The Strong Man we Need

 

During the early part of the 20th Century, humanity became obsessed with beings that were all-powerful, who had nearly perfect moral sense and who were capable of rising above the calamities of humankind's harsh and volatile reality—literally. One of the artistic representations of the perfect man arrived as a baby that had been sent to Earth from a far-flung planet that had already been doomed by its culture's hubris and reckless belief in its own technological divinity and was awaiting its final calamity. That baby's cosmic conveyance landed him in the heart of rural America, where he was adopted by an aging, childless couple who instilled in him the true-blue values and common sense of prairie sodbusters. 

It turns out, however, that the baby was more than just a child from space. Due to his molecular and genetic peculiarities, the lad (named Clark) absorbed radiation from our younger, yellow sun, which made him stronger, more dense, more powerfully gifted with abilities that only revealed themselves as he reached age twelve.

Taught to hide his powers so as not to draw attention to himself, Clark began to see that he could still use his skills to help people and by the time he reached man's estate, he adopted a dual role in his life. In one, he is a quiet but gifted journalist, a country boy living in the big city. In the other, he is a powerful hero who saves people and uses his strength of character (and of frame) to fight bad guys and save hapless victims.

Of course, this is Kal of the house of El from the exploded planet Krypton, raised by Martha (Ma) and Jonathan (Pa) Kent in the flat, boring, bucolic grasslands of America’s central expanses and who later dons the mantle of his homeworld to fight for truth, justice and the American way, a mantra scoffed at by his paramour Lois Lane in the 1978 movie because, she says, it will put him in direct conflict with every elected official.

Superman is a powerfully recognizable character in American popular art and comic book literature. He has spawned countless TV and movie variants, while dominating the comic book scene since his genesis in 1938. From the moment he first “landed” on newsstands he has captured the imagination of generations of children and moviegoers and regardless of how many times his story is recycled, it nevertheless inspires.

The planet on which this Kryptonian son landed was a world in duress. America was reeling from the crash of ‘29 and the effects of The Great Depression. Communism was taking Eastern Europe by storm and an Austrian-born upstart jailbird house painter was rallying the German people to a frothing rage of racial supremacy and Nordic blood myths. The world was shuddering under these burdens and needed a savior to capture its imagination. Hither came Clark Joseph Kent, mild-mannered journalist by day, but whenever there was trouble, this faster-than-a-speeding-bullet, skyscraper-leaping hero came on the scene and saved the day.

It is impossible not to see the messianic undertones within Big Blue's origin story. A boy from another father, adopted by a humble family, the adolescent development of apparently superhuman powers, the growth to a savior of his adopted people, is all generally a pastiche of the early chapters of the gospels. Superman saves everyone he can and is forever recognized as a kind of deity by the people of Metropolis (his adopted city). Jesus “springs” from God, though is adopted by Joseph, who is the scion of a formerly childless couple (Abraham and Sarah) and of a lost kingdom (Solomon/David). At the temple, Jesus demonstrates keen understanding of the laws and of unusual powers and eventually he grows to manhood as both a humble carpenter and yet accepts his destiny to die for the salvation of mankind. The similarities are uncanny until we remember that this is how humans tell stories and that there are trends like the hero’s journey and story arc which explain these otherwise remarkable likenesses throughout all myth.

At the time of Superman’s creation, the world was fascinated by questions of human superiority. Thinkers of the period were trying to advocate for ethnic tampering to create the “perfect” human. They argued for the sterilization of those people deemed unable to meet certain intellectual skill levels. Although wrongly attributed to Darwin, the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ was born from this era. Formally known as eugenics, this mish-mash of pseudo scientific hokum was entirely based on the false idea that within the confines of our ancestry lay the admixture necessary to breed superior humans, perfect in every way. Many comic books in this period of history exorcized these desires for super humans by bringing them to the comic book page.

Assimilating some of the concepts from eugenics and adding a dose of Nietzsche, that former house painter mentioned above, also became obsessed with a race of perfectly Germanic people (totally opposite in every way of himself—almost a photographic negative). Tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, this so-called Aryan Race would sweep the world after Europe’s sovereign powers fell beneath Nazi tank treads and the swastika. Or so it was to be believed. Along with this sickening racial hygiene ideology came the abhorrent scapegoat motive that required the extermination of the Jews.

Antisemitism wasn't a German idea, though Germany may have perfected it. For decades leading up to the vast crematoria Hitler’s goons created to eradicate the Jewish diaspora of Europe, the world had been incredibly intolerant of the Semitic peoples. The Russians had used purges, called pogroms, to eradicate those who didn't fit the ideological standards of “The Soviet Man”. In America, antisemitism was basically endorsed, if not overtly, by those in power and reflected in popular culture. The term “intellectual” became synonymous with a dread of the Levantine. Hitler’s ideologies were quite popular at the time, especially in rural and Southern America, though usually in the form of hooded and cloaked hillbillies dancing around burning crosses and favoring the extermination of Black Americans rather than the smaller Jewish populations. Their spittle-flecked diatribes and blood-soaked race crimes bore more than a passing resemblance to Hitler’s brown-shirted bully boys beating up the sick and elderly and leaving them to die in the streets. On a visit to the American South prior to the beginning of the war in Europe, the German cleric and hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about how much the crimes perpetrated against Black Americans reminded him of the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

Superman’s creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel were perhaps unconsciously reacting to these growing intolerances when they created their now universally known hero. Both were avid readers of the popular pulp comic magazines of the time and were aware of characters with latent or overt powers. They created their super hero to outmatch any of these other limited versions by giving him super strength, super speed and the ability to (at first) leap quite high and far. It’s true that they were mainly influenced by John Carter of Mars, the character written by Edgar Rice Burroughs (incidentally, a deeply antisemitic author who invented Tarzan based on eugenic ideas) and how his earth-born abilities translated to superhuman strength on the surface of Mars. Superman’s powers were based on the fact that the harsh environment of Krypton made him far stronger than any human could ever be having been born to our yellow star.

