacs can hardly wait for Superman’s ten-minute, one-reel cartoon to appear once a month in more than 7,000 U.S. movie houses,” Time wrote in July 1942. “Supermania is the only word for their devotion to this irrepressible Citizen Fixit, who smacks death rays back into the cannon, restores toppling skyscrapers to their foundations, knits broken bridges together with his bare hands, and who has brought a new cry into the world: ‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—SUPERMAN!’ ” While the films necessarily lacked suspense, with Superman always winning, “his idolators (of all ages) seem satisfied to see him flex his muscles. This vicarious satisfaction has made Superman Paramount’s most popular and profitable short.… So popular is the muscular moron that 114 female artists at the Famous studio recently answered a questionnaire asking whether they would prefer Superman for a husband or a boy friend. All said: boy friend. Explained one: ‘Trying to live with so super a husband might be awfully fatiguing.’ ”
Reactions like those earned the Superman cartoons an uncharacteristically prominent spot on theater marquees. But that was not enough to save the series or the Fleischer Studios. The Fleischers were deep in debt on other projects, and in mid-1942 Paramount took over their business and changed its name to Famous Studios. Budgets for the Superman cartoons were cut, quality suffered, and in 1943 Paramount killed the series.
That was not the end of the story. The Fleischer cartoons gave Superman some of his most famous catchphrases—from “faster than a speeding bullet” to “more powerful than a locomotive”—which made their way first to the ongoing radio series and later to TV. These short Superman films were so effective that they even turned up in the comic books: In Superman No. 19, Clark feigned a choking attack and kicked Lois’s purse to distract her from a Fleischer cartoon that would have revealed his identity as Superman. Twentieth Century Fox and animators at Terrytoons were paying attention, too, drawing on Superman’s cartoon success to create their own super-strong character who could fly and wore a blue costume and red cape. The costume eventually changed to yellow and the new cartoon hero’s name went from Super Mouse to Mighty Mouse. One bit of Superman mythology that is never attributed to the Fleischer Studios but should be is the use of a telephone booth as a dressing room. The first time Clark Kent ducked into a phone box to change into Superman was in November 1941 in “The Mechanical Monsters,” the second of the animation films. It proved convenient enough that he did it again on the radio, in the newspaper strip and comic books, on Broadway, and, most famously, in the movies. Pulling it off was easy when the booth was the old, heavy wooden box with a small window up front, but privacy would be tougher to come by in the newer, all-glass version.
The Superman animation series’ most lasting legacy was in showing that the Man of Steel could conquer yet another medium. He was quickly becoming ubiquitous, succeeding not just in the worlds of comic books and free radio entertainment but on the silver screen. That was a lesson Hollywood would remember.
THE MOVIE SERIALS WERE Hollywood’s stepchild, representative not of what the filmmakers could accomplish in their heyday in the 1940s but of what they could get away with. A serial was a short subject that theaters showed alongside the featured movie, with a new chapter each week and a dozen or more chapters in all. The format was a carryover from serialized pulp fiction and a precursor to early TV, where the movie segments were rebroadcast at the rate of one a day. The storylines—westerns and science fiction, crime and espionage—were aimed squarely at youngsters, who never stopped relishing them, from the silent era in 1912 until TV made them obsolete in the early 1950s. The writing was thin, with little love, no sex, and the beginning of each twenty-minute episode wasted recounting the last one. Few came for the acting, either, which was slapdash, with escapes and chases routinely lifted from old films and producers hoping nobody would notice. The draw was the cliffhanger, in which the hero (often literally) hung over a cliff as the villain gloated and fans were reminded to return the following week to see whether what came next was a death (almost never) or a rescue (count on it). Even when they flopped, which was often, studios could dub and resell the shorts in France, Italy, Turkey, China, and, most obliging of all, Spain and Latin America, where episodes were stitched back together for a single five-hour viewing.
