The Superhero as Avatar II: Superman and the 1940s

In 1938, Superman appeared to a world that did not previously know his kind. He combined in his person the full superhero package, which included a garish costume, a thematic title, and equipment or abilities centering around a core concept.

By the early forties, comics would host a startling array of costumed heroes. Some worked in costumes and themes but essentially bore the marks of their pulp-hero heritage; others belonged almost completely in a world of the fantastic, from characters who could transform and reshape their bodies (Air Wave, Hydro-Man, Plastic Man) to wizards (Dr. Fate, Zatara, Ibis the Invincible) to spirits returned from the dead to fight crime (Kid Eternity, the Spectre).

At some point, the unlikely but still somewhat realistic pulp hero gave way to a wild explosion of variants on the concept of men and women gifted with abilities more suited to the cast of ancient pagan legend and more modern fairy tales. Superheroes went from a cast of zero in the mid-thirties to more than one person might care to remember in a very short span; and, barring the possibility of a spontaneous generation in hundreds of places at once, we must assume that some seed spawned an entire genre of superhero.

Superman appeared in the right time and place to seed the development of the costumed superhero of the 1940s. Though predated by the Phantom in 1936, Superman exploded into public awareness, spawning cartoons, movies, and spin-off titles all in his first ten years. He enjoyed name recognition and an enduring appeal that even allowed him to survive the near-extinction of his kind that followed the end of the Second World War. The Phantom's seed might have fallen first, but he never took root. Superman became the father of his kind. In this sense we can understand him as the archetypical superhero of the forties even if he appeared over a year before the decade began.

The Seed that Grew a Forest

Before Superman, adventure comics included a number of four-color variants on the dashing and daring pulp adventurer. The ranks of rugged reporters, fighter aces, and heroic sons of moneyed famines provided the pulp-styled heroes of comic books. These heroes lay much of the groundwork that would contribute to the model of Superman, Batman, and subsequent superheroes. From them, the superhero would inherit a comic-book vision of manhood and heroism.

The tools and dangers that the comics pulp hero enjoyed stayed within such things as fists, clubs, knives, pistols, blackjacks, a bomb or two, and the betrayals of wanton women. His enemies might enjoy a few more resources, especially those who knew the secret canon of mad science, but the conventions of pulp heroes did not allow them to move too far into the separate genres of fantasy and science fiction.

With the appearance of Superman, the barriers between the various families of popular fiction broke down. The crimefighting hero, in his person, combined with the crusading reporter, and again with the traveler from space. As the hero himself expanded to fill new clothes, so, too, could the menaces he faced. He no longer had to confine himself to a diet of spies, saboteurs, and gangsters.

The Look

The visual component of superheroes provides an obvious line at which to divide the pulp hero, such as the Shadow, from the mystery-man style superhero, such as Dr. Mid-Nite. The superhero costume sticks in the imagination and probably did much to imprint the superhero on the imagination of a generation of readers.

Though conceptually less important than the powers a superhero demonstrates - Superman, after all, could perform the same deeds in costume, in civilian clothes, or in his birthday suit - something makes this element fundamental. The presence of the costume implies an entire series of conventions, including the notion of super-powered alpha males fistfighting their way to a better world. Perhaps the type of disbelief required to allow for such a wardrobe in the first place kicks the brain into the right gear to absorb the other impossible elements that complete the form.

For readers who do not take themselves or what they read so seriously that they can afford to amuse themselves in ways that do not contribute to dignity or a posture of maturity, the superhero adds a festive element to what, unadorned, might seem like little more than a blunt tale of interpersonal violence. By the time Stan Lee decided to reinvent comics and Jack Kirby actually did the work that that involved, the unlikely and the ridiculous had become desireable elements of the superhero concept. However, since those elements predated Lee's involvement in creating comics and represented one of a short list of innovations that we can't truly attribute to Kirby's efforts, we should recognize that the appeal of the absurd wardrobe of the superhero comic existed as something for Lee and Kirby to rediscover, not invent. Most of what constitutes "camp" includes the very self-conscious application of the unselfconscious conventions of an earlier day.

The History

America still labored under the burdens of an imploded economy in 1938, but the rise of a new and proactive approach to government - essentially personified by the innovations of President Franklin Roosevelt - reflected something of a paradigm shift. Things seemed poised to happen on a grander scale than an earlier, but still recent, common sense would allow.

If Batman reflected elements of the age of Dillinger, Superman showed signs of the World's Fair of the 1930s. The promise of technology, portents of better times (one might say the light at the end of a long, long tunnel), and the bonds that form among people who have survived a common crisis all appeared in a period that needed antidotes to a justifiable gloom inspired by economic and political crises in, but not contained to, America.

Superman did not struggle against human limitations in the way Batman did. He rose above them, providing a theme very right for his times. This, probably more than any other particular aspect of the character, explains why he managed to inspire the imagination of consumers of popular culture in ways other superheroes would not until nearly a generation later. Superman migrated to cartoons, movies, radio, and television well in advance of peers from the same generation.

The optimism of the premise could explain a great deal. Batman might confront the demons of the present, but Superman provided a model for the future.

The Gifts

From the beginning, Superman operated on a scale that made him a plausible antidote to the problems of the world. Occasional storytelling excesses that cast him in a messianic role appeared from his earliest days, although the bluntness of some uses of the character as DC's copyrighted Christ-figure would, thankfully, wait until a much later era. However, even before America entered the Second World War, Superman sometimes acted in morality plays about it.

