The Superman (Part 2)
3
My efforts to write the third part of this piece have been a lot tougher on me than I had anticipated, truthfully. To the best of my knowledge, the history of the development of Superman as a character and symbolic figure was as I had described in the previous two parts; first a text piece by the just-barely-out-of-high school Siegel and Schuster followed by the idiosyncratic Detective Dan-inspired and Dick Tracy-adjacent single issue that didn't sell, the whirlwind development of strips in 1934 and their eventual fortuitous placement in the newly-developed Action Comics as the cover story for its very first issue. In pinning down details to discuss, however, rather than sort of gesturing vaguely toward Superman without reference, I found a vexing and ever-populating web of fascinating parallel lives of the character, developmental paths explored that led inevitably to the character we know but in greater number than I'd anticipated. I did not know, for instance, that Schuster was not Siegel's first choice for the character after the failure of The Superman to find a publisher. Instead, briefly convincing himself that the issue wasn't with the material but with the star power of the names attached, he briefly cut Schuster out of the character they'd created together to write to bigger names in the comic strip world, such as Leo O'Mealia, artist of Fu Manchu, and Russell Keaton, artist of Buck Rogers.
Little remains of either set of exchanges and most of the material pertaining to it was only made public after it was entered into public record as part of the lawsuit Laura Siegel, the daughter of Jerry Siegel, filed against DC Entertainment on behalf of her father in large part to acquire literally any kind of stipend for him. Siegel and Schuster, the two co-creators of not just the great comics character of all time but the single character upon whose back the whole of the colossal world of superhero comics evolved from, the first of the primordial creations of the deep to crawl onto land, very nearly died penniless in illness; even after the lawsuit, it amounted to pennies earned against the untold millions and billions of dollars generated by their creation. Part of that lawsuit, which isn't the center of this piece to be clear, was in establishing that the character of Superman pre-existed his publication in Action Comics #1 and as such was not a solicited work whose ownership would default to the soliciting editor but was in fact one possessed by Siegel and Schuster. In pursuit of this, she divulged a number of documents as evidence, including most all of what we know about the interim forms of the character between the prose piece and the eventual emergence of the character in 1938.
In the reoriented script and pitch notes Siegel sent to O'Mealia, we see the continuing thread of the influence of the science-hero on him. Science-hero is a term coined by Alan Moore, legend and arguably greatest writer of comics, at least superhero comics, of all time, specifically to denote heroes with a science fictional rather than magical, supernatural, or wholly inexplicable origin. The term as he uses it, both in his comics work of the 2000s as well as in brief essays and theory work he's done, exists as an interim form between the mythic hero of religion and mysticism (parallel to the folk hero, or superhuman figure of common humanity) and the superhero, the later caped-and-cowled form that would drive comics as an industry for decades. The science-hero, per Alan Moore, is one with not just a science fictional origin but also a certain motif to their action; the superspy or superdetective fall under the umbrella of the science-hero, reliant more on gadgets and technology than proper superpowers. In juxtaposition to the mythic image of the Nietzschean superman, this figure would be akin to the engineer individualists of Ayn Rand, taking the image of the corporate industrialist and amplifying it to 11. This Randian self-interest and the supremacy of science over the world is not an incidental element in the history of comics; she was not only popular in broader cultural space, being one of the key figures to rewrite libertarianism from a predominantly socialist anarchism to the much more right-wing form we know now, but was also one of the chief inspirations of Steve Ditko, co-creator and major artist behind a number of all-time great heroes, moronic personal politics aside. The image of science as root of heroism was one of conflicted value: World War I, only recently finished, wasn't the first mass mechanized war but it was the most catastrophically brutal, seeing armored tanks and airplanes and gas attacks, all figures of science fiction rather than fact themselves only a decade or two before, wielded toward mass death. That Siegel and Schuster saw the science hero as one leaning perhaps toward an inherent villainy as shown in their prose piece "The Reign of the Superman" I don't think can be extracted from this context and make sense. Where others were committing whole-heartedly to the figure of the science-hero, warts and all, Siegel showed more trepidation.