“Jungle Sam” Katzman was the king of the serials, for better and worse. The producer and director was Jack Liebowitz’s kind of guy, a penny-pincher and autocrat who had never lost money on a film. He started not with a story or idea, but with a wild and colorful title like Flame of Calcutta. From that he built a narrative of intrigue set in eighteenth-century India. His biggest earners were the Jungle Jim pictures, or at least they were until the Superman serials he made for Columbia Pictures in the late 1940s. To make sure the new films would be a hit with the adolescent fans who loved Superman in his other media incarnations, Katzman tested them on his fifteen-year-old son, Jerome, and his friends. “If they guess how the guy gets out of the predicament each week,” Katzman said, “it goes out immediately and we rewrite until they can’t guess.” The other key, the producer knew, was a Superman in whom his son and millions of other kids could believe.
Kirk Alyn was an odd choice for the job. He was more a song-and-dance man than an actor, having studied ballet and performed in vaudeville and on Broadway in the 1930s and early forties. That’s where he decided to trade in the name he was born with, John Feggo, Jr., for Kirk Alyn, which he felt was better suited to the stage. He appeared in chorus lines and in blackface, modeled for muscle magazines, and performed in TV murder mysteries in the days when only bars had TVs and only dead-end actors performed for the small screen. But he had experience in serials if not in superheroes, so when he got a call from Columbia in 1948 asking if he was interested in trying out for Superman, he jumped into his car and headed to the studio. Told to take off his shirt so the assembled executives could check out his build, the burly performer complied. Then Katzman instructed him to take off his pants. “I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ They said, ‘We want to see if your legs are any good,’ ” he recalled forty years later. They were good enough, and fifteen minutes after he arrived, Alyn was hired as the first actor to play a Superman whom his fans could see as well as hear.
Alyn and his directors were smart enough not to try to reinvent the character Bud Collyer had introduced so effectively to the airwaves. “I visualized the guy I heard on the radio. That was a guy nothing could stop,” Alyn said. “That’s why I stood like this, with my chest out, and a look on my face saying, ‘Shoot me.’ ” His demeanor said tough guy, but his wide eyes signaled approachability and mischievousness, just the way Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had imagined their Superman a decade before. Alyn understood much as Collyer had that kids like fifteen-year-old Jerome Katzman could spot a phony in an instant. If they didn’t think Alyn was having fun—and that he believed in Superman—they wouldn’t pay to see his movies. His young audience, after all, didn’t just admire the Man of Steel. They loved him. Superman was not merely who they dreamed of becoming but who they were already, if only we could see. The good news for them was that Alyn was having fun, and he did believe in his character in a way that these preteens and teens appreciated even if movie reviewers wouldn’t.
Columbia Pictures, too, had learned something from the Superman radio broadcasts: It pays to let children hold on to their fantasies. Sam Katzman announced at his first press briefing that he had despaired of finding an actor capable of portraying the mighty Man of Steel but thankfully had persuaded Superman to appear as himself. The credit lines continued the ruse, billing Kirk Alyn as playing just Clark Kent.
Superman’s comic book colors—blue and red—would show little contrast in a black-and-white film, so Alyn wore gray and brown. Being the first live-action Superman meant making a series of adjustments, some of them painful. When it became clear that no stuntman could convincingly stand in for him Alyn performed his own stunts, or so he claimed, including one where he intercepted an electric current the Spider Lady had intended for Lois Lane. No one counted on the sparks catching on the metal of his Superman belt buckle. “I was saved from incineration only by the insulation on my boot soles,” he said later, “but it scared the blazes out of me.” Producers also promulgated rules about superpowers like X-ray vision. There were two things it shouldn’t penetrate: lead, whose X-ray blocking power proved to be Superman’s sole defense against the deadly radiation emitted by kryptonite, and clothing, which was Lois’s only defense against prying eyes.
