The first day we were back in our offices after the summer, during
what's called “On-Call Week” (I keep telling them, “I'm not
that kind of doctor!”), one of my senior colleagues – a US historian – came to my office and said he had something to show me.
In his office he presented me with this book, which he said he had
received a few weeks ago, and during his reading he kept telling his
wife, “Kent would really like this book!” He was right about
that. He loaned it to me, and I finished it last night. It is
perhaps the best single book I've ever read on the greatest hero of
20th-century American pop culture, and a great introduction to a
genre of story-telling that, as evidenced by the majority of the
posts in this blog, I have loved since childhood and will continue to
love until the day I die. The author neatly places each within the changing
contexts from the era of their conception, the 1930s, all the way
until the present, when although the comic-book medium itself is but
a shadow of its former self, at least in terms of sales, the granddaddy of all superheroes himself remains a cultural icon recognized and loved not
just in the US but all around the world.
Probably the best “mission statement” summing up Tye's purpose is
contained in the “Acknowledgments,” where he recounts his and his
agent's proposal of yet another book on Superman to his
publisher:
“There are endless books on Superman, I explained [having just
cited the round number of 200], but most are sociological surveys or
picture books, or deal exclusively with the comics, TV shows, or some
other limited aspect of his expansive, multimedia career. None is a
full-fledged account that approaches him as if he were human, which
he is to tens of millions of fans who have followed his loves and
deaths, reinventions, resurrections, and redemptions. The fact that
he is ethereal lets us fill in our image of Superman from our own
imaginations. Our longest-lasting champion, I said, offers a
singular lens into our deep rooted fears and our enduring hopes”
(pp. 301-2).
In the preface, “Endurance,” Tye lays out his approach and
outlines his basic themes as well as discussing what brought him, a
childhood fan of Superman in 1950s and '60s comics and the
George Reeves television show, to this project after several decades
and other writing projects. One theme that he returns to time and
again is the role of absent fathers in the lives not just of the hero
himself but his various creators, from Jerry Siegel himself whose
father died during a robbery to actor George Reeves who did not even
know his father. Another is how the character of the hero
changed through time, adapting to the zeitgeist of successive
ages in American society while maintaining a certain core essence.
This last seems very pertinent to the 2011 “DcnU/New 52” revamp
which has reimagined him in ways that echo the crusader for social
justice of the original 1930s stories in an age which hauntingly
resembles the Great Depression. Finally, throughout but especially
in the third chapter, “A Matter of Faith,” Tye keeps his eye on
the spiritual, religious, even metaphysical aspects of this creation
of two Jewish boys in Cleveland, Ohio, writer Jerry Siegel and artist
Joe Shuster, which gave birth to a genre, an idea, and even an ideal.
The comprehensive history of Superman in all his genres and
manifestations is told in eleven chapters, necessarily weighted
toward Siegel and Shuster's original idea and development, their
struggles to find a publisher, and how their creation so quickly got
away from them, taking on a life of its own that would make fortunes
for so many others which Siegel and Shuster had virtually no share in
until very near the ends of their lives. That foundational story
takes more or less the first half of the book, five chapters covering
the 1930s and '40s and culminating with the very aptly named
“Superman, Inc.” I had never realized how after that point, ca.
1950, the character's history could be divided into ages very roughly
corresponding with the passing decades: The 1950s, “The Deadly
Truth,” dominated by both the virtual death which some might call
murder of the comic book industry itself and an expanding
popularity of Superman wrought by the 1950s Adventures of
Superman television show starring George Reeves – whose death
in 1959, officially ruled a suicide, has been ever since shrouded in
mystery with a strong suspicion that it might be called
murder. The 1960s, “Imagine This,” in comic book history
usually termed the “Silver Age,” when Superman was under
the editorship of the controversial Mort Weisinger and a propensity
for the rather redundantly titled “Imaginary Stories.” The
1970s, when a changing society saw the comic book industry beginning
a long, slow though ultimately accelerating, hemorrhaging of readers
even as Superman hit the silver screen in a big-budget
motion picture starring Christopher Reeve, which would make us all
“Believ[e] a Man Can Fly” and solidify the iconic image of the
Man of Steel that dominates to this day. In an effort to clean
house, so to speak, and revivify a slowly faltering comic book
industry, the 1980s saw the first radical reimagining or “reboot”
of the character (along with much of DC Comics) in an attempt to take
the Man of Tomorrow “Back to the Future.” The early 1990s saw
emerge from an offhanded, almost joking comment at a DC Comics
editorial summit one of the cataclysmic events in the fictional life
of the superhero – his death – which struck the world's
psyche almost as deeply as the death of any “real” person.
Similar to my own early-childhood memory of learning of the
assassination of JFK (I had just turned two at the time, but I do
still remember it, or at least how deeply it impacted my mother) or
the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger – or the
terrorist strikes of 9/11 – I can still remember the moment when I
learned that Superman was dead! Even though, a life-long
comic book fan I knew that in comics no death is
forever. That story was followed within a couple of years – yes,
of course, he came back! – with a change in the status quo
long-time fans probably never thought would happen, when Superman
married Lois Lane. Hence the 1990s chapter title, “Till Death Do
Us Part.” And finally, even as the comic book industry's decline
reached crisis proportions (although that word, “crisis,” has its
own peculiar connotation in DC Comics continuity), a new reconception
of the character's formative years, as a teenager and young man in
Smallville – where there was to be no “tights or flights” but rather a down-to-earth exploration of Clark Kent's
difficult coming of age as an outsider trying to fit in but
developing a keen awareness of a higher destiny – brought the
character to a new audience for the new millennium even as the
periodic estrangement between Superman's creators and the
company that brought him to the world in all his different
manifestations itself reached crisis proportions and a
full-blown, years-long, no-end-in-sight legal battle. The one good
thing that looks to have come out of that long, drawn-out dispute is
the unearthing of all kinds of invaluable historical documents going
back to the very beginning and including such things as unpublished
memoirs by Jerry Siegel, voluminous correspondence between the
various parties, and even the original contract by which Siegel and
Shuster sold away all rights to their character for $130. That last
chapter is punnily entitled, “Tights and Fights,” and includes
brief mention of the latter-day, 2011 “revamp” mentioned above.
Throughout, Tye maintains a engaging narrative that brings the
characters alive for the reader, giving insight into the troubled
pasts of Siegel and Reeves – the absence of their fathers as
mentioned above – as well as the radically different personalities
involved in the various creations and recreations, imaginings and
reimaginings of Superman through the decades. He is
sympathetic to all parties, but does not gloss over their failings,
and a couple of major players to not come out well at all. Siegel's
second wife Joanne Siegel, for one; Siegel himself, for another, to a
certain degree. For a son so keenly feeling the loss of his father
early in his life, he treated his own son by his first marriage quite
shabbily. He even manages a balanced treatment of the man who, in my
opinion, bears unconscionable blame for killing an all-but-concluded
resolution to the lawsuit a decade ago, by which time, of course,
Siegel and Shuster themselves were gone, and the battle had fallen to
their heirs – from whom lawyer Marc Toberoff has finagled a deal
which will give him control of Superman and all rights
to the character should his legal manipulations prove successful. As
you can see, Tye's account does not change my opinion of this man.
There is much more I could write about this book. If you love
Superman, if you love comic books in general, or simply if you
are interested in American history and pop culture during the
previous century into the beginning of our own, it is absolutely
essential reading.
Cheers!, and Thanks for reading!
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