The Superhero: An American Invention

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we also love to hear your stories. We feature them routinely. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com.

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Speaker 2: There’s some of our favorites.

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Speaker 1: Jeffrey Johnson is a World War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. He’s also the author of Superhistory: Comic Book Superheroes, and American Society.

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Speaker 2: He’s here to share this story. Let’s take a listen.

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Speaker 3: My name is Jeffrey Johnson. I have a Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University. I was always joined to comic books since I was, I guess, about ten or eleven, and then I stopped reading them, and then I picked them back up during the late eighties and the early nineties. And then when I started my Ph.D. in, I guess, two thousand and four, I started reading them again, and it really just struck me just how cohesive the narrative is and how very much speak to the American experience in the way that King Arthur does for England, and Beowulf does for the ancients, and

00:01:18
Speaker 4: the Greek gods do for the Greeks, and the Roman gods for them.

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Speaker 3: I mean, they’re this mythological force and they’re a narrative driver of that speaks to these heroes that a certain society needs at a certain time. That speaks to their hopes and their dreams and their fears, and they’re a real mirror to what is always going on in the greater U.S. mindset and the background of how we live, which is an amazing thing to have to attract. Basically, how then American society changed from nineteen thirty-eight until now through these superheroes. The first comic book superhero was super, and he debuted in June nineteen thirty-nine, was the cover date of Action Comics Number One when he came out. There were comic strips and comic books before that. The first comic strip, which was a newspaper strip, came out in eighteen ninety-six.

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Speaker 4: And it was called The Yellow Kid.

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Speaker 3: But it was a different art form than what comic books are, because comic strips were different for comic books.

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Speaker 4: Because comic strips.

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Speaker 3: Came out daily in the newspaper, and they were three, four, or five panels and a strip every day, and they often touched on politics or things of the day at the early start, and then they would follow the daily adventures of somebody. And they were from the beginning really highly respected, and the people who created them became pretty famous and pretty wealthy pretty quickly because they were read by so many people in the newspaper every day. And most of the people who went into that sort of artwork, the kind of cartooning artwork, really wanted to get into comic strips. But in the early nineteen thirties, there were these pulp magazines, and then the early precursors to the comic books, with these little pamphlets that were put out at newsstands that were very much cheap paper, very quickly made stories, and often they were reprints of the comic strips that had been put in the paper. But the real first major difference of what a comic strip and a comic book could be was in nineteen thirty-eight, Action Comics Number One came out, and the superhero was introduced.

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Speaker 4: That was the first.

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Speaker 3: Appearance of Superman, and the creators of Superman were two teenage boys from Cleveland, Ohio. Their names were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry mostly wrote the stories and Joe mostly did the art, and they worked together on Superman, and they came up with the idea just while that they were trying to think up a comic strip for the newspapers, because they really wanted to be comic strip guys, because they that was where all the money and all the fame were. And these were two teenage boys who felt like they were outcast. They didn’t really do particularly well at school. They wanted to have girlfriend, but they didn’t. They were a little bit nerdy. They were two people who really felt like they needed a champion for them, someone who could stand up for people like them. And one of the really interesting things is that Jerry Siegel’s father had been murdered during a robbery, and he had always carried that with him. And so in some ways, he said later that he created Superman because he didn’t want people to feel like he felt in this fictional world that he created, and he couldn’t do anything about his father’s murder, and he couldn’t do anything at actual time, but he could create this world in which the superpowered hero could actually fight for the common man and could be this larger than life’s force who actually worked for real people and who tried to avenge the wrongs and tried to stop crime and make up for things that went wrong. It’s fascinating that two teenage boys created Superman, this first superhero who had created this entire industry.

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Speaker 4: That we’re still talking about today.

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Speaker 3: I mean, it came out of nowhere, and yet it’s this amalgamation of all of.

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Speaker 4: These different background things.

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Speaker 3: I mean, you have Superman, who’s, you know, dressed in this costume that’s very much taken from like these circus acrobat performers and strong men. Very bright and colorful and stin costume. And then you have all of these different pole heroes like Doc Savage, the Phantom, Zorro, Tarzan, the Shadow, who all have these secret identities, and they fight crime, and they’re in the shadows, but they weren’t really Superman because they didn’t put it all together. I mean, you had strong men like Popeye, and you had avengers like Zorro, or you had people who went on adventures like John Carter from Mars, and you had all of the elements were there, but no one ever put him into one person because it was too fantastical. When Siegel and Shuster first came up with the idea. They first tried to make it into a comic strip and put it into the.

