Skip to main content

Superman at 80

By


It was nice to see Jerry Siegel and Joe Scuster credited in the latest adaptation of Superman.  The director indulged greatly in the origins of the super hero, spending an inordinate amount of time on Krypton, telling us all about the uprising and Zod's sentence to eternal darkness; as well as young Clark's boyhood years in Smallville, Kansas, with Kevin Costner playing his exceedingly earnest father.  Halfway into this epic tale we finally get to the action, which played out pretty much like Superman II only without Lex Luther around to stir the pot.

Superman was originally created in 1933 by two high school kids searching for something that would lift their spirits during the Great Depression.  The Reign of the Superman appeared in Fanzine science fiction in 1933.  Superman underwent a major metamorphosis from super villain to super hero before appearing in Action Comics  in 1938.  


Siegel and Shuster worked out a deal with DC Comics, which succeeded Action Comics.  This greatly increased the visibility of Superman, showcasing him at the New York World's Fair Comics.  This would eventually lead to Superman's television debut in 1952 and the rest as they say is history.  Initially, Superman battled the nation's many prejudices and seemed the standard bearer of FDR's New Deal, but television producers toned down the social message considerably, wanting him to appeal to everyone.  No indication that Siegel and Shuster were ever thinking of Nietzsche's Superman.



The Man of Steel seemed on the edge of oblivion until revitalized in 1978 by Richard Donner, who cast Christopher Reeve as Superman.  Marlon Brando played Kal-el's Krypton father and Terrence Stamp the notorious Zod in the second cinematic installment.  Gene Hackman was the memorable Lex Luthor.  There was a wonderful campy feeling to this Superman with a lot of humor that I would think even Siegel and Shuster enjoyed. Mario Puzo wrote the screenplay.

Frank Miller recast Superman as a corporate tool in his deeply cynical Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel in which he reinvented Batman, who first appeared in Detective Comics in 1939.  Miller pitted the two against each other in a Battle Royale where the Dark Knight dons a high-tech exoframe to match Superman's extraordinary strength.   The Man of Steel had become hot property: the subject of a new television series, Lois & Clark, and a slough of new graphic novels, including one in which he dies.  All this seemed too much for Siegel and Shuster, who mounted a law suit to reclaim their super hero.


Superman has been rebooted so many times it is impossible to keep count, but the latest reboot falls flat.  Henry Cavill bears an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve and holds his own, but the movie was much too brooding and long-winded with virtually no humor.  If the writers were so interested in exploring Superman's roots, they might have looked back ant Siegel's and Shuster's early conception, having him defend "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators against the rampages of the corporate state, rather than resurrecting Smallville and Superman II .  Donald Trump would make the perfect Lex Luthor.

You can explore the 75 Years of DC Comics in this huge Taschen book, which was released in 2010.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more