Tag Archives: Jerry Siegel

Voices from the Archive: Kurt Busiek on Copyright Extension and Comics

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Kurt Busiek weighed in in comments a while back about what rights the original creators should have when copyright is extended on works owned by corporations (i.e. Superman.) His thoughts are below.

>> What is your view of the termination rights that have been introduced along with the copyright extensions? >>

I’m not Noah, but I think they’re a necessary corollary of the extensions.

When someone buys an intellectual property, they’re essentially licensing it for the term of copyright, after which point it goes into the public domain. So they were never buying it “forever,” they were buying it for a clearly-defined number of years.

If Congress extends copyright, they’re changing the deal, making their license last longer. The reasoning behind the termination rights is that if the term lasts longer, the purchaser never bargained for that extra period. So who owns the IP for the extended period? It was supposed to be the public, but it isn’t. So should it be the purchaser? The creator? Someone else?

The solution they came up with was to give the creator an opportunity to reclaim the property for that extended period, rather than simply to give the purchaser that extra chunk of ownership time for free. If you’re going to extend copyright in the first place, that seems reasonable — when the company that is now DC bought Superman, they did not have any expectation that they would still own him today. So them owning him today is not part of the initial deal — it’s an artifact of copyright extension, and not something they ever bargained for in good faith. And having the government just hand it to them is a preposterous transfer of value from the public to corporations. [Not that the copyright extension wasn’t a preposterous giveaway anyway, but it’s slightly less preposterous this way. If the deal is going to be made longer, then the terms have been altered, and the other terms should be subject to renegotiation too.]

This all extends from the copyright extension, but it makes sense. If you’d only leased your Camaro for a period of time and the government decided that the lease was going to be extended, you wouldn’t expect that the extension would be free. Not that the Camaro comparison makes any sense — you own that Camaro, but you don’t own the right to make sequels to it, to spin off a line of She-Camaros and the Legion of Teen Camaros and Camaro’s Girl Friend Caprice. Those rights remain with GM.

Still, Congress was giving away what belonged (or would belong, after copyright expiration) to the people, so as the people’s representatives, they got to decide whether to give it to corporations for free or to make it possible to renegotiate the term at the point the deal would have ended under the old rules. It’s almost shocking that they didn’t wholly benefit corporations, but it’s logical that they didn’t — it’s not merely that nobody knew Superman would still be valuable today, it’s that nobody expected Superman to still be an ownable property today, so if he is, there’s room for other changes.

I think copyright lasts too long. I think 25 years for corporate copyrights is too short, but somewhere in between there’s probably a good number. Good luck to anyone trying to get that past Congress against the will of Disney, though.

And I think $11 million is a lot of money, but it’s a fraction of what Superman should have earned for its creators. As a comparison, CARRIE was an early sale, too, and the deal was weighted heavily toward the publisher, but it’s made its creator a lot more money than the first couple hundred pages of Superman. Or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, to pick another first novel. That the Superman creators were profligate with what they got doesn’t mean it was enough — and while they might well have been legally stuck with it, DC shouldn’t be any less stuck with copyright expiration and/or reversion, but as noted, corporations change the rules in ways we’d call greedy if it was individuals doing it.

The freaky part is, the value in having Bob Kane happy and pro-DC versus the expense and public-perception damage of having this kind of case go on is a monetary issue, too, and it’s not like this stuff came as a surprise. The point at which to head off this kind of case — not just for Superman, but for Kirby creations and Gardner Fox creations and so forth and so on — was ten years before the termination window opened, and through something more generous than a nice pension that’s dwarfed by the scale of the profits rolling in.

These days, of course, contracts are written to get around the specter of potential future copyright extension and reversion, though who knows whether that’ll be held to be legal in decades to come? If it doesn’t, I expect that we’ll be hearing that creators who take advantage of changes in the law are greedy, while corporations taking advantage are being fiduciarily responsible.

So it goes. And $11 million is a lot of money, but how much of the $4-plus billion George Lucas is getting is about the IP rights to STAR WARS? Lots of heated argument to be had on that, I’m sure — but circling back to the start, I think termination rights are an artifact of extension. If termination shouldn’t be allowed, then extension shouldn’t have been, either.

