This new hero was built of rugged stuff: he was based, in part, on the ancient mythoi of the Jewish golem folklore at a time when European Jews were fleeing mass extinction; he owed the narrative form of his tales to both the Gothic Romances of the land his creators families' had fled and the American monomyth, the promise of success in this new land earned through hard work and traveling the virtuous path regardless of the obstacles one must face; and he owed much of his final form to the tales of swashbuckling male heroic figures immortalized in contemporary pulps and adventure films.
He was the embodiment of the alien coming to a strange new land and becoming the savior of the lesser mortals. He was the perfect escapist male romance for post-depression , and apparently remained so for the next seventy years. He also reminded the reader that the social order must be protected. Even though he was omnipotent, he chose to defer to the laws and social mores of man, a lesser being. He was, or rather is, the Superman.
Although Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster's new Character was All-American, like most of the American kids who grew up admiring him, his background was tied to the "Melting Pot" streets of the Mid-West. More specifically, Cleveland, Ohio. This new hero was an immigrant who blended the best of the old world with the new narrative myths of America.
The Golem Awakens
This new hero was built of rugged stuff: he was based, in part, on the ancient mythoi of the Jewish golem folklore at a time when European Jews were fleeing mass extinction; he owed the narrative form of his tales to both the Gothic Romances of the land his creators families’ had fled and the American monomyth, the promise of success in this new land earned through hard work and traveling the virtuous path regardless of the obstacles one must face; and he owed much of his final form to the tales of swashbuckling male heroic figures immortalized in contemporary pulps and adventure films.
He was the embodiment of the alien coming to a strange new land and becoming the savior of the lesser mortals. He was the perfect escapist male romance for post-depression America, and apparently remained so for the next seventy years. He also reminded the reader that the social order must be protected. Even though he was omnipotent, he chose to defer to the laws and social mores of man, a lesser being. He was, or rather is, the Superman.
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Even though the publication of the first Superman story in Action was primarily an experiment and no promotional work or publicity was done to draw attention to the book or the character, sales took off faster than the proverbial speeding bullet. In less time than it takes Clark Kent to change clothes, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had not merely created one of the greatest fictional characters of all time, they had introduced a purely American icon to the world. They had also introduced a new genre of literature, the super-hero tale, as well as such now stock character types as the superhero, the super-side-kick, the super-villain, and the super-pet.
While tales of “god-like” men and the great Greco-Roman Heroes were nothing new, they stand apart from the super-hero genre (with the possible exception of Wonder Woman) in that, while the heroes’ powers may be a result of the actions of the divine, the hero is certainly not a puppet of fate, or acting as an agent of a particular god or gods, as were the Heroes of Greece, Rome, and most older Heroic traditions. Instead the superhero has to decide whether or not to operate within the moral dictates of society and use their power for good or take advantage of their strength and merely take what they want.
Superman followed the moral dictates of his adoptive, human, parents: “truth, justice, and the American way.” This was an important lesson to be taught to those in his adoptive nation which, in 1939, was poised on the brink of becoming a super-power in its own right
Secret Identity
Siegel and Shuster also introduced the concept of the secret identity to comics. Not in the sense of Lamont Cranston putting on a disguise to become the Shadow; the unique twist with Superman was simply that Clark Kent’s humanity was the alter ego.
Superman, as Jules Feiffer explained in The Great Comic Book Heroes, merely pretended to pass as a mortal to disguise his identity. Other heroes were, like Zorro and the Lone Ranger, mere fops who pretended at heroics, covering their face to protect themselves from the law when they engaged in their felonious assaults on others.
Superman was an honest to goodness living and flying version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ubermensch, the nearly perfect form of humanity to which we all aspire. Clark Kent was, in many ways, Superman’s satiric take on humanity. As the bumbling, weak-willed, socially inept Kent, he was virtually ignored by all of those around him. Clark Kent had no hope of landing the girl, suffered from fainting spells, and was the focus of abuse by his colleagues.
Why did Superman choose such a self-abusive alter-ego? Feiffer believed that the primary reason seems to be that the Kent persona exists as both a pointed satire of the readers and as their connection to the book itself. The readers identified with Kent, the loser, and then quickly latched on to the escapist notion that Kent was just an illusion, a mere disguise, for a hero who could defeat the bullies, move worlds, and then get the prettiest girl. The reader saw themselves in Kent and received gratifying wish-fulfillment from the adventures of Superman.
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