In one example, Superman appeared before 1941 in a short but meaningful piece in which he traveled to Europe, captured two dictators (doppelgangers of Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin), and dragged them to stand trial in front of an international tribunal. As a wish-fulfillment tale we can recognize in it both its silliness - no single Superman appeared to put an end to a war that consumed over thirty million lives - and its vision, a future where human principles like the Rule of Law can stop wars, something viewed as an inevitable symptom of the flawed nature of man as far back as Homer's day (when wars resulted from the earth groaning with the weight of men).

Superman could play the hero game on the conventional scale. We see as much on the cover of Action #1, where he lifts and shakes a car to discharge a cluster of gangsters. Writers, though, clearly saw a larger role for the character as a player who might reshape not just a city (the essential territory in which typical superheroes operated), but possibly a world.

This, interestingly, predated the godlike powers that Superman would accrue by the mid-sixties. In the beginning, he could pound through walls, outrace moving cars, leap over buildings (and, soon after, fly with no obvious means of propulsion). His concept broke into messianic themes when Superman could stand up to a tank, but not necessarily do more.

The Ethos

Superman's powers do much to define him, but his character matters a great deal. Imagine, if you will, a superbeing with the abilities of Superman and the values and tendencies of the Punisher. This combination would seem more monstrous than human; an unstoppable killing machine, unimpeded by human efforts to elude his intent, very much resembles the Christian notion of Satan as a tormentor of the evil. Unlike Satan, however, such a figure need not limit himself to those scraps that fall to him by virtue of the various mechanisms theology catalogues for providing the devil with victims.

Such a figure might terrify collective mankind to the point that it could put aside its differences and disputes long enough to destroy such a creature - if this proved possible - or find some way to flee from it. Post-Crisis treatments of Superman suggest that he recognizes his ability to inspire fear as a repository of unbelievable, possibly uncontrollable, and therefore terrifying power. What, then, keeps Superman on the right side of popular esteem?

Superman operates under a system of self-imposed rules that somewhat resemble a key tenet of the Hippocratic Code. "If you can do no good, at least do no harm" stands out as the foremost principle of this sort, and one can recognize this principle shapes his behavior even if he never gets around to uttering it. Sometime along the path of his development, Superman also took to a principle against the deliberate use of lethal violence - one controversial story had Superman kill a more recent version of his Silver Age enemy General Zod, but that event clearly represented an aberrant incident in a long career in which the principle reliably holds. Draconian principles of right conduct combined with an innate compassion do much to take the edge of menace off a character who could do something like walk through a battlefield to seize the leader of a country and drag him off somewhere for punishment.

The formation of an ethos much reflects one man's realization of an ethos compatible with the Wilsonian vision that so many hoped the prosecution of the Second World War would achieve. Historical footnotes detailing Allied atrocities (for instance, the destruction of Dresden) mask the vision of the best of the movers and shakers who helped bring down the Nazi assault on Europe. The powers that united against Hitler, Hirohito, and their feeble bedfellow Mussolini, committed incredible acts of mayhem as a means to making such action obsolescent. One can easily dismiss such logic as flawed without impugning the master vision of a world that policed outlaw nations.

The Imitators

Aficionados of the Silver Age of Comics may recall how a doomed superhero named Wonder Man appeared in the first years of Marvel Comics' Avengers and met an untimely and tragic doom. Historians of the character may recall rumors of legal action by DC Comics, owing to a name too similar that of DC's Wonder Woman.

Will Eisner created an earlier Wonder Man and DC's lawyers shut that production down very fast. DC apparently considered the similarity to Superman so pronounced as to warrant litigation.

Other characters, of varying degrees of similarity, would appear on the scene, including Fawcett's ill-fated Captain Marvel, who became actionable after years of selling more comics than even Superman could. While the resemblance between the two characters, particularly in their forms in the early 1940s, makes it difficult to argue that Captain Marvel resulted from convergent character evolution rather than an editorial five-finger discount, we can still see in the timing and prosecution of this lawsuit more jealousy than justice.

Superman provided an easy model to imitate, but something, probably the opportunities beyond imitation which the superhero form offered, kept the obvious duplicates fairly few, at least until the self-referent comics of a later day would show a proliferation of duplicate supermen (some of which appear in a Recycling Bin column here).

First Father and Avatar of the 1940s

More typically, the superheroes that followed in Superman's tracks paralleled him on abstract levels. The original Vision came from another world and had amazing powers, but would not, except by exceptional feats of deceptive logic, resemble Superman in ways that implied simple duplication. The crew that followed demonstrated a considerable diversity and vitality, in spite of the death by disinterest that would await almost all of them in the forties and fifties. Superman's model would inspire the creation of a community of heroes that included Batman, the Sandman, the Blazing Skull, Hydro-Man, the Tarantula, the Whizzer, the Flash, Johnny Quick, Plastic Man, Air wave, and endless others who may have kept the superhero concept vital even as they faded into obscurity and cancellation.

We consider a seed that produces many offspring fertile. A source that fathers an entire species we should view as fertile in a way exponentially greater. That Superman could inspire new creations rather than simple duplicates of his own salient features marks him convincingly as a seminal character, not just as a first-comer of limited impact.