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Speaker 4: Newspapers, and nobody wanted it.

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Speaker 3: Then they went around and they tried to get every comic book publisher to take it, and nobody wanted it because nobody believed that anybody would want to read something that was this unbelievable, that was this super. And so they finally found a comic publisher that was run by two guys named Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, who started what was at that kind talled National Comics, but it later became known as DC Comics, and they were looking for filler for this new comic book they were creating called Action Comics Number One.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story of comic books and where it all really began, and not superheroes, because they’ve been around Greek mythology to the present.

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Speaker 2: But in nineteen thirty-eight.

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Speaker 1: A couple of young guys, teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and they they had more than an idea. They wanted, as Jeffrey said, to create a champion for sort of nerdy outcasts like themselves.

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Speaker 2: And by the way, the book is.

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Speaker 1: Superhistory: Comic Book, Superheroes, and American Society. Go wherever you get your books, Amazon or the usual suspects.

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Speaker 2: And when we come back.

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Speaker 1: More of the life of comic book superheroes and how they mirror American life. Here on Our American Stories. Here are in Our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot; help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories, and Jeffrey Johnson, who is a World War II historian at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and he’s also the author of Superhistory: Comic Book, Superheroes, and American Society. We’d left off with him talking about two teenagers in Cleveland, Ohio, and this idea for a character and a cartoon and a comic book called Superman.

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Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where Jeffrey last left off.

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Speaker 3: Although everybody remembers Action Comics Number One is the first appearance of Superman. There were multiple stories in there about detectives and crime, and there was a magic story, and there was all of these different formats that were basically pushed in this one episode. And Superman was basically added to this first issue because they needed something to put in there. The was the story, and this was Siegel and Shuster’s last chance.

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Speaker 4: And so when Action Comedies.

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Speaker 3: Came out with the cover date of June nineteen thirty-eight, they did put Superman on the cover. And there’s this incredible cover of Superman picking this car up and he’s smashing it, and you see these guys in the background with fear on their face and running around. And I mean, it’s not what people think of Superman now as this, you know, person who fights crime and he’s, you know, nice to children and he saves cats from the trees and that sort of thing. I mean, this is somebody who was terrifying the people on this cover of this first issue, and the history inside is.

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Speaker 4: Much the same way.

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Speaker 3: I mean, you know, Superman goes around and he he fights these kind of petty street criminal type crime, and he, you know, he fights corrupt politicians. There’s a portion of Action Comics Number One with the villain is a lobbyist who’s corrupt, and Superman basically holds him upside down.

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Speaker 4: On a wire and tries to scare him to death.

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Speaker 3: That’s very different from the Superman that most people think of, who pushes planets around, to a guy who’s worried about a lobbyist who’s kind of make a bad background deal. But I mean that’s what Superman was in the beginning. He was someone who stopped petty thieves, and he stopped corrupt slumlords, and he took on gambling dens that put slot machines for our children to use. I mean, he worried about street level crime, because that’s what Siegel and Shuster were worried about. They were worried about the things that they saw every day. I mean, this was nineteen thirty-eight. This was in the midst of the Great Depression, right? Things were going terribly. In the U.S. economy get crashed back in nineteen twenty-nine, so you have almost a decade of breadlines and soup lines and massive amounts of.

00:10:41
Speaker 4: People out of work.

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Speaker 3: So when it came out, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Lieba, was printed two hundred thousand copies, and they printed it as an overprint. They thought they’d have a lot extra sent back, and then it immediately sells out, and the retailers are asking them for more. So they printed more for issue two, and they sold out of that, and they printed more for issue three, but nobody knew that it was Superman selling the issues because there was so many different stories in there. And then by issue six, they finally got numbers and they were able to figure out that it was Superman, and they went around and they talked to a newsstand dealers, and they said, “The kids don’t know Action Comics. They asked me for the one that’s got Superman in it.”

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Speaker 4: And by Action.

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Speaker 3: Comics Number Six, they were selling about five hundred thousand copies each, which was up from that two hundred thousand print run for the first one that they thought was wildly optimistic. I mean, Superman took off in a way that I don’t know if American culture has ever seen before. It became a mania of just how popular, how quickly he became. He got in Macy’s Day Parade balloon, like within a couple of years. Pretty soon, he gets his own show on the radio, and he’s got radio adventures. And I mean, and then really quickly, in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine, he gets his own own comic book. Superman Number One comes out basically a year from the first issue of Action Comics Number One.