The evolving science-hero figure Siegel presented was no longer a super-detective made near invincible due to the powers of science, let alone a psychic empowered by theosophical spiritualism and hypnotic force brought to bear by a potion. Instead, this new Superman was a time traveler from the far future, when advances in science made common life itself seem superhuman, with extensions of the durability of the flesh, the strength of the muscles and bones, and the intensification of the senses and the mind. On learning that the Earth of the future was about to be destroyed, he builds a time machine, sending himself back to 1935, then the near-future, in order to live a life unimpeded by disaster. This in turn naturally leads to fighting injustice, finding that his natural power so exceeds his new peers that outrages can now be dealt with directly. As we can see in this version, there is a minor complexity to the view of science and technology. In juxtaposition to fin de siecle techno-optimism like that espoused by H G Wells, Edward Bellamy and others, who saw in scientism the pathway toward an idyllic socialist future per Engels, Siegel in that post-WWI position of earned cynicism clearly saw it at least as somewhat a threat. The end of the Earth in this version is not deeply elaborated on, but it is implied to be due to the scientist-government of the future world itself. In one deft move, Siegel would be able to establish the dual edge of scientific advancement, albeit at the cost of a narrative priding the individual against the broadly social. This is an interesting position, given that a speaker at the Milwaukee Socialist Party claimed at the time, not disputed by either Siegel or Schuster, to have given a lecture at their party hall regarding how the world of abundance offered by socialism would one day lead to the common man becoming like a superman, a sentiment he claimed inspired their creation and one we can see within this model.
This version of Superman is the first time we see him as an otherwise common man albeit from a seemingly uncommon time and place. At no point in the material Siegel sent O'Mealia do we see an indication that Superman was a particularly superlative example of his future world. He is not a genius scientist, time machine notwithstanding of course, nor is he particularly fit or wise or any other ubermenschian trait we had previously seen associated with pulp heroes, such as Doc Savage or Allan Quartermain or Tarzan. Instead, he was of the common people, at least of his time, a people that had become wildly enhanced in their natural capabilities due to the aforementioned socialist abundance reshaping the world of the future. This is an image we see often in the utopian and socialist science fiction of the fifty or so years prior to this, created in that liminal window where Marx and Engels' ideas were spreading and were seen often as the milder reformist counterpart to the very active and occasionally quite violent anarchism of the day. This is, of course, not a knock to the brave anarchists of the late 1800s and early 1900s; it was by their labor we won many necessary rights and likewise say in that brief time a blessed union of anarchist, socialist and communist forces toward common goals. Symbolic interest here for this Superman comes largely from the juxtaposition of his power versus the common man of the 1930s. It is meant, of course, to show the capacity for limitless human potential, which given our lacking understanding of certain biological limits of the body at the time were often gesturing toward this very literalized image of the superman. What results is an image of clear intention but interestingly mixed results.
On paper, this juxtaposition's goal is clear: the Superman must guide humanity toward the greatness he possesses, for it is just an image of the natural latent greatness of all humanity. However, we have to remember he comes from an Earth on the precipice of destruction, a destruction which, in that earliest pitch at least, is left vague. If we bend time to use the earliest examples from Superman itself as a guide, then its death would come via old age rather than science-induced calamity. Still, it is a world that is not fated to die in some abstract sense, viewing the long tail of causality and physics toward some ultimate doom, but actively dying, and one on which humanity is in a cursed state of actively witnessing that demise. We likewise have the of course McGuffined plot element that he is the only one to escape, done largely to triage future storytelling rather than a deliberately conceptualized thematic and symbolic element (at least not yet). But this still leads to a symbolically muddled event where an ubermensch sits among the common man, radically outclassing them in every way.
