June 1967: The Everyman in Superman

That mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent seldom gets any applause. Superman 197, a 1967 80-Page Giant, was the rare exception. So we tend to forget how much of Superman’s power — his fantasy power, not his fictional power — comes from his secret identity.

Superman feigns timidity, cowardice and uncertainty as Kent in a emotional disguise that’s doubly necessary because his physical disguise is so slight. So Kent is, in a way, the repository for Superman’s human failings.

There’s a deeper psychological resonance in Kent as well. He’s the Everyman in Superman. He’s us.

Superman is often criticized for silliness on the grounds that his friends would certainly see through his secret identity. But that really misses the point, which is psychological, not practical.

The fact that nobody knew who Clark Kent really was — particularly those closest to him — added greatly to the fantasy kick of the character.

Adults often feel that they are underrated and unappreciated by those around them, and children — still uncertain about their own identity — experience that feeling even more intensely. Clark Kent was our revenge and our redemption. If they only knew…

Of course, the fantasy of being the Special One has its downside — it’s inherently narcissistic, after all. But it can also provide an emotional compensation in a harsh and/or indifferent world. Somewhere beneath every superhero story we’ll find an underlying premise — the reassuring idea that one person can make a difference.

“The truth may be that Kent existed not for the purposes of the story but for the reader,” wrote cartoonist Jules Feiffer in The Great Comic Book Heroes, his seminal hardcover retrospective on superheroes published in 1965.

“His fake identity was our real one. That’s why we loved him so. For if that wasn’t really us, if there were no Clark Kents, only lots of glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities — what a hell of an improved world it would have been!”

April 1958: Vulnerability and Vice Versa

I always keep a couple of DC romance comics on my prized spinner rack — there among the superheroes, the monsters, the machine-gunner GIs and the spacemen — in order to mimic the actual effect of some newsstand in 1960.

Romance was a fresh sales gimmick created to supplant superheroes when they “retired” after World War II, evil presumably having been finally vanquished.

It occurs to me that I find romance comics kind of silly and superhero comics kind of serious, and that that fact in itself is sublimely silly.

It also occurs to me that my nervousness about the genre may have had something to do with the fact that romance comics tend to be about weakness and vulnerability, while superhero comics are of course about uncanny strength. So more than gender separated those two audiences.

Yet just scratch the surface, and you find that all stories about strength are necessarily also about weakness, and vice versa.

“A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him,” wrote Jules Feiffer, recalling the attitudes of the superheroes’ first fanboys in the 1930s and 1940s. “Our cultural opposite of the man who didn't make out with women has never been the man who did — but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, L'il Abner's, or Superman’s, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell out.

“Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.”

April 1941: The Spirit of the Times

Once you’ve created Superman, how do you top that?

Why, with super-Superman, of course. So that’s what Jerry Siegel did in 1940.

Instead of merely leaping tall buildings, this character could fly to ends of the universe with the speed of thought. He could read evildoers’ minds and extinguish them with a glance. He could rescue the victims of burning buildings by bathing them in a beam of light projected from his finger. He could swell to the size of a 10-story building to crush an escaping criminal’s automobile with his green-booted foot.

He was the Spectre, the brainchild of Siegel and artist Bernard Baily who debuted in More Fun Comics 52 (Feb. 1940).

Jules Feiffer noted that the Spectre had the grimmest origin of all: he was a murdered cop, Jim Corrigan.

Despite his attractions, the Spectre was proof that more isn’t necessarily better. Unlimited powers turn out to offer limited plot lines.

The Spectre in a 1970s incarnation drawn by Jim Aparo.

“Apparently nobody involved gave much thought to the incongruity of publishing the Spectre, Spirit of Vengeance, in a comic entitled More Fun Comics,” noted comics historian Ken Quattro. “Baily accomplished the remarkable task of modernizing the traditional depiction of Death. His was a brawny Grim Reaper, sans scythe. Along with the hooded cloak, life-stealing eyes and blanched complexion expected of his ghastly position, the Spectre also unnecessarily sported boots, gloves and tighty whities (albeit, green) in keeping with the already de rigueur superhero fashion of the era.”

“Superheroes often come in distinct sub-genres, many of which are epitomized by a single character,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “For example, the Flash is the exemplar of the super-speedster, Batman of the mysterious creature of the night, and Captain America of the patriotic-style hero (despite the fact that the Shield beat Cap to the stands by more than a year). The Spectre is the template upon which the ‘avenging spirit as superhero’ is based. Others of that type include Mr. Justice and the Vision.”

February 1940: When You’re Young at Heart

Instant grownup — no, instant SUPER grownup! For a kid, that’s wish fulfilment on steroids.

In Whiz Comics 2 (Feb. 1940), Captain Marvel was created to be a caped, super-strong, invulnerable individual who could leap tall buildings in a single bound, just like Superman. 

Initially, where he differed from the Man of Tomorrow was in his alter ego, which was a refinement of Superman’s engaging weakness-to-power fantasy. Captain Marvel didn’t disguise himself as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter. He actually was a child, just like the majority of his readers.

In A Boy and His God: The Promise of Masculinity in Captain Marvel, Ryan Johnson wrote, “The Captain is, physically, a man. He has a man’s strength, a man’s size and stature, and even a man’s face. Specifically, it is the face of contemporary film action-hero Fred MacMurray, whose visage was so stereotypically masculine that when he aged out of playing younger roles he was repeatedly cast as the model 1950s-era patrician. But despite all this, the comic star is clearly not a man, remaining instead an over-large boy.”

“The Big Red Cheese revels in his abilities in a much more wholesome, boyish way than the destruction-prone Superman, using a pair of torpedoes as water skis, for example, or heckling an airliner as he flies past,” Johnson observed. “As he dashes by a plane in a one-panel aside, Marvel waves and shouts ‘Yah, yah, you can’t catch me!’ (Captain Marvel Scores Again! in Whiz Comics 5, June 1940)… (I)t is the very thing that a boy suddenly given super powers would be likely to do. Moreover, he reacts to the rest of the world with the same child-like spirit, especially when it comes to the opposite sex.”

Indeed, cartoonist Jules Feiffer saw Captain Marvel as “…a friendly fullback of a fellow with apple cheeks and dimples, he could be imagined being a buddy rather than a hero, an overgrown boy who chased villains as if they were squirrels.”