Making Superman fly was a more vexing problem. The technical crew strung cables from the studio ceiling to pull Alyn aloft and molded a steel breastplate to hold him there, and for twelve long hours he was filmed dipping, banking, and, yes, flying the way men had dreamed of since Daedalus built wings for Icarus. The flaw this time was the wiring: It was so painfully visible that the crew was fired and Superman was grounded. Filmgoers saw Alyn poised on the window’s edge, but what flew away from the building or any other setting was an animated Superman. He always landed behind a bush or wall, from which his human counterpart could dash out and resume the role. The effect was cartoonish.
Parts of the radio Man of Steel were reprised on film, with Alyn self-consciously announcing, “This is a job for Superman!” before each rescue and shouting, “Up, up, and away!” every time his cartoon double took off. That made sense on radio, when listeners needed cues; it seemed like a parody when everyone could see that Superman was on the job and airborne. Equally jarring to observant fans was noticing that Clark went through the identical motions every time he changed into Superman in the Daily Planet storeroom, and that the rough airplane landing in the final episode looked an awful lot like one in the 1947 serial Jack Armstrong. Why were they using scavenged film? Surely it wasn’t for lack of money: Columbia poured $350,000 into the filming, making Superman one of the most expensive serials ever. In the end, the fifteen-part film that aired in 1948 looked like what it was: a B movie sliced into fifteen disjointed parts.
But kids whose Saturday at the movies was the highlight of their week ate it up. These were the same youngsters who, even before they could read the words, had thumbed through their Superman comic books until the pages grew ragged. In later years the reward for finishing their homework, or the inducement to get started, was the chance to listen to Superman on the radio. Saturdays had meant Superman cartoons at the movie house downtown, while on Sunday he showed up in regal color in the funny pages. Now there was a new treat: their hero, in live action, as part of the weekend matinee. Their parents dropped them at the theater thinking the attraction was Charles Dickens’s penniless orphan Oliver Twist, but the real reason they wanted to come was Hurled to Destruction, the Superman short that ran first. That explains not just why Superman played in seven thousand movie houses nationwide but why it took in more than a million dollars, which was three times what Katzman had invested and enough to make it the most successful serial of the time.
In 1950, two years after the first set of shorts, Katzman and Columbia released a fifteen-set sequel called Atom Man vs. Superman. The title was borrowed from the radio series that introduced kryptonite, but almost everything else was different. The enemy this time wasn’t Der Teufel, the Nazi scientist, but the comic books’ Lex Luthor, who slipped in and out of prison and banished Superman to outer space using a secret ray that “breaks down your atoms and reassembles them wherever I desire.” Even as the hairless villain was rewriting the laws of physics and inventing flying saucers, his henchmen inexplicably continued pulling off low-tech capers like holding up shoe stores and laundries. Atom Man used a hybrid approach to flying that made it more convincing than in the first serials, though it still left a lot for the fans to wish for. Animated stand-ins were used again, but the transition from human to cartoon was smoothed by filming Alyn with his arms raised above his head, an electric fan blowing from above to simulate whooshing air, in front of blue staging that was supposed to look like sky. Other shots had him straddling an airplane and later a missile. The changes made Atom Man better than its predecessors, but there was no denying that these short Superman movies did not have the taut drama of the radio broadcasts of the same name.
The Superman serials launched the careers of several actors, some of whom, like Alyn, came and went with the short films while others, like Noel Neill, would be back later. Neill, a twenty-seven-year-old “sweater girl,” became known to adoring fans as the sweet Lois Lane and to detractors as the saccharine one. Like Superman, Lois had a uniform for the first fifteen shorts: a wide-brimmed white hat, a wool business suit, and wavy black hair bouncing off her shoulders as she walked. In Atom Man her wardrobe expanded to three outfits and her hair was trimmed to well above the shoulder line. Katzman knew Neill from their earlier collaborations and thought she looked enough like the comic book Lois that he didn’t require a tryout. The direction he gave her during filming was clipped and pointed: Play yourself.