The Darwinian eugenicist sentimentality hadn't yet even by the 1930s been stripped from progressive, radical and revolutionary spaces; we have to remember that this view of it being an ultimately and fundamentally fascistic doctrine largely emerged historically only in the midst of and the wake of World War II and the Nazi regime's utilization of it. Siegel almost certainly did not intend for this quite aristocratic and progressivist in the literal sense image of the superman, but still it emerges. It is founded in a fundamental way on the notion of the progressive development of culture and society in a rather linear manner. This creates an odd temporal dynamic; futurians by their nature become the superior race in a rather literal way, possessing greater wisdom, physical ability and know-how to a degree that affirms rather than undercuts anti-socialist understandings, underscores the natural aristocracy of being albeit one founded on time and development rather than a time-flattened one. Most analytics of aristocracy versus polity in socialist theory (hell, even fascist theory) exist without an integrated t-vector; in terms of discussing whether a time displaced person fits or defeats the theory-class of the aristocrat, we are in the woods without a compass. We do have a natural inclination, however; the Sentinelese islands, off the coast of Myanmar, have long lived a seclusionist life, signalling that they want no contact whatsoever from modern man, going so far as to fire spears and arrows at people (largely Christian proselytizers) to keep them at bay. We see in this dynamic an example of a time-flattened relationship, where the presumptive progress of modern man is held up against a native and "backward" people. Some of you will naturally wince at that sentence; this indicates our already-existing position on this notion, that futurity and progression does not inherently justify an aristocratic position. That people encroach upon their islands, however, is indicative likewise of the venality of modernity that can at once spurn aristocracy writ large while embracing it for the self. This is, ironically, the inherent paradox of individualism, which produces and wields classes while at the same time disavowing them, attempting to create grounds for the development of self but depriving others of the same for fear of the (at times quite catastrophic) consequences. I don't have a solution to this problem; it's one that still vexes the right wing, in their battle of aristocratic autocrats versus populist feral jackasses, as well as the left wing, in the management of a bureaucratic state versus a flattened holocratic one. Thank you to Eugene Thacker and Dominic Pettman for their book Sad Planets which provided a lot of material for this.
It is notable as well that in this early iteration of Superman sent as a pitch to O'Mealia, we see as well the final time Superman would be depicted as an adult within his own origin. The shift obviously has much more ramifications on the other side of it, but here on the position of power being acquired as an adult, it produces the same recurring question they opened for themselves back in "The Reign of the Superman"; what occurs to a person when they acquire such great power? Both the superdetective iteration of the Superman along with this time-traveling variant position the figure as more noble, albeit in a complex and still shaded manner, juxtaposed against their natural cynicism in that first story. The power, for instance, in this time traveling iteration is a wholly unexpected and unintended consequence, the first time this particular element enters the equation. As a result, the latent egomania and megalomania inherent to the seizing of great power, to by will become an ubermensch not just in terms of actualizing your own potential greatness but to do so specifically in relation to the commonality of all humanity, is stripped from the event of ascendency. Here, the superman emerges in 1935 and discovers to their shock the tremendous nature of their power in relation to the world. It is in this moment that they actively choose to pursue heroism, albeit one rooted in a street-level Jewish viewpoint in the Depression era, where being rough-and-tumble was accepted as a necessary component sometimes to presumptive nobility. (A position we, thankfully, seem to be returning to.) Superman here seems shockingly banal and imperfect, in sharp contrast to the two previous iterations. This question, of what to do upon the reception of impossible power that separates you obviously and forcefully from a world you used to be and still long to be enmeshed in, becomes central to the symbolic function of Superman. Here, it emerges seemingly by accident, a quirk of design plucked from aping science fiction novels to generate a super-powered street level hero. Why so many heroes were constructed in similar measures but failed to achieve the symbolic density and gravity that Superman has is one of the great and fascinating mysteries of social, literary and cultural studies.
4
The next Superman toward which the Superman we know would emerge from would in fact be the final historical link before that common history began. Following the failure of his work with Lee O'Mealia to be accepted by the Bell Syndicate as a daily strip, for which O'Mealia had produced two weeks worth of strips that Siegel apparently never even got to see, he was put in touch with Russell Keaton, artist then of an aviation comic strip but, more importantly, shadow-artist for Buck Rogers. Keaton was a younger fellow, closer to Siegel in age despite his relatively high-profile gigs. Interestingly, Siegel would pitch to O'Mealia in the interim between contacting Keaton and officially ending work with O'Mealia on the idea of collecting their strips into a standalone comics magazine featuring the Superman. O'Mealia, surveying the landscape at the time, one in which the failure of Detective Dan, which had inspired the second comic book-length draft of The Superman with Siegel, had failed to sell so spectacularly that it shut down the Superman pitch despite interest from the publisher, told Siegel it would be a bad idea. Comics, at least ones that were Westerns or romances or talking animals, didn't sell. Quaint, in retrospect.
