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75 years of Superman By Luís Salvado Of the countless comic characters created over the last 150 or so years, Superman is the most famous of them all. The sum of elements that date right back to his beginnings, as powerful as they are unexpected, created that rarest of things: a totally original figure with a whole imaginary world created around him who earned mythical status and effectively changed the history of the medium to which he belonged. And in the process he became the template for an entire genre of superheroes which would become the most prolific in North American comics and elevate the comic book above the newspaper as the main format for their publication in the country. But more than this, Superman became a recognised symbol throughout the world and in every culture in comic form and in other mass media, such as radio, cinema and television, which expanded and reset the coordinates for later generations.
The origins of the myth The public caught its first glimpse of Superman on 18 April 1938, in one of the stories in the first issue of Action Comics, dated June 1938 on the front cover. This issue became so symbolic that the few original copies still surviving are valued today at roughly two million dollars. With a storyline by Jerry Siegel and artwork by Joe Shuster, the story covers 13 pages and recounts the adventures of a vigilante in a colourful suit from a destroyed planet living on Earth, where he uses his super powers to fight crime while maintaining a completely different alter ego, that of a shy and clumsy reporter. At the time, nobody could have foreseen that these two young men in their early 20s, friends since high school, had created a veritable myth, but the origins of the hero were not as humble as those of the two high-school friends who had been trying to make it in comics for years. Superman mixes very different references, in most cases almost certainly unconsciously. These range from comics themselves and popular literature (he has a tight costume like The Phantom, powers and a cape like Mandrake, an alter ego like the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro, invulnerability and super strength like Popeye, physical perfection and the name ‘Clark’ like Doc Savage, and special powers derived from living on a different planet like John Carter) to the greatest icons of Catholicism and Judaism and the classical mythologies (he is a powerful being who came down from heaven to help man like Jesus Christ, he was sent into the unknown as a baby so as not to die like Moses, he is practically a demigod like Heracles or Gilgamesh, and he has a weak spot like Samson, Achilles and Siegfried), without forgetting Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘Übermensch’.
A social and political hero (1938-1947) If the readers of the age were mostly unconscious of this cluster of references, the truth is that Superman became an immediate hit because he was an obvious, direct and visceral response to an era when the problems seemed increasingly super-human. The USA was
in an almost decade-long recession and a new war was looming on the horizon. Suddenly, there was a new hero on the scene, one who was clearly superior to anything depressing reality could throw at him and living in the same city as his readers and not on other planets or in distant jungles. Intergalactic adventures were still a thing of the future for the Man of Steel, who in his first year alone battled cruel landlords and organised gangs and exposed the government’s use of sub-standard materials in social housing, the war-mongering of arms manufacturers, the poor working conditions of miners and even the perils of dangerous driving. Superman was completely in tune with the age. He was the perfect fantasy from a psycho-analytical point of view since he empowered the weak who could dream of a world in which, behind their feeble and unprepossessing appearance, there secretly dwelled an almost omnipotent man after all. In fact, even compared to the superheroes who followed, he was singularly original, a fact which gained prominence recently when the lead character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill mentioned it but which Jules Feiffer had already put into words in 1965 in his seminal essay The Great Comic Book Heroes: he was born Superman and is Superman everyday he gets up; Clark Kent is merely a disguise. Superman is the real character and Kent his invention. More than that, Kent was a way of integrating into human society; it was the way he saw us and this is what allowed the reader to identify with the myth of omnipotence. Siegel and Shuster’s comics are crude by modern standards and were a million miles away from the quality published in the newspapers of the age, but they were superlative for the low standards of the comic books of that time. The stories were dynamic, vibrant and fast-paced and Shuster’s drawings captured the essential - the action, narrative and movement – to become the initial standard for this new industry. In that same period, the key elements in the saga quickly coalesced: prior to 1941 the existence of the planet of Krypton and his adoptive parents were established; his various powers defined; and his companions Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White introduced, not to mention his arch-enemy Lex Luthor. Reality also continued to accompany Superman. In 1940, the hero foresaw America’s official entry into WWII and confronted Hitler and Mussolini in a famous double spread drawn for Look magazine, teaming up with other heroes in later pages for the war effort. Superman created the concept of the costumed superhero and in the following years hundreds of similar characters followed in his footsteps, leading to the rapid expansion of the emerging comic-book medium which henceforth would replace newspapers as the preferred publishing format for comics in the USA. The popularity of the hero meant that he was quickly adapted to radio and cinema as early as the beginning of the 1940s, which further boosted his popularity and added other important elements to the myth: Kryptonite, the introduction “Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” on radio and the ability to fly in the excellent animated series produced by the Fleischer studios. At the same time, his popularity led to more standardised behaviour and adventures, which now had to satisfy the largest number of readers/listeners/viewers possible. Superman became the supreme symbol of the pure and uncorrupted hero and began to feature in