Superman’s career, from the very beginning in 1938 to a pre-reboot ending in 1986, reveals an interesting moral convergence of his inner and outer strengths.
To appreciate this, we must first lay aside the standard explanation for differences in the same DC characters across the decades; the multiple-universe concepts of Earth-1 and Earth-2.
The truth is more interesting.
Superman’s use of violence evolved in three
phases, driven by two outside factors.
The first phase was the most uncurbed
level. When Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) the concept
of a hero meting out justice to evil-doers was a familiar one to readers of
popular fiction, especially of the pulp magazines. The Shadow gunned down
gangsters with monthly regularity. It would have been no surprise that, as
early as the second issue of Action Comics (July 1938) Superman was seen
hurling a torturer to his death.
[Action Comics #2, July 1938]
Superman seems to relish threatening
criminals with his super-strength, and they would be wise to not call his
bluff. These aren’t idle threats as a number of criminals died in these early
Superman stories, without due process.
[Action Comics #16, September 1939]
[Superman #2, Fall 1939 –reprinted from the newspaper strip]
Also, on several occasions Superman
allowed, through inaction, for them to meet a horrible end.
[Action Comics #13, June 1939]
[Superman #2, Fall 1939 –reprinted from newspaper strip]
This first version of Superman doled out
his personal justice like Judge Dredd, performing executions of criminals as he
saw fit. To anyone brought up on the Silver Age and Bronze Age Superman, the
epitome of morality, these acts of manslaughter (if not murder) are a shocking
sight.
But very soon after this time, Superman’s
attitude towards violence changed.
[Superman #5, Summer 1940]
[Superman #5, Summer 1940]
By the summer of 1940, Superman is allowing
justice to be served by the law of the land. So what actually brought about
this second phase, this change of Superman’s mind?
Not specified within the narrative of the
Superman stories at the time, the answer must lie with the outside world, and
the imperative of maximizing financial success of the character for the owners:
most notably Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz. Once they saw the success that
they had in their hands, they were swift to exploit as many opportunities for
‘Superman’ as possible. Besides selling ‘Superman’ as a newspaper strip (the
original ambition for Superman by Siegel and Shuster), the obvious move was on
to radio – early films, cartoons, and later on to television.
The radio serial The Adventures of Superman
began regular broadcasts from February 1940, just 21 months after the first
appearance of Superman on the comic-book racks in May 1938 (although Action
Comics #1 was cover-dated June 1938).
When Siegel and Shuster had first signed
their contract to supply Superman to Detective Comics Inc. for publication,
Siegel had a relatively free hand to write the stories. Shuster supplied the
art (soon with the additional supporting artists in his ‘studio’: Paul Cassidy,
Jack Burnley, and – even this early – the distinctive 1950s/1960s Superman
artist Wayne Boring).
But once Superman’s unexpected success was
apparent to Donenfeld and Liebowitz, they knew that they needed better
editorial control over their lucrative comic books. They employed Whitney
Ellsworth to get a firmer grip on the material. He became the second editor of
Action Comics, replacing Vince Sullivan from Action Comics #21 (February 1940).
By this time, with a radio show, Superman’s
popularity would have been limited if his moral code was not acceptable for
family listening. It’s likely that word must have got back that Superman had to
stop killing crooks with such abandon. I suggest that this first outside factor
explains Superman’s change of attitude between the autumn of 1939 and the summer
of 1940 (by which time the radio show was in full swing).
These concerns anticipated the growing
alarm of parents who feared their children would be brutalized and corrupted by
the material in the ‘funny books’. The comics industry eventually founded the
Comics Code Authority in 1954, especially after the attacks by the psychiatrist
Fredric Wertham. (But as we have seen now, Superman’s publishers had reeled in his
more base instincts years before this happened!)
After this, hundreds of Superman stories
embedded this strict ethical code of behaviour into the bedrock of Superman’s
being: so much so that his oath ‘never to kill’ became a staple of Superman
comics throughout the Silver Age of Comics – and also the plot engine of a
number of stories themselves when he had to devise ingenious methods to keep
this oath, yet defeat his enemies.
(Another interesting by-product of
Superman’s new radio presence was the demise of Clark Kent’s editor in the
comics, George Taylor. Taylor’s last appearance was in Action Comics #30
(November 1940) and Perry White (just ‘White’ then) was there in the next
published Superman story in Superman #7 (November-December 1940). But the
character of Perry White, as Clark Kent’s editor at The Daily Planet, had
already first appeared in the second episode of the radio serial, broadcast
back in February of that year. This was a case of the comics being brought into
line with the radio show – as did also happen later with the introduction from
radio to the comics of Superman’s vulnerability: kryptonite.)
