The battle for Superman's soul
The superhero we need now
The origin story of Superman the comic book character is more compelling than the plot of most of the movies in which he stars.
Two bullied Jewish boys, sons of immigrant families growing up in the Depression, meet as 15-year-olds at Cleveland’s Glenville High School. They spend years developing a comic strip centered on a creature from another planet with super strength. He’s a foe of the Nazis and a fighter for the downtrodden.
After scads of rejections from publishers, they come across a buccaneering Army major, ex-spy and author who thinks their idea “stands a very good chance,” as Larry Tye wrote in his Superman biography. But “The Major” is a better judge of talent than he is a leader of a company. He’s forced into bankruptcy by two sharp operators. They take control of his business and pay the boys $130 for the first Superman comic.
It seems like a lot of money until the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, realize that they sold away eternal control of a gold mine — the Superman character — for next to nothing.
Superman spawns a universe of superheroes and supercharges the comic book industry, radio, television and the movies, accounting for what cultural historian Roy Schwartz notes is more than $50 billion in media and merchandising sales.
Nearly 90 years later, the creation of the two scrappy kids from Cleveland is still powering stories on television and the big screen. The new Superman movie has won the box office for the past two weekends, but not without some controversy that goes to the heart of the franchise.
For every generation
There are commonalities that go back to the 1950s Superman TV show starring George Reeve. Daily Planet editor Perry White still doesn’t want to be called “chief” and favors the imprecation “Great Caesar’s Ghost.”
But by and large, Superman gets reinterpreted for every generation. It’s the Ur-story that many of us grew up with, starting with comic books, TV, and the Superman of the 1978 movie starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, and in a hilarious portrayal that steals the show, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor.
The story of Siegel and Shuster inspired Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” which in turn, led to a new opera that is opening the Metropolitan Opera’s season in September.
Kindness
In the new film, Superman is no longer the dark, brooding figure he was in the 2013 Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s somber movie starring Henry Cavill and Amy Adams that at times felt like Game of Thrones mated with Gladiator.
Instead the superhero of 2025, played by David Corenswet, is an upbeat, wholesome character harking back to the portrayal by Christopher Reeve in 1978’s Superman: The Movie.
He even swoops down to a Metropolis street to rescue a squirrel. (That prompted a New York Times story: “A City’s in Grave Danger. Why Would Superman Save a Squirrel?”)
The new Superman has an overenthusiastic pet, the dog Krypto, who appears lovable enough to have inspired a surge of interest from the public in adopting rescue dogs (or at least searching for the term on Google).
Superman remains, as always, an immigrant, having been sent to Earth as a baby by his parents on the doomed planet Krypton and raised by a couple who find him and the remains of his rocket in a Kansas cornfield.
And it is his status as an alien that led to criticism from conservatives that the film is too “woke.” The movie’s director James Gunn talked to Entertainment Weekly about the controversy.
Gunn said he had been speaking with a reporter for The Times of London, who pointed out that “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were the sons of immigrants, and they wrote Superman as an immigrant story. And I said, yeah, it's a story about an immigrant, but mostly it's a story to me about kindness, which it is. That's the center of the movie for me.”
“That's the thing we can all act upon, is kindness. And so what does that lead to? Well, does that lead to the way you vote? Sure. Does that lead to everything? Yeah. Does it lead to how many people are dying from road rage? Yes. All those things are affected if people just start to value kindness. I mean, people did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn't necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn't about anything other than that.”
I mean, people did value kindness in the past. That was an American value…
— James Gunn
The discussion of immigration as a theme had stirred the right’s criticism. On Fox News, Jesse Watters brought up a criminal gang: “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.”
Kindness seems in short supply. The movie opened at a time when the Trump administration is using masked ICE agents to round up immigrants in an effort at mass deportation. As the Guardian noted, “Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates ‘like dogs’, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.”
