On the newsstands in May 1938, browsers had their choice of Tarzan in Comics on Parade, Popeye in King Comics, daredevil aviator Captain Desmo in New Adventure Comics, or some caped guy smashing a sedan in this new title, Action Comics.
Readers who opened the magazine met Superman in medias res, running through the night with a bound-and-gagged woman under his arm. The story was rearranged from a long-unsold newspaper strip by Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
The Man of Tomorrow was racing to deliver evidence that would secure the governor’s pardon for an innocent prisoner who was about to be executed.
From the first, in the hardscrabble Depression era, this giant of a man was looking out for the little people — people-the battered wives, the victims of lynch mobs, the abused orphans and prisoners, the citizens betrayed by corrupt Washington politicians.
“He stood up for the underdog, the little guy/gal, the downtrodden,” recalled comics historian Johnny Williams. “He was the ‘anti-bully.’”
As writer Tom De Haven noted, “When Jerry Siegel wrote every story, Superman functioned as a freelance do-gooder with the demeanor and gumption of a laughing caballero, a rabble-rouser devoted to ameliorating social ills with his fantastic powers.”
“Whatever he does, he does philanthropically, often for just one poor soul in despair (having been swindled, wrongfully jailed, or driven by the powerful to the brink of suicide) but always, too, for the common good. He accepts no reward, modestly waves off any applause.”
Clark Kent wasn’t “virtue signalin.,” He was virtuous in an era when the values of decency and honesty were repaid with poverty and anxiety.
“Superman’s America was something of a paradox — a land where the virtue of the poor and the weak towered over that of the wealthy and powerful,” wrote Bradford Wright in Comic Book Nation. “Yet the common man could not expect to prevail in America, and neither could the progressive reformers who tried to fight for justice within the system. Only the righteous violence of Superman, it seemed, could relieve deep social problems — a tacit recognition that in American society, it took some might to make right, after all.”
As writer Mark Waid observed, Superman was “…as close as contemporary Western culture has yet come to envisioning a champion who is the epitome of unselfishness.”
De Haven noted that the first Superman strips represented “…a hodgepodge of elements freely borrowed from science fiction (Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series, John W. Campbell’s novel The Mightiest Machine and of course Philip Wylie’s Gladiator); from the adventure pulps (Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Shadow, Doc Savage) and the funny papers (Popeye, The Phantom, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon). But it was a synthesis, too, artless and sincere, something … different; something, as the illustrator Jim Steranko points out (in his modestly titled Steranko History of Comics) that ‘embodied and amalgamated three separate and distinct themes: the visitor from another planet, the superhuman being and the dual identity.’”
Those rejected newspaper panels, crudely reassembled for inclusion in a 10-cent throwaway rag for kids, channeled a power to fire the imagination that ignited an industry, founded a popular cultural genre, and still echoes around us in another century.
In summer 1998, exactly 60 years after Superman first appeared, artist Jon Bogdanove and writer Louise Simonson revamped his debut exploit for Superman: The Man of Steel 80, providing the familiar fable with a late-millennial polish.
Then and now, it still works. Timeless tales always do.
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