In an era when studios carefully managed the lives of actors, Columbia was obsessed with keeping intact the illusion of Superman. Every aspect of the making of the serials was to be secret. Katzman banned outsiders from the set when scenes with Superman were being shot. He screened any personal appearances scheduled for Alyn, and told the actor that he “wasn’t to appear on the studio lot wearing the ‘uniform,’ ” which is the way his bosses insisted he refer to his costume. But the studio simply couldn’t suppress Alyn’s swaggering pride at the role he had been given to play. He loved it when Katzman would tease the maître d’ at lunch by asking, “Do you know who this is?” then delightedly telling him, “This fellow is Superman!” When he was off the set Alyn refused to brush back his Superman spit curl, which clearly identified him with the character, and when he was on he gleefully told nonstop stories of derring-do. That identification came back to bite him: He was so widely viewed as an alien from outer space that it became difficult for him to get other roles. “Everyplace I’d go,” he explained, “they’d say ‘Hi ya, Superman!’ ” This would become a familiar complaint for future actors playing the role.
In the end the serials suffered the same fate as Superman on radio and in animation: they faded out as the spotlight moved elsewhere with changing American tastes and technologies. By 1948 America had four television networks, and in another three years their broadcasts would be beaming across the nation. TV didn’t kill the movie business, as Hollywood had feared, but it did change the behavior of the American public, especially young fans like those Superman leaned on. The cabinet radio that had been the focus of family entertainment was replaced by a TV console, and kids who had flocked to Saturday matinees increasingly stayed home and watched for free.
The Man of Steel, though, was far too potent to fade away himself. Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, and Sam Katzman had proved that their superhero could be wildly popular as live-action entertainment, and Jack and Harry already were lining up the talent and gadgetry to bring Superman into the era of the television.
BACK IN THE COMIC BOOKS, something curious had been happening to Superman: He was maturing and evolving. That had never been a consideration before, not when he went from infant to adult in a single page of Action Comics No. 1 and it was uncertain whether he would last beyond a few issues. No one had given any thought to how or even whether he should continue aging. Joe and his assistants had drawn the character as if he would stay thirty-something forever, even as they went from being young artists to middle-aged ones (editors would later explain his slow aging with the contrivance that he was born on February 29, the leap day, so he added a year only once every four years). Just as important, no one had scoped out which parts of his past readers would want to explore and how his present world should be enlarged. Now, as Superman was looking ahead to his third decade of stardom—and Jerry and Joe were reluctantly relinquishing control over him—a new lineup of artists and writers had begun scoping and enlarging.
Krypton was one of the first elements to take on added dimensions. All we knew to start was that the planet had exploded and Superman had escaped. That seemed like enough, since what mattered was his life with us on Earth. The newspaper strips and the radio show had begun to fill in details about Superman’s parents and their world, but the comic books didn’t catch up until the summer of 1948, and the first full-length origin story was written not by Superman’s creator but by Batman’s. Bill Finger’s tale opened with this teaser: “Who is Superman? Where did he come from? How did he obtain his miraculous powers? Millions keep asking these and many other questions.” The next nine pages took readers back to “the great planet Krypton,” populated by “humans of high intelligence and magnificent physical perfection.” A handsome, tall Kryptonian scientist wearing a green costume and yellow cape was trying to convince the ruling council that their planet was doomed. The uranium in its core had been quietly churning for ages to the point where “Krypton is one gigantic atomic bomb!” There could be no more hair-raising words for readers, even young ones, who just three years before had lived through the staggering news of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki thanks to the nuclear bombs that ended World War II. Kryptonians’ only salvation, Jor-El insisted, would be to build huge rocket ships and flee to Earth, a world with a similar atmosphere and far less gravity. When no one would listen, Jor-El and Lara sent their only child off in a tiny spaceship.