Obviously, the version with Keaton didn't sell either. It's practical history is substantially more sparse than even the exchanges and work with O'Mealia, which seemed only to not generate any archival material because of the tremendously poor attitude toward that kind of work being worthy of archive at all. Michael Chabon dives into this superlatively in his remarkable The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel obviously and openly deeply inspired by Siegel and Schuster and the complex lives and professional relationships they maintained before, during, and after the creation of Superman, in his novel rerendered as the Escapist (obviously merging elements of Mister Miracle into the figure as well, indicating Chabon had if not a strong knowledge of comics himself than at least very capable people in his orbit). The attitude at the time was one that simultaneously sought to openly exploit cheap work-for-hire to generate a steady income while also in the same breath decrying it as worthless enough that reusing old papers and burning drafts rather than paying for storage was a more effective use of money. This was in part due to short-sightedness, sure, but it was also in large part due to the heinous working conditions of working people in general, where their labor must hold the paradoxical position of important and valuable enough to actively exploit them for but simultaneously not valuable enough to offer decent pay or esteem. That in this case it was a latent and brewing form of what would become iconic American art, one of our few active contributions to the field, is immaterial; in the world of labor rights and exploitation, all are by brute force of class warfare made equal.
There was only one change to the Superman within this iteration that we know of, but it was a major one. In it, he was still a time traveler sent to 1930s America to escape a dying future world. But in this version, he was a three-year old, sent by his parents to save his life. He is hurled to the past, where is found by a couple of passing motorists, Sam and Molly Kent, who deliver him to an orphanage until his immense might proves too troublesome and they adopt him instead. They teach him to serve humanity with his great power, raise him with firm Midwestern values, and send him off into the world. He is described in the pitch material and continuities as having an athletic uniform when he is Superman to differentiate him from his civilian form, Clark Kent.
Obviously our interest here is less in the specifics themselves as much as how those specifics tilt the symbolic landscape of Superman as a figure. The shift of him being sent as a toddler rather than an adult offers a complex pivot. Where before the genetic supremacy and eugenicist component was implicit, more emerging via the progressivist Darwinian landscape, here we have something that on its surface is a strong step closer to being explicit. The understanding of epigenetics versus genetics, basically the somatic and physiological end of "nature vs. nurture" rather than the purely psychological, wasn't understood then as well as now, but we did at least have a functioning grasp of it. Things like nutrition and fitness had begun to be prescribed not just as ways to strengthen the body but at also as a way of aiding the development of children. We get a complex image then, one of the natural genetic superiority of the Superman due to his temporal displacement and the developmentalism of the human body, but likewise his immersion in 1930s America, still in the throes of the Great Depression, would act as a great leveler in certain ways. We forget sometimes as well that the era in which Superman emerges in the world also has a striking effect on his symbolic value. By emerging in the Depression, discovered by common people of the Midwest, he is not spared the hardships of his time or of the most downtrodden. Siegel himself wrote that the opening of "The Reign of the Superman", penned only about a year and a half before, included a lengthy scene surveying the breadline and its deprivations with the scientist who creates the potion scowling at those in line, with it specifically noted that having grown up in wealth himself and having never suffered the deprivations of poverty, he was especially inured to their suffering. This, of course, sets the ironic reversal when a vagabond of that same line, unlikely to be missed should the experiment go awry, is plucked up for the powers, only to turn about and kill the fat cat scientist without a second thought. But where that version of the Superman cuts a complex moral figure, descending into evil but clearly as a result of the embitterment of his suffering, here we see a young Superman, raised without awareness of his shocking origins in far-future Earth, being raised in the simple and decent if hardship-laden environments of his time.
It's precisely this shift which grounds not just the character's moral invective toward helping the downtrodden but also the beginnings of the slow overturning of the more deplorable aristocratic images of the superman as a Nietzschean figure of will-to-power. The self-possession still exists, with his remarkable might on display at the orphanage he is dropped off at, but the question of the usage of power emerges. This is a place where we still see current thinks and writers and artists flounder; the naive position that power corrupts is often used as a cowards escutcheon to not just impugn the powerful but to abandon all positions where power might be accrued. This feels good, being incorruptible, but its venality is revealed when we see the brute truth that power still remains and is wielded then exclusively by the wicked. The mere possession of power does not make someone become corrupted. Yes, we have the classic Deleuzean thresholding problem where, just like matter changes properties quite suddenly as pressure and temperature cause it to shift phases, people can undergo sudden and unexpected psychological shifts under certain conditions. (This underscores as well the base venality of thoughts about the inherent goodness or badness of people, viewing them as either incorruptible or irredeemable, believing there to be some enduring moral character of a person devoid of the circumstances and conditions of their life and thus immutable no matter what we might do. This is a model, by the way, exclusively used for the formations of classes and the inevitable creation of an aristocracy and an untouchable slave class; be wary of those preaching it.) Here, the richer question finally becomes implied: if one is not inherent corrupted by power of this magnitude, what must be done with it to remain good? What level of proactive moral action versus passively holding positions you don't act on or speak about? And, given the sometimes hurtful and pained unexpected consequences of actions we presumed good, what do we do in this world of motion?
