The story behind the story

From the June 21, 1941, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, we learn that Jerry Siegel once answered his door every to find a group of boys inquiring about Superman. Siegel told them that Superman did live there, but that he was out stopping criminals at that moment. To bolster his claim, he would show the kids one of Superman's spare outfits. He and Joe Shuster "have assumed a solemn obligation to instill faith, whenever possible, in the physical reality of Superman."

Interesting stuff. The article has what has to be one of the earliest printed versions of Siegel's tale of when he came up with the character, on a sleepless and hot summer night:

I am lying in bed counting sheep when all of a sudden it hits me. I conceive a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I ever heard tell of rolled into one. Only more so. I hop right out of bed and write this down, and then go back and think some more for about two hours and get up again and write that down. This goes on all night at two hour intervals, until in the morning I have a complete script.


He then runs to Joe Shuster's house and they work on the character together. In this version, it happened in 1932. I've usually seen the date as 1933. The Steranko History of Comics covers this, too.

Good stuff.

There are lots of other versions of this story told these days.There's an illustrated book called Boys of Steel by Mark Tyler Nobleman.
 

This seems to be the promotional image for The History of Invulnerability.

There's a stage play called The History of Invulnerability. I haven't seen it. Anybody know if it's any good?

A thriller that involves secrets about Superman's creator and Cain. Yes, that Cain.

There's a whole bunch of stuff about it in Brad Meltzer's novel The Book of Lies.

Where are all those people going?

Gerard Jones discusses it a bit in Men of Tomorrow. Also, i want to say that it inspired a lot of Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Klay novel.


There's some contention about what drove Jerry Siegel to create Superman, largely because he only talked about that one night in the early 30's and shied away from any self-psychologizing.  There are a whole bunch of other discussions of it that I'm omitting here. It's becoming a bigger and bigger part of the Superman story, especially as the publicity of the lawsuit over the rights to the character becomes more and more prominent. It seems likely that, if Warner Brothers could tell the story without making themselves look immoral, they'd probably make a feature film out of it.

On a related note: Google image search turns up some weird stuff, doesn't it?

controversy

Well, there's a back-up story (The Incident) in this week's Action Comics #900 that's caused a stir. In it, Superman states his intention to renounce his U.S. citizenship so that his international actions may not be construed as American policy. He does so after the Iranian government gets angry because he showed up to nonviolently support some protesters in Tehran. Here are some relevant links.

First, from comic book resources' robot 6. This one's a pretty good summation of the internet reaction.

There's comics alliance, which has a huge discussion in the comments.

Here's an example of the outside (outside of comics fandom, that is), reactionary response.

Thus far, I've been unable to find any genuine praise for the element of controversy, aside from the stray comment to news stories or blogs. As a story, regardless of what Superman intends to do, it's really not very good. It's only 9 pages, and lacks a real ending. It's told mostly in flashbacks, and of those 9 pages the entirety of the first is devoted to a guy standing around, checking his watch, and waiting for Superman to arrive. Narrative economy is not on the menu today. It also ends with a pretty lame attempt at demonstrating Superman's inspirational effect on the conflict in Tehran that draws him to Iran in the first place.

As for my feeling on the controversy, Douglas Wolk says it pretty well: 'Plenty of stories, from Paul Dini and Alex Ross's Superman: Peace on Earth to the beginning of "Grounded,"have addressed why Superman doesn't simply solve the world's geniune problems. The real answer is that that's not what Superman stories are about. The point of Superman stories is to wildly distort the world as we know it: to provide a huge, fun perspective on alienation, on leading a double life, on the struggle to understand what truth and justice are before one starts fighting for them. And anyone who purports to be offended at "The Incident" should remember that this happens in the same universe where, in 2000, Lex Luthor was elected President of the United States.'

At heart, this is a controversy inherent to the genre. It's one of the things that made a mess of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Any time you try to insert real world problems into superhero stories, you run the risk of exposing the genre for what it is: fiction. No genre can stand up to the real world.

The most interesting aspect of the whole thing is the frequent equation of Superman and Obama, which arises from the bafflingly persistent "birther" movement that demands further proof of Obama's US citizenship. People are making lots of jokes about needing to see Superman's birth certificate or something of the kind.