In which case, Superman would have entered the public domain in 1994, and been free for anyone to use for the past 18 years. Every day of DC’s ownership of the character since then (plus the years of ownership still to come) was a gift given from the public to DC, and one of the restrictions we put on that gift was that the creators had the right to take it back during a particular window.

Considering the value of that gift, the public had the right to put whatever strings they wanted on it, really, and if one of those strings was that Siegel and Shuster and their estates got a shot at benefiting from that gift too, that’s not really so bad.

 

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Superman Isn’t Jesus, He’s Moses

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Let me say up front that I loved Man of Steel. Unabashedly. I didn’t realize how much I missed a well-done Superman, someone who is just genuinely a good person, not all broody and conflicted like Batman, nor snarky like Iron Man, but someone who wants to do the right thing, until I was watching the movie and I loved it.

But even in the middle of my love for it, I felt like something wasn’t quite right. The movie was so good, but it wasn’t great. The movie seemed both to love Superman and not quite understand him. Take the ending, where so much of Metropolis is destroyed, so many lives lost, but without any emotional consequences for Superman. I didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have at least attempted to move the battle out of town and I surely didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have been devastated by those deaths.

But the biggest indication I found that the movie didn’t get Superman had to be when we saw Superman in the church, his head right next to Jesus. This wasn’t the only Jesus reference. Richard Corliss in Time points out the obvious others:

Man of Steel takes its cue from Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns, which posited our hero as the Christian God come to Earth to save humankind: Jesus Christ Superman. [Script-writer, David] Goyer goes further, giving the character a backstory reminiscent of the Gospels: the all-seeing father from afar (plus a mother); the Earth parents; an important portent at age 12 (Jesus talks with the temple elders; Kal-El saves children in a bus crash); the ascetic wandering in his early maturity (40 days in the desert for Jesus; a dozen years in odd jobs for Kal-El); his public life, in which he performs a series of miracles; and then, at age 33, the ultimate test of his divinity and humanity. “The fate of your planet rests in your hands,” says the holy-ghostly Jor-El to his only begotten son, who goes off to face down Zod the anti-God in a Calvary stampede. You could call Man of Steel the psychoanalytical case study of god-man with a two-father complex.

All these New Testament allusions — plus the image of Superman sitting in a church pew framed by a stained-glass panel of Jesus in his final days — don’t necessarily make Man of Steel any richer, except for students of comparative religion. And as Goyer has noted, “We didn’t come up with these allusions of Superman being Christ-like. That’s something that’s been embedded in the character from the beginning.

Whoa, doggy. That’s just flat out wrong. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren’t patterning Superman after Jesus. They were patterning him after Moses. A woman has a baby she cannot keep or he’ll die. She puts him in a small ship, of sorts, and sends him off, hoping some other woman will take him in, raise him, and keep him safe. He grows up to save people.

Pharaoh's Daughter Finds Moses Exodus 2:3-6It’s not a perfect match. Moses’ mom lives. He has a sister and a brother who he hooks back up with later. His culture of origin isn’t lost.

But losing sight of Superman’s origins in a basket in the bulrushes means the filmmakers miss the importance of some of the very things they’re depicting. And they miss opportunities to make Man of Steel into a richer story, because they’re drawing on the wrong archetype.

Let’s be frank. Jesus makes a bad Superman. There are a lot of reasons why, starting with the fact that no one wants to watch Superman standing around lecturing people, being tortured to death, and then scaring the shit out of his friends by appearing to them after he’s dead (okay, maybe I would want to watch that Superman movie, but it doesn’t scream summer blockbuster) and ending with the fact that Jesus, though a really compelling figure, is compelling for his ideas, not his action adventures.

But the most important reason Jesus makes a bad Superman is that, unlike the other men in the “hidden special child” genre, Jesus’ story has a specific arc and a definite end. And I’m not talking about his crucifixion. What I mean is that Jesus has one battle with his arch-enemy, he wins, and the world is over, the end.

Jesus’ story can be retold and reimagined—a crucial component for a good superhero story. But there is no “Tune in next time for another exciting adventure.” Jesus is a one-and-done hero. When Jesus accomplishes his mission, the world is at its end. If Superman is Jesus and we saw his huge fight with his dad’s nemesis, what’s the plot of the next movie?

