Supermen seek solitude.
After all, being inundated by the needs and demands of ordinary people would be draining, even for a superhuman. So the pulp hero Doc Savage created his Fortress of Solitude — a huge, hidden, igloo-shaped dome in the arctic — as a retreat for research and meditation in the 1930s.
Almost a decade after Doc Savage’s magazine vanished from newsstands in 1949, Superman debuted his own Fortress of Solitude in The Super-Key to Fort Superman! (Action Comics 241, June 1958).
“One of the elements that surely came from (Superman editor Mort) Weisinger was Superman’s Fortress of Solitude,” observed Will Murray in TwoMorrows’ The Krypton Companion. “He had earlier cribbed the idea of a North Pole laboratory-hideaway for his Captain Future, and now with Doc Savage off the stands, cribbed it again.”
Superman’s hidden arctic refuge was a children’s clubhouse writ large, combining a science fictional research center, a super-museum and an interplanetary zoo.
But it had been anticipated by a somewhat different super-sanctum sanctorum in a story penned more than a decade before by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel (Muscles for Sale, Superman 17, July-August 1942).
The “Secret Citadel” Superman pounded into a mountain had an S insignia above a doorway set in a steep cliffside on the outskirts of Metropolis. In addition to a super-gym, the retreat also included its own trophy room.
“An old ray gun Luthor tried to annoy me with,” noted Superman, inventorying his mementos. “Righab Bey’s turban… A poster advertising my appearance with Jordan’s Circus… Part of a broken ax Pedro attacked me with… A blanket given me by Wacouches, boy chief of the Chirroba tribe… Count Bergac’s monocle… The Archer’s arrow.”
The Secret Citadel was recalled in a feature in Superman 187 (June 1966), an 80-page giant devoted to the Fortress of Solitude.
Then or now, Superman has always required a distant refuge where he can get away from it all.
After all, the word “loneliness” does have two Ls.
Mark Engblom wrote:
ReplyDeleteThis sequence of the Secret Citadel’s creation is do special to me, since Superman #187 is literally the first superhero comic book I encountered as a pre-schooler. It stuck out from the stack of Disney comics my grandparents had for us grandkids to read, and I always loved reading it. Of course, I have my own copy now, and it’s still one of my most treasured possessions. Who could resist becoming an instant lifelong fan of superhero comics after seeing a cover like this?
Mark Engblom wrote:
ReplyDeleteAs for the Fortress concept itself, there IS. a version of it that falls between the Secret Citadel and the version that made its debut in Action #241. The term "Fortress of Solitude" and an Arctic location are mentioned for the first time in Superman #58 (1949), which depicts a castle-like structure encased in ice...looking more like Santa's North Pole workshop than the Fortress we're all familiar with.
I ran across that oddly understated debut of the polar Fortress. Of course, Doc Savage was still being published in 1949. I wonder if that was why they underplayed it.
ReplyDelete