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Speaker 4: I mean, this was grassroots. This wasn’t marketing.

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Speaker 3: Nobody went out and asked people what they wanted, or, you know, tried to do these surveys or tried to, you know, come up with something that people wanted. This was a vision of these two kids who changed the entire world in some way by by creating these superheroes. There were soon dozens and dozens of knockoffs Superman, and one of the first Superman knockoffs was actually done by DC itself. I mean, when that they saw how popular Superman was, they quickly talked to writers and tried to figure out if they could get another superhero to make more comics about. And so they talked to a guy named Bob Kane as the story, and he came back after a weekend with this idea for Batman. And Batman couldn’t be any different from Superman. They wanted a Superman knockoff. But I mean, Batman is not superpowered. He’s a millionaire playboy who is everything that Bob kand a writer who created him wanted.

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Speaker 4: He wanted to be rich and popular and be able to do all these things.

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Speaker 3: He’s wished fulfillment for Bob Kane in the way same way that Superman was for Siegel and Shuster, but in the exact opposite way. So you have this really interesting dynamic now that you have these two DC superheroes that couldn’t be any different. You have Superman, who’s eventually shown as being this Kansas farm boy who’s from a place that’s so quaint and so Middle America that it’s called Smallville. He’s adopted by these wonderful couple who teach him the values and who teach him that he’s supposed to fight for right and for truth.

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Speaker 4: And justice and all this stuff.

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Speaker 3: And I say the other stuff because they didn’t start say in the American Way until The Adventures of Superman TV show with George Reeves came about in nineteen fifty-three. And then you have Batman who sees his parents murdered and he’s got all of this money and all of the things that he could want, but he’s in this city that basically the crime of the city killed his parents, and now he has to start this war on the city and the crime that’s in it. So, I mean, you have these two heroes, but they do reflect these two sides of this American mythology that’s been around since the very start of who we are. What’s fascinating about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster is they were immigrants, as were almost all of the early creators of comic books. They both had parents who fled different countries because of the antisemitism of where they were from.

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Speaker 4: As did a lot of the early creators.

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Speaker 3: I mean, Bob Kane was of a Jewish background, and his parents fled where they were from because of problems. I talked about the publishers, some National Comics. They both came from different countries to the States when that they were young, and they fled because their parents thought that they could have a much better life in this country. And one of the creators were going to talk about later, Jack Kirby. He was from New York, and his parents were also immigrants, and they came to America because of a better life. And Stan Lee was born Stanley Lieber, and he was of a Jewish background too. So, I mean, a really large portion of the early creators were from Jewish backgrounds and where people really understood how things could go wrong in places other than the U.S., and they came to the U.S. really wanting a better life. By the end of the nineteen thirties and the early nineteen forties, there were literally dozens of not hundreds of knockoff comic book superheroes. I mean people like the Black Hood, Cat and Man, Sub-Zero Man, Hydro-Man, Voltron, the Human Generator, the Phantom Lady, Major Victory, the Human Bond, and Vapo-Man. Are, you know, some of the great names that come out of that era. But I mean there were also some that were really successful. One of the most successful one is on Shazam, or Captain Marvel’s he’s known sometimes, who came out of Wiz Comics Number Two and nineteen forty, and he was a Superman ripoff, but he was done in this very safe, very cleansed, and a very easy read. So, Shazam, who was created to look just like Superman, but he’s given these much more child friendly adventures where there was nothing violent or nothing that parents could feel bad about their their children reading. And he was highly popular. He outsold all superheroes, including Superman, for a while, but then he was such a Superman knockoff that DC sued Fawcett, and then they won eventually, but by the time the courts had dragged out, this was in the nineteen fifties, when that his sales had dropped so much that the effect of DC went in the court case really didn’t matter. So by like nineteen forty and early nineteen forty-one, you have this mass of superheroes, right, dozens of publishers who are publishing hundreds of different superhero who all share some of the same elements and being superpowered and wearing bright costumes of fighting crime. They’re selling millions of copies across the boards of these issues. And then you have World War II come about, and.

00:17:12
Speaker 1: You’ve been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story of how, well, how our comic books came to be in America. And again, it started with two teenagers in Cleveland, and the next thing, you know, from Superman, we get a very different character from the same company, Batman. When we come back, more of this remarkable historical look at America through the lens of comic books. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and with Jeffrey Johnson, who’s