But, as luck would have it, even if the filmmakers thought they were making a Christ-allegory, there’s enough of the Moses tale still present to suggest some possibilities for further storytelling. We saw Lara, like Jocabed, entrusting her son to a woman she could not know. There’s not a lot about the Pharaoh’s daughter in the Christian Bible, but both Jewish and Muslim lore flesh her out a whole lot more and, though the lore differs somewhat, both traditions show her radically changed by raising Moses, to the point where she throws her lot in with the Jewish people trapped in her country and forsakes the Egyptians.

It would be interesting to see how Martha Kent might throw her lot in with the superheroes, even though she’s not one, in order to keep supporting her son and his cause. Superman stories tend to leave Martha at home, but the Moses archetype suggests bigger possibilities for her.

I think we unintentionally saw the destruction of the Golden Calf when Superman destroyed the drone. And we saw, constantly, Superman surrounded by people who didn’t quite trust him. All this just serves to remind us that Moses has continuing adventures. He does have a good arch-nemesis in the Pharaoh, with a great backstory that ties them both together in a compelling way that adds to their encounters. Is Moses rejecting the culture, and thus the Pharaoh that saved him? How can the Pharaoh retain his power and authority in his own community and deal with a community with God on their side? Moses has a murder for a righteous cause hanging over his head (and really, the death of Zod in Man of Steel is alarming because the movie has spent so much time arguing for Jesus-Superman. And Jesus doesn’t kill people. But there’s no such problem with Moses.). And then there’s the 40 years in the wilderness. There’s a lot of ground to cover, stories to be told. Things you could add or take away or retell in countless ways. The fact that at least three religions already do so proves it’s a rich story that stands up to the type of reuse our superhero stories get.

The biggest difference between Moses and Jesus, one with important implications for the Superman story is that, while Jesus can go anywhere people are—earth, Heaven, Hell—Moses never entirely fits in with the people he’s leading. He wasn’t raised with them, he wasn’t an adult among them at first (remember, he runs off and lives in Midian for forty years), and he can’t go with them into the Promised Land. It’d be interesting if these were the people of Earth. But imagine the story you could tell if these were the Justice League. What would it mean if Superman were leading them toward a goal he could never meet?

I saw referenced multiple places that Man of Steel was yet another movie that attempts to tell 9/11 with a happy ending. Okay, so if Superman can be used to talk about big tragedies people are still trying to grapple with, why not more explicitly let Superman grapple with the unimaginable tragedy of the destruction of his people in ways that mirror how Jewish people have wrestled with the Holocaust?

I’m not arguing for a one-to-one mapping. Obviously that wouldn’t work. But there are writers who could pen a compelling story—because they know that story—about a guy who, as far as he knows, is the only person in his culture left, who must wonder if he resembles his grandfather or whether he got his love of science from his aunt, who must wish he knew old folk songs or what the people in his family’s neighborhood ate at holiday meals, and who can’t ever get complete answers to those questions.

And then, what happens when Kara shows up? Do you rejoice in the found family member? Do you find her presence a sharp reminder of the rest of your loved ones’ absences? Of their ultimate fates?

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Superman can have hope because he’s corny Jesus-dude made of hope or he can have hope because the alternative is to give into despair. The second choice makes for a more real movie, and one that, I’d argue, is truer to Superman’s roots, both mythically and in the lived realities of his original creators.

But the thing I find most fascinating and appalling about taking something with its roots in Moses and declaring that its roots were in Jesus all along is that this is such a common approach—not to superheroes, but to theology—that there’s a word for it: Supersessionism.

The belief that the new covenant between Jesus and his followers supersedes the old covenant between God and the Jewish people is fundamental to most forms of Christianity. Even if Christians don’t know the term, it’s the reason we eat cheeseburgers. And it’s an incredibly tender sore spot among Jewish people, who aren’t that excited to hear all about how, when God said he was keeping a perpetual covenant with the children of Israel, he meant “perpetual until some better people come along.” Jewish scholars and theologians have argued—and rightly so, I think—that the Christian belief that Christians now have the special relationship with God that supersedes the Jewish relationship is an important part of the foundations of anti-Semitism (because, in part, it implies that God’s fine with whatever terrible things Christians want to do to Jews, because God doesn’t love them best, or at all, any more).