Who Owns Superman?

There's a legal battle being fought for the copyright to Superman, and there's a concomitant internet debate about who should have the copyright.

Here's a basic statment of the issue. here's another.

This writer thinks a Superman in the public domain is a good thing, for "culture." He continues his argument here, the foundation of which can be summed up as follows:

Creative endeavours ultimately are the property of the commons, the public.

A great many things are wrong with that sentence. But, moving on...

There's no new information in this article, but the title is telling: "Writing and Ownership, Why Superman has Abandoned us."

And one final article, which sums up the status of the current legal situation, gives a nice timeline (though it's from Wikipedia, it seems ok), and has a strange prediction: Marvel will publish Superman.

Copyright is currently one of the more compelling issues in folklore. Who owns traditional culture? Who can determine what's done with it? Who gets the money from its display?

There seems to be three opinions to the matter.
1. Superman belongs to Time/Warner, who own DC Comics, who, under a different name, bought the character from Siegel and Shuster in 1938 and have renewed their ownership ever since. This is the corporate stance.
2. Superman belongs to the creators and their heirs, despite having sold the character long ago and being paid the contracted amount. They have tried to regain the character at several time since. This is the creator stance.
3. Superman belongs to everybody. This is the, um, public good stance.

Mark Twain argued in favor of eternal copyright, extending unto the descendants of writers. In his formulation, a business created by an individual could be run in perpetuity by that individuals descendants, so why on earth would the creations of a writer be any different? I'm sure other writers have chimed in on this stuff.

Let's talk about mythology.

If Superman is a myth, then everybody already owns the character. The most recent ruling has to do with the particulars of the origin story, which is perhaps the most often told story of the last century. I'm not talking about just the movies and the comics, but also about public discourse. Think of Obama's joking speech of last year, where he denied being christ but insisted that instead he was rocketed to earth from Krypton. That sort of retelling goes on all the time, in every medium as well as in everday conversation. Telling the story in that manner does not infringe upon copyright, as no one's making money from it. And parody is, of course, protected. Then there's the pastiche, such as Alan Moore's Supreme stories. Or Kurt Busiek's Samaratan. Or about a thousand other comic book characters.

There are academic retellings, there are political retellings, there are comedic retellings. And it's all fine. Thus making the third position both correct and irelevant. Unless somebody wants to publish their own Superman comic, or make their own Superman movie, to turn a profit.

As for positions

Stuff and whatnot

A more and more prominent issue in the study of folklore is creator's rights and copyright. This is paralleled by its prominence in the world of comics. It's particularly relevant where Superman is concerned. The creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sold the rights long ago. There has been a great deal of legal conflict over this, as Siegel himself felt cheated. His (and Shuster's heirs) have continued the fight. I don't feel the need to go into the history of this conflict here, nor am I qualified to comment on the technicalities of copyright.

That said, I side with creators.

There has been a new ruling that seems to favor Warner Brothers and DC Comics, who own the copyright at the moment. The only really interesting piece of news here (to me) is the fact that the heirs will gain all rights to the character in 2013. If I were them, I'd have a giant clock counting down the seconds, like the Chinese used to have in Beijing, right by Tiananmen Square, to count down the time until Hong Kong was once more part of China. That thing was huge.

I found this article on Smallville. I don't have much to say about the writer's opinions, other than I'm not a fan of the show. He makes some interesting comments about "canon" and "straying too far", but the one thing I have to get down in writing is that Smallville's creators didn't come up with the notion that Superman and Luthor were friends as kids. That was Jerry Siegel. He wrote a story in 1960 called "How Luthor Met Superboy" where the true reason behind Luthor's hatred of Superman became known. Superboy made Luthor lose all his hair. I'm not even kidding about that. See this article. This phenomenon of thinking the first time YOU encounter something is the first time it happened is pretty common, I think. I've certainly fallen victim to it a number of times. On TV Tropes they call it "Older Than They Think." TV Tropes is one of my favorite websites. I could read that thing all day long.

In other international news...

The new Prime Minister of Bulgaria is referred to as Superman.

So is Michael Jackson.