In theory, there’s no reason the movie can’t center on both the immigrant experience and the need for kindness. Both have been central to Superman since Siegel and Shuster created him. They “freely borrowed elements from their cultural environment, including the extensive Jewish tradition of heroic stories about men and women given special abilities to defend the helpless, from biblical to rabbinical,” wrote Roy Schwartz in his book, Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero.
Born as “Kal-El” on Krypton, Superman owes much to such biblical heroes as David and Samson. But Schwartz argues that the real template for the life of Superman was Moses: “Both are castaways, sent adrift in a small craft to risk an unknown fate, a desperate act made by their parents in the face of certain death. Both are refugees fleeing genocide, and both are orphaned by their tragedy (Moses's parents didn't perish as Superman's did, but he nonetheless grew up parentless in Pharaoh's court).”
Siegel knew tragedy firsthand; his father died of a heart attack when his store was robbed.
In some portrayals and particularly in the movies “Superman Returns” and “Man of Steel”, Superman is Christlike, willing to sacrifice himself for the sins of humankind. Larry Tye notes that Muslims, Buddhists and even atheists have also claimed Superman embodies their stories and values.
But whatever his religious roots, Superman has always been a fighter for the little guy. Schwartz notes that before he was called “the man of steel,” Superman debuted as the “champion of the oppressed.”
“Superman's earliest foes,” Schwartz wrote, “were abusive husbands, slumlords, protection racketeers, corrupt politicians and businessmen, Nazis and fascists, and later megalomaniacal scientists like the Ultra-Humanite and Lex Luthor and alien conquerors like Brainiac and General Zod — all manifestations of tyranny and oppression, the same evil Moses fought.”
True, Superman sometimes went to extremes in the early years, inflicting his own brand of vengeance without recourse to the law. Schwartz cites a vivid example of Superman resorting to “an eye for an eye” form of justice:
In Action Comics #3, poor Eastern European immigrants working as miners are trapped in a cave-in as a result of unsafe work conditions. The greedy, carousing mine owner cares little until Superman, having rescued the miners, returns to teach him a lesson. He traps the owner in his own collapsed mine, forcing him to try and dig his way out. Having experienced it firsthand he reforms, vowing to make his mine the safest in the country and his workers the best treated.
Still, there was usually sunnier side to the superhero. Larry Tye put it simply: “Superman was a creature of light, and it was that very optimism that America loved most.”
The cheerful hero of the new movie seems just right for our times. “Superman’s bromides can feel old-fashioned and will certainly be viewed as cornball by the deeper cynics out there,” observed Jarrod Jones at AV Club. “But there’s something resolutely sincere and bracing about this Man Of Steel’s farmboy optimism in a time when earnestness gets the finger and moral clarity is in short supply. Superman delivers a simple, potent message: You don’t need X-ray vision to see people as people.”
Dropping from the sky
As scholar Kelly Lytle Hernández, pointed out in her book Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, the creation of Superman came 31 years after passage of the Immigration Act of 1907. It required all immigrants entering the U.S. to pass through an official port of entry, undergo inspection, and receive official permission to enter the U.S.
“Dropping from the sky and failing to register with the U.S. immigration authorities, Superman entered the United States without authorization,” wrote Hernández. “According to U.S. immigration law, the incorruptible leader of the Justice League of America was an illegal immigrant. Yet the tale of Superman evolved free of any hint or consideration of his illegal status.”
Sure. he was just a “fantasy,” Hernández noted, but the issue of illegal immigration began to resonate in the decades after Superman began appearing on television. “By the mid-1970s, vigilantes were patrolling the border, and Congress was hosting explosive debates about how to resolve the so-called wetback problem.” As she noted, activist Jorge Lerma wrote a song with the lyrics: “It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No man, it’s a wetback!”
Even though there are many ways to enter the U.S. and immigrants come from every corner of the world, Hernández wrote, since the early 1940s, the “entire national emphasis of the U.S. Border Patrol shifted to the southern border,” leading to “the racialization and regionalization of U.S. immigration law enforcement.”
Above politics?