Superman isn’t a Jewish myth, but he’s a cultural figure with strong Jewish roots—created by two Jewish guys, given an origin story that draws heavily from one of Judaism’s central figures. Neglecting those roots and grafting on Christian ones instead is problematic. It makes for a less compelling story (like I said, if Jesus/Superman has defeated Satan/Zod, what can happen in the next movie that still keeps Superman a Christ-figure?), it neglects the rich mythology Superman’s creators drew from, and it perpetuates a troubling theological stance.

But I think the worst thing is that it indulges its majority Christian audience in this country in a lie we often tell ourselves without realizing—that Jesus is the center of all things and we, being close enough to the center, should be the people around which the whole country revolves; all stories are our stories or can be taken and made to be. In the end, using Superman to reinforce Christian supremacy in the United States probably isn’t going to ruin Superman. But it is a lie that comes from and leads to ugly places. And it’s a shame to see it at the heart of Man of Steel.
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Betsy Phillips writes for The Nashville Scene‘s political blog, “Pith in the Wind.” In her spare time, she makes up spooky stories. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine and Qarrtsiluni.

First illustration unknown artist; 2nd from Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely All Star Superman”

 

Krypton vs. Kypton

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Man of Steel

There have always been two flavors of superhero: Marvel and DC. When my dad was reading comics in the 40s, Marvel (AKA Timely) threw anti-heroes into DC’s original, and so much blander. good guy mix. When I was reading comics in the 70s, Marvel put out the sophisticated stuff, DC the embarrassingly childish. My twelve-year-old son reads the occasional comic now but mostly takes his superheroes in movie form like everyone else in the 21st century. But Marvel and DC are still the reigning flavors. Only these days Marvel Entertainment tends toward the comically playful, Warner Brothers the pretentiously somber.

Look at Iron Man 3, an incoherent but highly entertaining comedy. The slapstick moment in The Avengers when the Hulk punches Thor after teaming up to fight alien invaders made me snort so loudly I embarrassed my teenaged daughter. Dark Knight Rises on the other hand, not so much with the uncontrollable laughter. Ditto for Man of Steel. Is that a bad thing? Well, it means my wife writhed in her seat for 143 minutes, tweeting updates of her torture. My son at least enjoyed the fight scenes.

I’m not a big Zack Snyder fan. 300 enraged me, Watchmen bored me. But Man of Steel I can mostly live with. Except for the shot after shot after World Trade Center-inspired shot of collapsing New York. When the hell did 9/11 get downgraded to CGI fodder?

But aside for the drone Superman downs in the epilogue because the government keeps trying to invade his privacy, Snyder isn’t interested in the War on Terror. He, like so many recent superhero writers, is stuck in World War II. General Zod is this month’s Hitler reboot. If a field of human skulls is too subtle a Holocaust allusion, Superman spells it out: “You’re talking about genocide.”

There’s been some internet kvetching about the damage the movie does to old Superman mythology. Aside from a few four-winged dragons, I disagree. For all his pretentious somberness, Zack Snyder gets Jerry Siegel. Superman was born to battle eugenics, and eugenics is what Man of Steel is mostly about.

Snyder’s Krypton isn’t a luckless ice planet dying of old age. It is the pinnacle of selective breeding, a planet whose inhabitants have taken the reins of evolution and engineered themselves into a race of violently amoral ubermensch. They breed scientifically, culling only the so-called best from a gene pool Registry. As one of Zod’s sidekicks quips: “Evolution always wins.”

Siegel said as much in Superman #1: “Superman came to Earth from the planet Krypton whose inhabitants had evolved, after billions of years, to physical perfection!” In Superman’s newspaper comic strip premiere, Krypton is “a distant planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen—beings which represent the human race at its ultimate peak of perfect development!” How can aliens represent the human race? Easy. They’re not aliens. The original Krypton was Earth:

“In his laboratory, the last man on Earth worked furiously. He had only a few moments left.

“Giant cataclysms were shaking the dying planet, destroying mankind. It was in its last days, dying . . .

“The last man placed his infant babe within a small time-machine he had completed, launching it as—

“—the laboratory walls caved-in upon him.

“The time-vehicle flashed back thru the centuries, alighting in the primitive year, 1935 A.D.”

That’s the script Siegel mailed Buck Rogers artist Russell Keaton in the summer of 1934. After drawing a few test scripts, Keaton turned him down, and Siegel crawled back to his high school pal Joe Shuster.