By the Bronze Age, the cultural landscape
of America had changed from the moral certainty of the Eisenhower era and the
depths of the Cold War in the 1950s. This became the second outside factor to
change Superman.
Vietnam and the countercultural pressures
of the 1960s and 1970s began to have their effect on Superman’s new generation
of writers. One of them was Denny O’Neil, who had begun to write the innovative
socially-aware Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories. He was brought in to renovate
the Superman title in 1970 by new editor Julius Schwartz, debuting with
Superman #233 (January 1971) with a story defining a new direction for the
character in ‘Superman Breaks Loose’. ((Spoiler Alert!)) The kryptonite on
Earth is rendered harmless to Superman, but at the end of the story arc – over
a number of issues – Superman himself is permanently physically weakened. Okay…
he was still ‘Superman’: he just couldn’t toss planets around as easily as
before.
After these physical changes, the moral
certainty of Superman himself was challenged. A notable story was published a
year later in Superman #247 (January 1972). Written by Elliot Maggin, ‘Must
There be a Superman?’ was an exploration of the problem of Superman always
being on hand to help planet Earth, thus potentially stunting the natural
development of humankind. Perhaps Maggin got the idea from Star Trek’s
well-known ‘Prime Directive’ – but no matter. He raised interesting questions
about the relationship between the helper and the helped.
But perhaps a more significant story was
also published in that landmark issue, one that marked a third phase in
Superman’s relationship with violence.
The first in a short-lived series ‘The
Private life of Clark Kent’, this Denny O’Neil written story describes how
Clark Kent defuses by persuasion the kind of situation that Superman would have
dealt with by force. Clark Kent muses, afterwards, that perhaps ‘Violence isn’t
always the answer’. Note that it’s ‘Violence’, not ‘Killing’. He’s moved closer
to Mahatma Gandhi’s personal practice of nonviolence with this new understanding.
Incidentally, that story also displayed another
change in prevailing attitudes since the early 1940s. In Action Comics #21 (February
1940) Superman is considering a problem as he sits at home smoking his pipe.
[Action Comics #21, February 1940]
In Superman #247 (January 1972) he wonders
if he’s been missing something by not trying tobacco – and the message to the
readers is clear!
[Superman #247, January 1972]
But returning to the issue of Superman’s
changing attitude towards violence and killing, it was the perceptive writer
Alan Moore who realized that, by the end of the Bronze Age, this was the foundation
on which this version of Superman rested. Remove that, and it would be enough
to end his career.
Moore got the chance to demonstrate this
when he wrote the two-parter ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?’ in
Superman #423 (September 1986) and Action Comics #583 (September 1986). ((Spoiler
Alert!)) Moore’s plot contrives to force the immovable object (Superman’s ethical
code) to meet the irresistible force (the demand of the plot: he must kill the
newly totally evil Mr Mxyzptlk to prevent countless innocent deaths). The
immovable object breaks under the imperative of saving future lives, and
Superman must be no more.
[Action Comics #583, September 1986]
This shift, from having such a cavalier attitude
to criminals’ lives to Superman’s ‘oath never to kill’, illustrates a rather
different conception of strength than what is usual in super-hero comics.
In the Book of Proverbs (16:32), it’s
stated that ‘He who is slow to anger is better than a strong man, and a master
of his passions is better than a conqueror of a city’. This is summed up by the
sage Ben Zoma, who said, (in the Ethics of the Fathers 4:1): ‘Who is strong? One
who masters his evil impulse.’
Here we have a philosophy of self-restraint
as being the true marker of strength. Scale this up to the super-powers of a
Kryptonian under a yellow sun, and we can see how it would take a
super-strength of the mind, not the body, to resist the temptations on offer
when living as a Superman on a non-Super planet Earth.
Yet Superman showed this inner strength from
the very beginning, in his origin story. He was willing to live as a normal
person and not to use his super-powers for any kind of self-aggrandisement,
self-enrichment or power over others.
34 years later, his attitude towards his
outer, physical strength finally caught up with that inner strength. He finally
accepted that violence was not necessarily the answer to doing good – even if
you’re Superman.
copyright. Nigel Brown
