About this Episode: Superman is an American icon. He is probably one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world. The Superman franchise is a multi-million dollar enterprise. Everything from comic books and movies to Halloween costumes and lunch boxes and everything in between carry the image of the “Man of Steel.” He’s even been immortalized in song in Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”:

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim.

And we mustn’t forget the line from Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” (1966): “Superman or Green Lantern ain’t got a-nothin’ on me.” But we want to forget Neitzsche’s Übermensch—the “overman” or “superman”—which, as far as we know, Siegel and Schuster had never heard of. We also want to forget the publicity around the “death of Superman.” After months of build up, the death issue came wrapped in black plastic with the red Superman logo emblazoned on the front. Collectors knew that a mint copy required that the bag remain unopened. This meant that if you wanted to read the issue, you needed to buy a second copy! People stood in lines as they visited a comic book store probably for the first time in their life. Of course, Superman did not remain dead for long.

The history of Superman has a number of twists and turns. The Superman character was conceived by Jerry Siegel in 1933. Along with his friend Joe Schuster, the two seventeen-year-olds from Cleveland, Ohio, developed the character in comic strip form. The Superman storyline is an amalgamation of Voltaire’s 1752 tale Micromegas, about a visitor from another world, elements of comic hero Doc Savage, Philip Wylie’s 1930 Galdiator novel, and even the biblical story of Moses being placed in a basket to be saved from sure destruction. Even so, Superman was truly an American invention.

Siegel described Superman as “a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I ever heard of rolled into one.” Siegel and Schuster had a difficult selling their comic strip. The strip languished for nearly six years through rejections until it was finally published in comic book form in the first issue of Action Comics in June 1938. If you wanted to purchase a near-mint copy of that first ten-cent issue today, it would cost you almost $200,000! There are only about four issues in this condition in existence.

Here’s the kicker. Siegel and Schuster were paid $130 for all the rights to the comic and character, forever. Over the years, they sued DC (Detective Comics) to participate in the financial windfall, but with no success. It wasn’t until the first Superman movie came out that Siegel and Schuster were able to strike a deal with DC. They took their plight to the press rather than the courts. It was bad publicity that forced DC to sit down with Siegel and Schuster, who were now nearly 60 years old, to reach a financial settlement. Nothing comes easy in life, not even for the creators of Superman.

1 http://store.yahoo.com/wickedcoolstuff/superman.html

2 Webb Garrison, How It Started (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 78.

3 Quoted in Steranko, History of Comics, 2 vols. (Reading, PA: Supergraphics, 1970), 1:38–39.

4 To view a copy of the first issue of Action Comics, go to this site: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html