But his Superman wasn’t from a galaxy far far away. He was barely even scifi. After the German invasion of Poland and France, William Marston wrote that Siegel “believed that the real superman of the future would be someone with vast power who would use his invincible strength to right human wrongs.” That phrase, “the real superman of the future,” is literal. The Superman was the stated goal of eugenics.

Krypton’s Registry, the Codex of the genetically fit that General Zod wants so desperately–that’s literal too. American tycoon John Harvey Kellog (yes, you’ve eaten his cornflakes) and his Race Betterment Foundation started it back in 1915. Long Island’s Eugenics Registry Office opened in 1910, advocating the prevention of unfit breeding through immigration restrictions, racial segregation, anti-interracial marriage laws, sterilization, and “euthanasia.” The committee recommended every American smallville have its own gas chamber.

By the time Siegel was writing, Germany had adopted that American model and was expanding it into Auschwitz. That’s the Krypton Siegel was fighting against. His Superman was literally the Nazi Superman, plucked from the eugenic future and redirected to fight the superpowers who evolved him.

So I get why Snyder’s take is light with the laugh track. But didn’t we already win World War II? I wouldn’t mind a history lesson–in fact, yes, let’s please correct all the U.S. History textbooks that have conveniently written out the U.S.’s leadership in the eugenics movement. Eugenics was still taught in high school biology classes even while we were at war with the movement’s ultimate champions. A Superman fan in the late 30s and early 40s would have gotten Siegel’s allegories. But of the millions who saw Man of Steel opening weekend, how many registered anything but a Dark Knight-esque scifi romp? We should understand General Zod as more than just some alien supervillain. He’s us. He’s America’s darkest potential. I’m not sure even Snyder knows that.

I don’t necessarily object to Hollywood using the Holocaust and 9/11 to rake in profits. But I do expect something in the trade. Maybe some sly introspection? A little under-the-current thought-provocation on the socio-political issue of the film-makers’ choice? Instead, we get more destruction and a Superman who indifferently pulverizes his own Smallville and Metropolis during his ubermensch slugfests. Are we really not supposed to think about the collateral body count in the convenience stores and skyscrapers? There’s a lot of reasons not to laugh during this movie.

I was being partisan as kid when I duped myself into thinking Marvel was so much more sophisticated than childish DC. Maybe I’m still duping myself. Marvel Entertainment has no trouble cranking out its own brand of pretension. But superheroes remain a goofy genre, endlessly championing CGI fight spectacles over story and character.There’s a rather low, Hollywood-imposed limit to what such a movie can do. Zack Snyder’s somber palette and frowning ubermensch (did I mention the Christ motif?) aren’t pushing any of those boundaries. Neither are the members of the cheerier, Joss Whedon team. But when I go to my smallville theater to watch some guy in a cape, I prefer to come out giggling.

Top 5 Superman Songs of All Time

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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The word “superman” premiered in a play about a modern Don Juan. So it’s fitting that most Superman songs are love songs. Despite all of its anti-marriage ubermensch rhetoric (marriage is an obstacle to ideal breeding blah blah blah), George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 Man and Superman ends when the girl lassos her Clark in the final act. Since then, lovedumb Supermen have been crooning through the decades.

Here are their high notes:

 

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5. The Kinks, “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman”

The Kinks with a disco beat? It was 1979 and so not entirely their fault. I didn’t hear the song till their live album a year later. The year the Kinks were ret-conned into Rock continuity. That’s right, the Kinks did not exist before 1980.  Van Halen’s “You Really Got Me” wasn’t a cover until it appeared on One for the Road, an album of rock classics retroactively inserted into the AOR timeline. First time I heard “Lola” from a radio speaker, a stadium of fans were la-la-la-ing the chorus. I felt like the lone survivor from some parallel universe. I’d been listening to Pittsburgh’s WDVD for a couple of years, memorizing playlists, band line-ups, discographies. Reallocating the area of my brain previously devoted to superhero teams and baseball rosters. The Kinks? Never heard of them. But suddenly there they are strumming between the Who and the Rolling Stones since the 60s. I pretended like nothing was wrong. The Kinks? Sure, yeah, love ‘em. That’s Adolescent Survival 101. Next thing my first-ever girlfriend and I are cheering them in the Civic Arena, and wearing our matching concert T-shirts on our anniversary every month after clueless month. If everyone jumps off a cliff, of course you jump off too. Doesn’t matter if you can fly or not.