That final question is one I see a great deal of moral and ethical thinkers flounder on, whether they position themselves as philosophers, thought leaders, influencers, posters or even just figures in their community. This arises in large part due to a common stance now that the impact of actions, the harm, doesn't just matter more than the intent but that the intent doesn't matter at all. This is a useful position in the narrowband of correcting an over-reliance on the pre-emptive position of an event, valuing what was intended to happen over what did. But this also mutilates often what the proper moral and ethical response to an event should be, whether by the actor, the impacted, or the community observing and surrounding it. This is, in fact, why the notion and legal class of things like manslaughter were created; there is a demonstrable and obvious difference between a horrible accident that nonetheless results in the loss of life versus a premeditated and calculated murder, and while both might end up with the same amount of dead, treating both equally as punitively is horribly unjust. The problem of justice here isn't just abstract. One element of the quite venal nature of people who, driven by their very real pain and trauma, become possessed by an insatiable desire for retribution is that they become blind to the conditions they create that will in turn effect future action. If, knowing that there is no difference in how you will be treated between an honest accident or a calculate act of evil, you were to find yourself in the midst of an event like that unfolding, what would you do?
It's easy to flatter ourselves, but we already see the mild version of this play out constantly; in workplace relationships where you find yourself late to work for one reason or another, knowing you are going to be chastised and demeaned by your superior the same way no matter what, you resign yourself to it and act as normal. When we create these responses that are themselves programmed to be unresponsive to context and condition, we also create the conditions for people to resign themselves to the reality of their act and have demonstrably no reason to pull back or lessen its intent. We likewise see in the mass shooter the same; knowing that you will be killed when you exit (presuming you are not shooting predominantly people of color, in which repugnantly you will be taken to Burger King instead), do you take hostages or just shoot to kill? People often take a naive and short-sighted view of the real task of architectures of morality, ethics and justice, believing it satisfactory if we can answer specific events well, either unaware or willfully blind to how this sabotages the future. That this question emerged now within the development of Superman as a character altered not just the narrative direction of the character, including later developments such as the red kryptonite that would turn him evil or the various inverted incarnations of the character such as Bizarro, General Zod, Cyborg Superman, Superboy Prime or even later his own father under the name Mr. Oz many decades later, but also the symbolic heft of the character. The defining trait of Superman in many ways is not his near-infinite power but the way he wrestles with the question of adequate use of power, when to intervene and when not, the agony of not being able to respond to every simultaneous privation or how the necessity of rest subdues him and allows harm to come, and more questions along those lines. People are right that Superman is in ways fundamentally boring. But that's because at heart, he is a philosophical character whose greatest conflicts emerge from that space, where the resolution to mere fisticuffs is often the final stage of solving intractable problems he faces.
At this point in Superman's development, he is not yet a god amongst the world. Certain depths of the question of adequate use of power are held back. However, we do see the first instance of dual parentage and the questions and symbolic associations that brings. Lacking the divine context and solar god imagery, here it remains something closer to the question of a trans racial child, born of one ethnic or cultural space but raised in another without access to that original culture. The question of true parentage becomes pertinent, obviously answered here by a resolution of the genetic and the epigenetic. This, it turns out, is also the clear path out of potential fascist associations for the character. He passes from high to low, from the unbelievable might and abundance of the future world, still in this iteration destroyed by unnamed cataclysm rather than a specified and thus thematically potent event, into the hands of simple folk in the midst of the Depression. This aligns him not with one type of person but instead allows these separate aspects to touch one another. These dialectical events, sometimes wrongly gestured to as centrisms, are notable because they are distinct from both conceptual fields upwind of them. Identity in this manner is rarely if ever purely and singularly additive, merely one-and-another; instead, the alchemical fusion of two elements often produces a third shockingly different one. The term "confusion" emerged initially in alchemical literature as a term pertaining both to the spirits of things being con-fused, or merged with, each other but also as a literal term for what we would eventually call alloys. The importance of alloys in the development of humanity is literally unthinkable; without bronze, without the early iron refinements and alloys, without the ability to produce complex liquids and metals and gases through the countless millennia of alchemists, mystics, engineers and scientists, none of what we currently see of the world would have occurred, looking instead like a permanent zoo exhibit (given human-drive climate death and ecocollapse, maybe that's not to bad, but that's a different question). Sadly, we don't yet see the fruits of that choice in this iteration, given its lack of archival material.
