Superman had just destroyed the office of a corrupt patent attorney, and the police had him trapped in the elevator.
“Triumph blazed in Sergeant Blake’s eyes… ‘Careful men!’ he warned the officers grouped about him. ‘We’ve prayed for this break for months, and now that it’s come, we don’t want to muff it. He was seen going into that elevator … and he’s bound to come out of that door any minute!’
“ ‘And that’s what bothers me,’ muttered someone. ‘What do we do when he does emerge?’
“Said another: ‘Our guns are useless against him.’
“Nonsense!’ retorted Sergeant Blake. ‘All we’ve got to do is keep cool and we’ve got him!’
“But his glib comeback didn’t satisfy even the Detective Sergeant himself. There were some very wild tales being circulated about this fellow who called himself SUPERMAN. He was said to be a modern Robin Hood … a person who had dedicated his existence to assisting the weak and oppressed. It was whispered that he possessed super-strength, could lift tremendous weights, smash steel with his bare hands, jump over buildings, and that nothing could penetrate his amazingly super-tough skin. But of course, pondered the sergeant, these were mere rumors, fantastic fairy tales. Probably SUPERMAN was just an ordinary person whose better-than-average strength had been immensely exaggerated. Without a doubt!”
Blake’s bluster was featured in what was probably the first prose story written about Superman, a two-page text piece in Superman 1 (Summer 1939).
That issue also gave us the first version of Superman’s origin that mentions Krypton and his foster parents, stories reprinted from the first four issues of Action Comics in 1938, and a biography of Superman’s young creators, Siegel and Shuster, who wouldn’t always remain so popular with the publisher.
The opening of the elevator doors proved to be an anticlimax for the jumpy cops, because all that emerged was “a slim, nervous figure” whose “…meek eyes blinked fearfully behind thick-rimmed glasses.”
“I believe that Batman … or … The Batman, as well, was wanted by the police in the very early days of his comic book,” Bruce Kanin recalled. “A superhero being hunted by the police is guaranteed to be a short-lived thing, because before long, they realize that the superhero (almost by definition) is helping them and making their jobs easier. Still, it would be nice to have a few stubborn police who don’t want the superhero’s help, just to make things interesting.”
Or, as in Alan Moore’s Marvelman, you have a military-industrial complex that sees superheroes as an inherent threat to its power.
“When we teens learned about the ‘original’ Superman, we were fascinated…. but as time passed, as more and more we discovered Golden Age Comics, pulps, and material like pulps, I for one grew weary of the physical specimen who cannot be hurt, and does whatever he pleases,” Cheryl Spoehr said. “ I think my disgust with the paperback character of Remo Williams the Destroyer encouraged my disgust for ‘heroes’ who don’t care about or listen to others… and returned my interest to a man who could conquer and control the whole universe easily, yet chooses to stay on Earth, insulted and considered emasculated in his pose as an Earthman, and came out as himself only in costume!”
“More and more, the concept of vigilantes that take the law into their own hands to mete out ‘justice’ strikes me as fascist, and the continued popularity of such characters is troubling,” Paul Zuckerman wrote.
“DC early on recognized that with Superman and Batman … I never really read any of the pulps, so I didn’t know them well; the radio Shadow was the one that I was familiar with. As movies like Dirty Harry or Death Wish got popular, characters like the Punisher and, later, at DC, the new Vigilante increasingly took the law into their own hands. Batman himself got darker, as he is regularly shown torturing or beating people up, as if his code against killing is sufficient.”
And yet, if you find yourself in a world in which corporate and governmental leaders are corrupt, “the system” offers no protection. That’s something Zorro realized. We also have to remember what comes with great power.
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