“Hey girl we’ve got to get out of this place

There’s got to be something better than this

I need you, but I hate to see you this way

If I were superman then we’d fly away”

 

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4.  R.E.M., “Superman”

I had way too many Black Sabbath albums to get my head around R.E.M in high school, but college was another planet. The year I first kissed Lesley Wheeler. We meet in a student center utility closet moonlighting as our literary magazine office space. She liked R.E.M. and so soon I did too.  Apparently this “Superman” was a cover of an obscure 1969 single from some band named the Clique. Another ret-con, but nobody was pretending otherwise this time. Despite all the Superman hubris, it’s an underdog’s song. Mike Mills, the bassist, sings lead. Michael Stipe is slouching by a back-up microphone, a cup of coffee in his hand, tambourine in the other. Lesley was dating someone else, but we kissed once, during a party in her honors dorm, and then she flew away for a semester abroad. R.E.M. wouldn’t have their breakthrough till the following year, when it wasn’t just our college DJs twirling “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The whole multiverse was about to explode. I might not have had her grades, her scholarship, none of the spark bursting through her poems. But I knew to fly after her. I knew what was happening.

“You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you?

I know you don’t love that guy ’cause I can see right through you.

If you go a million miles away I’ll track you down girl.

Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart.”

 

Jimmy Olsen's Blues

3. Spin Doctors, “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”

Our kitchen calendar said 1991, but it sounds like the 70s rebooted, Steve Miller Band, Aerosmith, even a little Lynyrd Skynyrd, all of it seamlessly synched together by the dance beat thumpings of a double bass drum kit. An analog amalgam at the dawn of the digital sample. When Lesley and I moved in together that year, the hardest part was merging our record collections, deciding whose redundant copy of which David Bowie was less scratched, less nostalgically vital. I’d thought CDs were a passing phase, like 8-tracks, but was now giving in to fate. A rotating CD rack perched on a speaker the size of an end table. Pocketful of Kryptonite sold 5 million, its four singles muscling through the airwaves. We hummed them in the car, in the kitchen, in the backs of our heads as we drifted asleep. We found a caterer, a baker, a quaint historical house to rent for an August afternoon. It rained in the morning, pushed the heat back all day, then poured again that night as we drove back to our apartment with the wedding loot. The Spin Doctors’ second album flopped.  Doesn’t matter. After the readings and the vows, I slotted Kryptonite into the reception CD player with some other new releases and hit “random.”

“Lois Lane please put me in your plan

Yeah, Lois Lane you don’t need no Super Man

Come on downtown and stay with me tonight

I got a pocket full of kryptonite”

 

Lazlo Bane

2. Lazlo Bane, “I’m no superman”

Actor Zach Braff discovered the song, an obscure indie tune that premiered in a 14-second snippet over the opening credits of Scrubs before it made it to the band’s second album. Lazlo Bane (I’d thought it was a person) originally said no to the TV deal. Didn’t want to sell out.  But somebody must have talked some sense into them. Three weeks after 9/11, a sitcom’s exactly what the country needed. Lesley and I had just moved into the house we live in now. American flags flapped up and down the block. Our son was one, our daughter four. We had to explain to them that terrorists were not going to blow up skyscrapers in Lexington, VA. We didn’t have any. We’d moved to Smallville, after rocketing away from the New Jersey Metropolis where we’d fallen for each other. We hunkered through Afghanistan, Iraq, prayed Obama could save us all. NBC dropped Scrubs in 2009, but ABC rebooted it for a ninth and final season. They shuffled the cast and hired WAZ (I’d thought he was a band) to rerecord the theme. It didn’t matter. We’d stopped watching years before.