That enlightened readers about Krypton, but Superman himself still didn’t know his planet’s history or its fate. It took another fifteen months for Finger to bring the hero back to Krypton for the first time since he was an infant and for comic-book-only fans to get their first look at kryptonite. Superman encountered a meteorite infused with the metal in a jewelry store on Earth and, alarmed at how it wilted him, he followed it back through space and time to its source. Arriving on Krypton just as the planet was about to explode, he had a quiet look around. (He “is invisible to these people because he is not of their time and doesn’t exist for them,” an editor’s note explained. “He can only view them as he would a silent movie, but he can read lips.”) Following Jor-El and Lara’s baby as he rocketed to Earth, Superman did not realize he was following himself until he saw the infant rescued by the Kents, his foster parents.
Going home humanized the Man of Steel. He knew now why the meteor from Krypton had weakened him and why his parents had abandoned him. But that understanding brought with it a loneliness that would never leave. He realized now what Jerry Siegel had confided in us from the beginning: Superman was an orphan and an alien. His planet’s sole survivor, he was the last of a long-lived and majestic race. It was not an easy burden to shoulder. “Now I understand,” he thought to himself, “why I’m different from Earthmen! I’m not really from Earth at all—I’m from another planet—the planet Jor-El called Krypton!!”
The character named Jimmy Olsen was another instance of comic books catching up with radio as well as with a changing world. While we were introduced to Jimmy and his mother in an April 1940 broadcast, it would take another nineteen months for the comics to give him a personality and a starring role. It took just four panels for the boy, who looked to be ten, to let editor Perry White know his dream: “I—I’d like to become a real reporter—like Clark Kent. And if you’d only give me a chance.” White’s reply hinted at the repartee the two would continue for decades: “Tell you what I’ll do, kid. Come back again in five or ten years.… And I may give you a break.” Too impatient to wait, Jimmy stowed away in Lois’s car as she chased a story about the villainous Archer, then he helped Lois skedaddle into the woods when the Archer took aim at her. The story ended with Jimmy getting his first byline in the newspaper. It would be four more months before he got a last name, twelve years before he earned a promotion to cub reporter, and seventeen years before he settled in with his trademark blazing red hair after experiments with blond, honey blond, and light red.
As with most of the borrowing back and forth between comics and other media, Jimmy stuck because he tapped a nerve. Being a kid, he could share in Lois and Clark’s zany adventures without feeling any of the responsibility that weighed on adults like them. Jimmy was a foil for everyone around him—letting Superman repeatedly sweep to his rescue, Perry snarl at and then warm to him, and Lois display her suppressed mothering instincts. Every ten-year-old who flipped through a Superman comic book and tuned in to the radio show identified with him—which is why, however tired his shtick sounded, Jimmy has lasted through thousands of radio and TV broadcasts and through seventy years and counting of comics.
Perry White was everyone’s grandfather or favorite uncle—hard-boiled on the outside but soft as a yolk once you peeled back the shell. And while he, too, got his name and personality on the radio, he quickly came to play a major part in Superman’s expanding comic book universe. Whereas Jimmy started out with just a first name, Perry, as befit his age and irascibility, at first had just a last one. Six months later he was humanized with a given name, although it was one that more commonly is a surname. His writers were novices when it came to newspapers, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they couldn’t decide just what rank he held, moving between editor, editor-in-chief, managing editor, and editor-publisher. The one constant was his championing no-holds-barred journalism.
Perry’s most versatile reporter and Superman’s most cherished and tormenting friend was Lois Lane, who came onto the scene just five pages after Superman did. Readers could follow her infatuation with Superman, which in 1949 looked as if it might end in marriage, and her exasperation with Clark, which Superman exploited to get out of marrying Lois in the 1949 story with the implausible title “Lois Lane Loves Clark Kent.” She lived in unit 1705 at the Ritz Plaza Apartments, which was near Clark and filled with pictures of Superman. At the Daily Star and its successor, the Daily Planet, she held almost every job there was, from sob sister and columnist for the lovelorn to war correspondent, weather editor, question-and-answer editor, and head of the lost and found department. The story she most wanted to write in the early years but could never pin down was “that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same.” We learned that she had a bottomless collection of fashionable hats, a weekly show on radio station WCOD, and a pistol in her purse that she used to defend herself when Superman wasn’t there to save her.
