SUPERMAN

Superman is the most important character to come out of American comic books and one of the most popular icons that American culture has ever produced. First conceived in 1933 by high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman debuted in the June 1938 issue of National Periodicals' (later called DC Comics) Action Comics. Emerging from a nexus of immigrant culture, New Deal sensibilities, and male adolescent insecurities, Superman found phenomenal success, helped to launch the fledgling comic book industry, and heralded a new era in the marketing of youth fantasies as consumer culture.

Superman was a science-fiction character whose origin mirrored the immigrant heritage of his young Jewish creators. Fleeing from a doomed planet, an infant arrives in the American heartland, is adopted by an elderly couple, demonstrates amazing physical strength and invulnerability, and grows up to take his place in the urban middle class as newspaper reporter Clark Kent. Shy, bespectacled, and unpopular in school, Siegel and Shuster created a two-sided character representing both how the world saw them and how they imagined themselves. The mild-mannered and, in the terminology of a later generation, nerdy Clark Kent was only a façade to disguise the heroic Superman. It was a compelling fantasy for a generation of powerless and insecure young males.

With his impossible abilities and colorful costume, Superman was so deeply rooted in a young imagination that Siegel and Shuster failed to sell their idea to the middle-aged businessmen who managed the newspaper syndicates. After years of frustration and rejection, they finally sold the publishing rights for the sum of $130 to a tiny comic book company soon to be known as DC Comics. Within a few years, Superman comic books were selling over a million copies per month.

Cast as a "champion of the oppressed," Superman was a wise-cracking hero for common Americans menaced by the forces of greed and corruption. Pitted against crooked stockbrokers, heartless businessmen, and "merchants of death" who plotted to embroil the nation in foreign wars, Superman struck a heroic balance somewhere between the righteous violence of hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade and the benevolent interventionism of Franklin Roosevelt. Within a few years, spectacular commercial success and the demands of a world war would tame Superman into a much more conservative icon of stability. But in his formative period, no other hero in American culture spoke more directly and colorfully to the economic, social, and personal dislocations of a generation coming of age during the Great Depression.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniels, Les. Superman, the Complete History: The Life and Times of the Man of Steel. 1998.

Fleischer, Max, and Dave Fleischer, directors. The Complete Superman Cartoons. Image Entertainment, 2002.

Siegel, Jerry, and Joe Shuster. Superman: The Action Comics Archives, vol. 1. 1998.

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. 2001.