“You’ve crossed the finish line

Won the race but lost your mind

Was it worth it after all

I need you here with me

Cause love is all we need

Just take a hold of the hand that breaks the fall”

 

Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”

1. Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”

I thought Sufjan was Cat Stevens recording as his Muslim alter ego (which is Yusuf Islam). I was never hip, but now I’m old too. My son is twelve, my daughter sixteen. She sits across the dinner table, describing mutant subgenres I never dreamed of. I had to borrow the album from my metrosexual neighbor. It was already old, part of Stevens’ abandoned project to record fifty albums about fifty states. Apparently, Smallville is in Illinois. A legal dispute delayed the 2005 release. They had to put a sticker over Superman on the cover art. It came out in vinyl first—technology made cool by extinction. Our 80s vinyl lines the back shelf of our closet. We play them during dinner sometimes, the needle crackling like a victrola through speakers the size of furniture. The Illinois CD has no sticker, just a blank space, the past waiting to be rebooted again. Clark Kent used to be a joke, a Kryptonian’s caricature of humanity. They reversed that in the 80s, made the boy grunt his way through adolescence like the rest of us. I don’t know what the story is now.

“Only a real man can be a lover

If he had hands to lend us all over

We celebrate our sense of each other

We have a lot to give one another”

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6. BONUS TRACK: “You’re a Superman!”

I don’t know the singer’s name, just that she’s a redhead in a green dress. The nightclub doesn’t have a name either, but Lois Lane is there, ready to scoop Clark on an exclusive interview with Superman. Clark thinks it’s their first date. “Tonight I’m going to introduce a song that is sure to be a hit,” the singer announces. “Swing it, boys!” Action Comics No. 6, cover date November 1938. The Andrew Sisters had a hit that year. So did Ella Fitzgerald. It’s her voice I hear over Joe Shuster’s drawings. It’s no ballad. Just look at the angle of the trombone silhouetted in the background. Jerry Siegel is writing the love song no one ever sung to him. Girls found him creepy in high school. But now with Superman going into newspaper syndication, the girl next door—literally, her name is Bella, and she lives across the street from the Siegels—suddenly she’s not out of his bold, new reach. They’ll be married in a year, divorced a decade after that. It’s the only perfect Superman song, unblemished by its soundless performance. “Clark glances sideways at Lois. Enthralled by the magic of the song, her eyes have a distant, charmed look . . .”

“You’re a Superman!

You can make my heart leap,

Ten thousand feet!

“You’re a Superman!

But I’m the one girl who kin,

Get under your skin!

“When you crush me in your arms, I must reveal

I’m only flesh and blood and not resisteless steel!

“You’re a Superman!

Your ardour’s stronger than,

A human man’s!

“You’re a Superman!

And when you spring to me,

I am in ecstasy!

“Some day you’re gonna leap,

To the altar at my feet . . .

Then the whole world will know,

‘Cause I’ll tell all I know,

That I want ‘em to know,

That you’re My Superman!”

Superthing

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This essay first appeared on Comixology.
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When Craig Yoe first saw the pulp fetish pamphlet Nights of Horror, he instantly gasped, “Oh, my God, Joe Shuster!”

That expression of shock has a couple of levels to it, I think. First, of course, there’s the simple surprise of discovering unknown work by a seminal cartoonist. Artist Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel created the hugely successful Superman for National Comics in 1938. A decade and much legal wrangling later, though, Siegel and Shuster had lost the rights to their character, and were no longer welcome at the company which had been largely built on their creation. That much of the story is well known — but pretty much nobody was aware that the down-and-out Shuster had illustrated a low-budget porn title like Nights of Horror. In fact, given Shuster’s declining eyesight, some historians weren’t even sure that Shuster could see at all by the mid-1950s when Nights of Horror was produced.

The amazement expressed by Yoe and by other comics professionals he quotes in Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster isn’t simply because the work was unknown, however. It’s because of the type of work it is, and the type of artist Shuster is supposed to be. Stan Lee, with his usual talent for dispensing middle-brow wisdom, pithily sums things up in the introduction. “Whereas everything about the stories and artwork of Superman was positive and uplifting, the pages of Nights of Horror…cater to the basest of man’s character and morals.”

So there you have it. Superman is good. Nights of Horror is evil. How, oh how, can we reconcile the two? Lee does it, characteristically, by genuflecting in the direction of tragic irony: Shuster loved the noble and good, but became “so disillusioned and desperate” that he debased his talents and turned to the dark side. Yoe himself isn’t that prudish, but he too sees a contrast. Superman was too perfect, Yoe argues. The discovery that Shuster had a less savory aspect, therefore, makes him, Yoe says, “someone we, with our own flaws can relate too.” Stan the Man looks on with distaste and Yoe looks on with avuncular amusement, but both agree on the central narrative, viz., it was a big step (whether down or sideways) from drawing Superman to drawing fetish art.