What fans couldn’t see but did speculate on endlessly was who was the inspiration for America’s most famous lady journalist. Was it Margo Lane, girlfriend of one of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s favorite pulp heroes, the Shadow? Perhaps it was Torchy Blaine, the fast-talking, crime-solving newspaper reporter who starred in a series of 1930s films and, in one, was played by actress and singer Lola Lane. That is what Jerry told relatives and friends over the years. Or was it Glenville High’s Lois Long, Lois Ingram, Lois Peoples, Lois Donaldson, Bertha Lois Beller, or Lois Amster? Joe repeatedly singled out Amster, a class beauty and National Honor Society member whom he said he had a crush on. Jerry did, too, but he backtracked when that struck a nerve for his new wife, Jolan Kovacs, who had modeled for Joe when he was drawing Lois. A character named Amster also showed up in one of the first issues of Jerry and Joe’s early collaboration “Doctor Occult.” The real-life Lois Amster, reminiscing at age ninety-three, says she “never spoke to” Joe and Jerry, “never had anything to do with them. They weren’t my type.… My type was more sophisticated than they were, more affluent than they were.”
Easier to trace were Clark Kent’s roots, at least the ones outside the comics. His first name came from Gable, the king of Hollywood and star of Mutiny on the Bounty, and his last name was borrowed from a less well known film star of that era, Kent Taylor. His reporting style was based partly on the kind of journalist Jerry had once fancied becoming himself, when he doubted his comics would sell. A better model was Wilson Hirschfeld, the crusading reporter and managing editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and a high school classmate of Jerry and Joe’s. The three had worked together on the Torch, and dreamed up stories together on the front porch of Wilson’s home. Hirschfeld, who died in 1974, alternately confirmed and denied that he was Clark, although a warm condolence card from Jerry after Wilson’s death helped settle the case for the Hirschfeld family.
Clark’s parentage inside the comics remained more ambiguous through the 1930s and 1940s. The couple who found and raised him at first were simply called “the Kents.” Ten years on, in a comic book published in the winter of 1948, his foster parents got first names: John and Mary, although those names appeared not in the text but on the Kents’ gravestones. A year later Pa Kent would inexplicably become Silas, and it would take until the 1950s for the couple to settle in as Martha and Jonathan. From the first the Kents were big-hearted. They saved the baby boy who rocketed into their world, adopted and raised him as their own, and imbued him with a mission. “No man on Earth has the amazing powers you have. You can use them to become a powerful force for good!” John admonished from his deathbed. “There are evil men in this world … criminals and outlaws who prey on decent folk! You must fight them … in cooperation with the law! To fight those criminals best, you must hide your true identity! They must never know Clark Kent is a … super-man! Remember, because that’s what you are … a Superman!”
Inspired though that message was, it was not original. Nearly identical passages had appeared six years earlier in yet another medium, the novel. It was written by George Lowther, a scriptwriter for the Superman radio show, and had the same title as that show: The Adventures of Superman. It was the first full-fledged book ever centered on a comic character, and Lowther was the first writer other than Jerry Siegel to get credit for writing a Superman tale. The comic strips’ Jor-L and Lora became Jor-el and Lara in Lowther’s book, and those spellings stuck although Jor-el became Jor-El. The Kents, too, got new names here: Sarah and Eben. Lowther fleshed out the worlds of Superman’s parents on Krypton and his foster parents on Earth. His longest-lasting contribution to the mythos was having Clark slowly discover his powers during his teens, which made him more empathetic and believable. “It was not until his thirteenth year that the incident occurred that was to set him apart from ordinary humans,” Lowther wrote. “Clark watched the teacher as she poked about in the desk drawer, and as he did so he became slowly aware that he was also looking at the inside of the desk, that his eyes had pierced the wood.… The simple truth was that he had looked through the desk as though the wood were transparent.”