I’ve always marveled (that pun was not intended) at how they designed Kal-El to look. With the rise of the Aryan übermensch—blond, blue-eyed, tall, fair of skin, Nordic—Shuster and Siegel’s creation was something more American in composition and clearly designed to be in direct antithesis to the Reich’s ideal human. Superman has the square, lantern-jawed and aqualine, almost Roman profile of other popular heroes of the time like Dick Tracy or Sam Spade. He is taller than average, with well-built muscles and glossy blue-black hair perfectly quaffed. As his alter-ego, Clark Kent, other than not wearing his Superman suit (at least not over his clothes) the only thing to hide Kent’s secret identity are a pair of thick, tortoise shell spectacles and a slightly smiley, good-natured country-boy personality, not quite Gomer Pile, but certainly not self-possessed or decisive and powerful like the hero he actually is. I have never understood how this thin disguise fools people.

Superman probably arose in popularity, like so many cultural icons, from a blocked wish for a savior. The world was on the brink of war and suffering the brutality of financial collapse. The old gods had become irrelevant or, more accurately, part of the problem. The belt buckles of the villainous Reich were inscribed with the self-righteous phrase ‘Gott mit uns’, thereby ratifying their divine right to purge the world of their enemies and secure an empire of a thousand years. The Nazis most assuredly had the endorsement, at least the blind eye, of Pope Pius XII and many church fathers were either outwardly complicit with the atrocities or capitulated out of fear (though Dietrich Bonhoeffer proved a hero of the period by not allowing himself to become an accomplice of the Nazis). In either case, America needed a hero to rally around and Superman fit the need. Although he did not participate in the war effort more than to get people to do their part or on the covers of his comics (he did fight the enemies on the radio, in the movies and in his newspaper comics), he was nevertheless a symbol to unify American consciousness behind.

Today, Superman has followed his other god-like predecessors by dying and coming back much changed and more powerful. He has also curated an entire pantheon of ‘meta humans’ who have powers similar to his and that nod squarely at the ancient animal/human hybrid deities of cave paintings. Superman is like Zeus or Jupiter or Odin or Ra or Vishnu in this way, but his Judeo-Christian origins cannot be ignored. What people really mean when they look up and say, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman,” is that there goes an immortal who is better and more powerful than we ever will be and we need him to save us from ourselves. This is doubly implied by the fact that many of Superman’s earlier villains were regular people gone insane from seeking power or by pursuing some horrid scientific goals. His most prominent antagonist is Lex Luthor, a mad billionaire real-estate tycoon who winds up hoodwinking America into voting him for president and then refuses to leave and who, like all villains, escapes accountability for his unruly and criminal behavior. If it sounds familiar to you, Superman isn’t the only echo of the frail and flawed human psyche that arises in our literature and sometimes in real life.

Other variants of Superman have come about in our more cynical modern era, where writers play havoc with the established origins to drum up sales or to engage readers. In an arrestingly eloquent comic series by Mark Millar called Red Son, we are asked what would happen if Kal-El’s ship cratered in the steppes of Russia and became a symbol for the Stalinist Soviet movement. Likewise, in a 2019 movie called Brightburn written by the Gunn brothers, rather than being a good, honest and noble being, a Clark Kent-like boy is actually a horribly powerful alien conqueror sent to Earth as a baby to grow into a usurper. He has no care for humanity or even his parents. Although fun speculations like these abound (there is even a comic alternate reality where Lex Luthor is the good guy and Superman is bent on world domination) the truth is, Superman is merely a modern output of the human religious impulse and he reflects the best of us, at least for the most part. 

At some point, every child, spurred on to fascination by movies or cartoons or comic books, dreams of putting on a red cape and using the amazing Kryptonian powers for good. For a little kid to read about and believe in superheroes is one thing. Once they grow to a certain age, we might expect them to come to terms with the faulty reasoning and lack of evidence for Superman’s actual existence, in much the same way they might grow out of the child-like belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If people persisted in believing that Superman was real or that he would save us if he was, we might look askance and find it unsettling and even an excuse to have someone committed. If they went around indoctrinating little children and forcing the homeless to believe in Kal-El in order to get food and shelter, we’d probably feel the need to step in and prevent it. No government official would ever endorse tax exemption for small groups of devoted Superman worshippers, nor would they try to get Superman’s symbol enshrined in the halls of government or schools, nor would they teach Kryptonian history or argue over which origin story was right. Such things wouldn’t ever be tolerated. Imagine if a man wearing the symbols of Superman bombed the home of a man who drew Captain America comics, because he wasn’t a member of the church of Detective Comics. The outrage would be rightly universal.

So, although Superman is real in the sense that we know about his characteristics and his origins and it is fun to pretend what it would be like if we had his powers or to read about his adventures—in much the same way that Hamlet or Huck Finn are real to us—the true spirit of humanity is in its ability to create engaging and inspiring stories, rather than in the probably faulty impetus behind that creation. Our heroes in the modern age aren’t quite what they used to be, it’s true, but Superman is probably proof that, if we could disengage the iron-age fairy tales we refuse to release, we might find that our modern deities are possibly—at least in Superman’s case—a reflection of our best selves and our moral potential and that he is the only strong man we need. As Superman's father, Jor-El says in the 1978 film, “They are a great people. They wish to be. All they lack is the light to show them the way.”