But was it? Not everyone thought so. Anti-comics crusader and psychologist Frederic Wertham for example, hated Superman and fetish pulp more or less equally, and for more or less the same reasons. Wertham believed that Superman encouraged “fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished.” The hyper-masculine, uniformed supermen were a sexualized, godless fantasy of force; a dream of limitless empowerment. Yoe quotes Wertham in the later’s famous screed, Seduction of the Innocent: “We established the basic ingredients of the most numerous and widely read comic books: violence, sadism, and cruelty; the superman philosophy, an offshoot of Nietzsche’s superman, who said, ‘When you go to women, don’t forget the whip.'”

As it happened, Wertham is on record condemning not only comic-book fetishism in general, but Nights of Horror specifically. The psychologist linked the fetish pamphlets to a series of brutal murders and assaults by a gang of young pseudo-Nazis in New York in 1954. As with super-hero comics, Wertham attacked Nights of Horror for its perversion, its sadism, and its general bad influence. Eventually, his testimony helped get Nights of Horror confiscated and destroyed by the state, in a decision upheld 5-4 by the Supreme Court.

Again, Yoe provides all of this information — but he doesn’t quite connect the dots. Perhaps he thinks too highly of Superman, or perhaps he’s simply unwilling or unable to credit rampant Comstockery. Nonetheless, the fact remains: in Wertham’s analysis, if not in his censorious conclusions, the crusading prude was definitely onto something. Whether it’s superheroes or fetish porn, pulp is pulp. And what pulp is made of, in large part is sadistic and masochistic fantasies. It’s not an accident that one of the earliest successful Batman villains, the Monk, was a vampire hypnotist who controlled the wills of his female victims. Nor is it coincidence that the incredibly popular early Wonder Woman stories featured elaborately bound beauties in just about every other panel. And as for Superman…well, how about this:

That’s a panel from the Superman newspaper strip which Siegel and Shuster worked on in the early ‘40s. It took me about a minute to find it by flipping at random through my volume of Superman: Sunday Classics.

So Shuster was into kink, then? Yoe does manage to uncover some evidence that the artist had an eye for chorus girls and the female form. But while that’s interesting, it’s not really the main issue. The point here isn’t that this or that creator had a personal thing for spanking or sadism or masochism. Rather, the point is that as a genre superhero comics simply aren’t that far removed from the kind of pulp fetish porn that Shuster retailed in Nights of Horror. Read through Yoe’s plot synopses of the sixteen plus issues that Shuster illustrated and you’ll get a definite feeling of déjà vu. Damsels in distress, evil hooligans, manly private dicks, and fiendish torture devices — didn’t Shuster illustrate all of this somewhere before? You’ve even got a fair number of men getting shown up just like that milquetoast Clark Kent…though, admittedly, Kent’s humiliation didn’t usually involve a French maid.

The consistency, though, goes beyond the simple details of the plot or the occasional oversexed Jimmy Olsen look alike. Both Nights of Horror and Superman have Shuster’s trademark, rough and ready stiff poses, forthright compositions, and linework-because-we-need-some-linework. It’s not slick, but it does have a kind of charming mass-market anonymity. The dominatrix on the cover of Secret Identity for example; Shuster drew her breast so it looks like a detachable sack draped over her shoulder. It’s as if he just chucked her together piecemeal for the pose, and plans to disassemble her as soon as you turn the page.

And then there are the picture frames on the walls of some of the dens of iniquity drawn in Nights of Horror — picture frames in which Shuster has neglected to place any actual pictures. Yoe suggests that these vacant blank squares evoke the emptiness and cruelty of the bleak pulp world. Really, though, it seems to me likely that Shuster didn’t draw pictures for the frames hanging in the background because…this is porn. Who’s looking at the damn pictures on the wall? Shuster isn’t creating art; he’s creating a delivery system.

This ability to focus on the main bit and ignore the frills was the genius of Superman too, of course. You want a power fantasy? Okay; we’ll give you a power fantasy. Super strength! Invulnerability! Constantly humiliating the girl you desire! What could be better than that, huh? Shuster knew a thing or two about catering to his audience’s desires. That he’d pander is not surprising — though the blatant obviousness of his vision still has the power to startle.