Such narratives about Superman’s growing pains were captivating to adolescent readers who imagined themselves in Superman’s place. The Superman legend had never waded into any of that. The Kents hid from him his otherworldly origins; he didn’t don his Superman identity until he was an adult; and his childhood took up just eight panels in the first Superman comic book and two fewer in Action 1. Jerry Siegel realized what a rich trove he had glossed over and now proposed a comic focusing on the pranks of a noncostumed character he called Superboy. Detective picked up the idea—minus the whimsy and with a costume—while Jerry was in the Army, launching a feature that explored Superman’s adventures growing up in the Midwest. It began in 1945 in More Fun Comics, a year later switched to Adventure Comics, and in 1949 Superboy got a comic book of his own. For the first time, readers learned how Martha Kent had stitched her adopted son’s playsuit into a red-and-blue cape and tights, and how she used glass from his rocket ship to make Clark’s special eyeglasses. The stories were not just about Superboy but about a Saturday Evening Post world of picket fences that needed painting and apple pies warming in brick ovens. Fans went wild—young ones new to the legend and their parents who had grown up with Superman and The Saturday Evening Post—making Superboy the most popular new title of 1949, a time when most superheroes were fading away.
If learning about his roots on Krypton had humanized Superman, learning what he was like as a boy softened him. To his young fans, girls as much as boys, he was more than ever one of them. Yet even as the new stories answered questions that kids had asked since the beginning, they raised concerns that would take years more for Superman’s handlers to sort out: How could Superboy know about his origins long before Superman did? How could there even be a Superboy if, as the earliest Action and Superman stories made clear, Clark didn’t acquire the Superman costume and identity until he was an adult?
Those questions mattered to readers and writers but not to Harry and Jack. By the mid-1940s they had a better fix on who was buying comic books. The most devoted audience was kids aged six to eleven, with 95 percent of boys and 91 percent of girls reading them regularly. The numbers slowly declined in successive age groups, but even at age thirty half of the men in America and about 40 percent of the women were poring over comic books occasionally, and many were still steady fans. That helped explain the 150 different titles that jockeyed for space on newsstand racks, accounting for record monthly sales of forty million. Detective now faced competition from Fawcett, Timely, Dell, Street & Smith, and a series of other publishers, while Superman was going head-to-head with the likes of Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Bulletman. While they wanted to give kids the new Superboy stories they craved, Jack and Harry also wanted to satisfy adults who were devoted to the old Superman tales they’d been raised on. The solution: Reap profits from both old titles and new, contradictions be damned.
The adult Superman was getting a different sort of makeover. Joe Shuster had drawn a sticklike superhero whose skimpy facial expressions were difficult to see, not to mention read. By the late 1940s, Wayne Boring was setting the standard with a more muscular Man of Steel whose face was chiseled, whose jaw jutted onto the page, and who had more stature, bulk, and gravitas than his early incarnation. It was an image that fit with a Superman who had gone from leaping to flying and whose powers were perpetually expanding. Everything around him got bigger, too, from city skyscrapers to the S emblem on his chest. His world was now as outsized as his place in it.
Superman and those he treasured were not the only ones who were evolving. Those he loathed were, too. His first enemy to appear in a costume was the Archer, who, once Superman unmasked him as Quigley the big-game hunter, confessed that “I thought hunting human beings would prove more profitable!” Superman: “Any kid could tell you that crime doesn’t pay, Mr. Quigley.” The Prankster, the Toyman, the Puzzler, and J. Wilbur Wolfingham, a W. C. Fields lookalike, used tricks and gags instead of a bow and arrows in their bids to conquer Superman. For editors wary of controversy, 1940s villains like those were a way to avoid the sharp edges of the real world. For a nation weary of war, they offered a release. For Superman, the masters of disguise and the tricksters let him demonstrate that his wit was at least as potent as his fists in battling bad guys.