Another important component from this transmission of a child is the first of many layers this event would accrue. Here, it reads as an inverted Moses with the same result, albeit hastened dramatically. In the story of Moses, the command of the pharaoh to kill every male Hebrew child, mirrored in the New Testament with King Herrod's similar proclamation leading to the flight of the family of Christ to Bethlehem to hide in a stable, causes his parents to swaddle him and place him in a reed basket which is then released in the river. Fortuitously, the basket is discovered by a princess of the pharaoh, who raises the child in the palace and teaches him he is of royal stock until fate intervenes and he becomes not only aware of his true parentage but also of the privation of his people. While the story of the Christ child obviously more closely mirrors the high-to-low transmission of the infant Superman, here we at least see the beginnings of that alchemical spirit. It is important in the tale of Moses that he not merely be a Hebrew fighting for his people nor a royal who betrays his class to fight for the oppressed masses but that he is both. It is by understanding both lives intimately, one by living it and the other by learning his true association with it, that the disparity between the two can come clearly into focus and the inherent violence of class stratification and racial segregation is made abundantly clear to him. We often see in Christian spaces and in fact several more conservative Jewish ones as well that this tale is stripped of its class consciousness and is instead relayed as a mere racial liberation. However, it is abundantly clear in the story that Moses, despite some words, sees no inherent segregation of the personhood of the Egyptians, the royals, or the Hebrews, and that his battle against injustice emerges singularly from that segregation. This is underscored by the plagues themselves. While the Hebrew people are often given, via Moses, ways to circumvent the events of the plagues, they are visited upon all of the people, not any one particular strata. This in turn mirrors the world-flood cataclysm of Noah, meted out against all of man, as well as the punishment of Adam and Eve, which flows downwind to all of the world. The recurring message, especially if we take it back to the garden, is of the native humility and unity of humanity and lack of any inherent hierarchical or aristocratic form in any true sense. Funnily enough, this passage from high to low mirrors more closely another figure in the history of class warfare, that of Engels, who turned away in part from the industrial inheritance he was owed by his parents by funnelling those funds into both the production and distribution of socialist literature before getting involved in writing it and expanding its theories himself.
So too is it with this Superman, from here on forward. One of the few stories we know to be committed to strips in this version, a story of a star football player being taken out by rivals requiring Superman to both locate and save the player while also assisting the team that has been unjustly wronged, feels like a flippant kind of nothing conflict, but it underscores this sense of the equal value of all things. To this Superman, injustice is injustice, and the process of battling it and the rot it can induce in the heart (including the aforementioned wrathfulness that even victims of injustice can bear upon others in the wake of their trauma and pain) is a battle fought at every station. This comes directly from that dual-awareness, his unfathomable might and the implied potential aristocracy he represents melded with the salt-of-the-earth raw humanity of the Kents and the enduring decency of common humanity leading to an overthrow of all value. This ironically, at least to a certain kind of thinker, reaffirms the true Nietzschean role of the ubermensch, his superman, who emerges not to climb the ladder of existing social orders, classes and values but to smash them as a hammer to the idol and in the blankness of the new world allow each and all to become the fullness of their effulgence. After all, it is not the nature of laughing lions to give birth to birds and snakes but to more and more lions. But the shape of the symbolic heft of his origin would soon complicate much more in the reunion of Siegel and Schuster following the seemingly spontaneous abandonment of this iteration by Keaton, with a rapacious and quick period of drafting infused a great deal more of the defining lifeblood of the character.