For much of his career, Superman has floated above political controversy. Although Siegel and Shuster had enemies like the Nazis in mind for the comic book character, the suits in New York who owned the company were cautious about involving Superman too closely in real-life conflict.
“Once Superman became big business, Tye noted, “plots had to be sent to New York for vetting. Not only did editors tell Jerry to cut out the guns and knives and cut back on social crusading, they started calling the shots on minute details of script and drawing. Superman must be in costume while using his superpowers. His forelocks couldn't be too curly, his arms should be shorter and less ‘ape-like,’ and Joe should get rid of his hero's ‘nice fat bottom.’ The latter especially made Superman look too ‘lah-de-dah,’ 1940s shorthand for shading toward gay.”
The owners weren’t subtle about putting Siegel and Shuster in their place as hired hands. "Bear in mind," Jack [Liebowitz] wrote five months after Action was launched, "that we own the feature 'Superman' and that we can at any time replace you." He wrote again the following April:
"You have the germ of a great idea in SUPERMAN but you need constant editorial supervision."
That supervision never ended. Siegel and Shuster fought legal battles for the rest of their lives in vain attempts to regain ownership of Superman, and their heirs continued to battle DC Comics in the courts, winning some financial rewards without ultimate success. Meanwhile generations of talented writers hired by DC (including my college classmate Elliot S! Maggin) retold the Superman story, reinventing him continually.
Superman’s CV
According to Larry Tye, Superman has a home address — 344 Clinton Street, Apt. 3-B in Metropolis — and even a Social Security number: 092-09-6616.
Those are both noted in a clever “curriculum vitae” Tye assembled for the superhero, in his book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero.
But perhaps the most salient part of the resume is the section called “media training.”
In a few words, it pulls together the astonishing cultural imprint Superman has had, as of the book’s publication in 2012:
Comic books (1938-present)
Comic strips (1939-1966)
Radio (1940-1951)
Cartoons (1941-present)
Novels (1942-present)
Movie serials (1948-1950)
Television (1952-2011)
Feature films (1978-present)
The superhero had a big foot planted on virtually every media platform of the 20th century. And that doesn’t include all of the myriad merchandising tie-ins.
As Tye wrote, “Kids across America lathered peanut butter and jelly onto super-flavored Superman bread and, if they ate all the crust, they might get treated to a Superman lollypop or Superman chocolate bar. Their Superman suspenders held up Superman dungarees. They stored their money in Superman billfolds until they had enough to buy Superman bubble gum, squirt guns, lunch boxes, underpants, jammies, moccasins, horseshoes, and a Krypto-Raygun complete with bulb, battery, lenses, and seven strips of film that let them flash onto a wall images of their idol in twenty-eight action-packed poses. Ka-ching.”
Truth, justice and the American way
Anyone alive in the 1950s would know by heart the mantra, transferred from the 1940s radio series to the television version starring George Reeve, that Superman is “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
That he is a “strange visitor from another world, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men…who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands! And who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.”
Those last four words “were added in the summer of 1942,” in the midst of World War II, Tye wrote “…and were chosen with the help of a child psychologist to ensure they touched the right chords.”
At first, the 1938 Superman could leap and skip past a train, by 1940, he could run a mile in a second, Tye noted, but it wasn’t until 1943 that he showed he could fly: “Up—Up—and away!”
Superman wasn’t just a superhero. He was the prototypical superhero, the one who outsold all the other comic books by a mile in his early years and then spawned a legion of imitators that continue to hold a grip on storytelling and the media in the 21st century.
True, the more layered and contemporary heroes of the Marvel universe in the 1960s began to overshadow Superman, but he is still central to the history of the comics, television and the movies.
As for the “American way,” we’re still figuring that out, day by day.
Another excellent column. I appreciated all the historical data. But my favorite sentence is more about current events. It’s a gold-medal winner at the Understatement Olympics: “Kindness seems in short supply.”
This made my day! I never knew the backstory and enjoyed how you used it to make Superman more relevant and a Super Man! Thanks for this.