While none of those villains lasted long, Lex Luthor did. When he first turned up in the spring of 1940 he had a full mop of bright red hair. By that summer he was gray, and a year later he was as bald as the evil Super-Man of Jerry and Joe’s high school imaginations. What didn’t change was Luthor’s determination to take down Superman on his way to mastering the universe. In their first encounter Superman confronted him, asking, “What sort of creature are you?” Luthor answered with candor if not modesty: “Just an ordinary man—but with th’ brain of a super-genius! With scientific miracles at my fingertips, I’m preparing to make myself supreme master of th’ world!”
It is true that you can judge a man by his enemies, and Luthor had a way of bringing out in Superman both his vulnerabilities and his invincibility. From that opening encounter Lex drew on the full mix of villainous tactics—zapping Superman with an all-powerful ray gun, fomenting war as part of his scheme to grab power, and kidnapping Lois Lane. He tested Superman’s mettle and exploited his soft spot. But in the end the Man of Steel smashed to bits the ray gun, talked the warring parties into signing an armistice, and rescued Lois. Holding her in his arms, he announced, “And that’s th’ end of Luthor!” If only it were true. Having created the closest thing Superman would ever get to a nemesis, Jerry and Joe were not about to let him die.
Mr. Mxyztplk, a bald imp who wore a purple suit and derby, was a different sort of adversary: He had superpowers but no interest in world domination. That had been his goal when he arrived on Earth from the fifth dimension, but he decided it would be more fun to discombobulate Superman by playing pranks on him, the way Bugs Bunny did with Elmer Fudd. What he hadn’t counted on was that the no-nonsense superhero could be as playful as he was. Superman learned he could send the little man back for at least a month to his home world of Zrfff if he could trick him into saying his name backward—Klptzyxm. So he came up with a different way to do it every time they met. “Let’s test your eyesight,” the Man of Steel teased his adversary in one such meeting, after convincing him he was losing his sight. “There are three small signs 20 miles from here! If you can read them off, fast …” Before he could finish, Mxyztplk was breezing through sign one, sign two, and finally: “It says, ‘Oxygen! Hydrogen! Nitrogen! Klptzyxm—’ Oops—I spoke the word that’s sending me back to Zrfff!”
Jerry Siegel said he invented the elfin character to give Superman and his readers “a change of pace” after all the battles against deadly adversaries like Luthor. “I think it added something to the feature to show Superman tangling with a magical foe who enjoyed making the idol of millions uncomfortable on his super-pedestal.” What made editors at Detective Comics uncomfortable was having to spell the Zrfffian’s name. One time when they typed it wrong—Mxyzptlk instead of Mxyztplk—the misspelling somehow stuck.
Names already were an obsession for Detective’s writers and artists, most of whom had transformed theirs for reasons of art or assimilation, so it is not surprising that they had fun with the names of their characters. With Superman their obsession was nicknames, the best gift you can give a friend. Man of Steel was the most used, but he also was known then or later as the Last Son of Krypton, Metropolis Marvel, Kryptonian, Citizen Fix-It, Wonder Worker, Man of Tomorrow, Champion of the Underdog, Champion of the Oppressed, Champion of Democracy, Champion of Justice, Colossus of Krypton, World’s Mightiest Hero, World’s Mightiest Citizen, Man of Might, Big Blue, Big Blue Boy Scout, Big Blue Cheese, Action Ace, Smallville, Strange Visitor, King of Speed, and, the simplest and most intimate, Supes.
The era that stretched from the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s became known as the Golden Age of comic books. It was a time when the comic book became an accepted art form and the superhero played a central role in American culture. Fans would look back longingly as comics hit a rough patch in the 1950s, with fewer heroes and plummeting sales. The dawn of the earlier, more hopeful era was marked by the birth of Superman. Its last important title was the Superboy comic launched in 1949. Who better to bookend comics’ gilded age than its reigning monarch? And in Superman’s case it wasn’t just a Golden Age of comic books but of comic strips, dramatic radio broadcasts, pioneering animation, and wildly successful movie serials. Superman was jumping from medium to medium just as Americans were, responding to society’s likes and dislikes and, just as often, shaping them.