Superman

Halloween will be upon us in less than a week. Soon, all manner of things will roam the streets asking for treats: ghosts, goblins, witches, werewolves, and, more often than not these days, superheroes.

For every dreadful Dracula and fearsome Frankenstein's Monster, there'll be at least three miniature iterations of Thor, Captain America, Batman, the Flash, and many, many others. (I have a strong feeling that 1 in 4 will be Marvel characters, owing to Avengers Endgame.)

They'd all do well to remember the man who made this possible: Superman.
He's the guvnor, the trendsetter, the first-ever costumed, super-powered hero. (Author's note: Though Lee Falk's The Phantom was the first character to wear a distinctive costume, he had merely human strength and intelligence.)

The year was 1938. Paralyzed by the Depression and facing another world war in the years ahead, Americans needed a hero to look up to. Faster and stronger than the mightiest human, he needed the ability to shake things up and mete out justice wherever it was needed.

Enter Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of gawky teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio. The target of bullies and the butt of jokes, they found solace in the fantasy worlds of Doc Savage, John Carter of Mars, and Buck Rogers, and, upon graduating from high school, they set out to make a name for themselves. In the process they created a new word to describe their character: a Superhero. Since then, he has been the star of newspaper comic strips, Saturday-morning serials, cartoon shows, big-budget movies, a musical of all things (It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman!), video games (including Superman 64, oh dear, oh dear), and prime-time TV dramas.

If you want to know the full story of the world's first superhero, I would suggest no finer a source than Larry Tye's Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero (2012, Random House). Just for today, though, we're going to focus on two comics: the DC Millennium reprint of Action Comics 1, and Superman Y2K, an issue published close to and set within the year 2000.

The cover itself

The "DC Comics Millennium Edition" stamp

As the maxim goes, every story has to begin somewhere. Superman's story, such as it is, begins with the first issue of Action Comics. Today it's the most valuable comic in the world, with intact copies going for prices that would make Bruce Wayne himself grimace. You see, matey peeps, comic books of the day were printed on what amounts to wood-pulp newsprint, which disintegrates over time, and an intact copy means it was really well-preserved, like, museum-quality preservation.

This reprint, issued by DC to commemorate their most important titles for the new millennium, is printed on good, solid, collectible-worthy paper, because...Who knows? Maybe by the year 3000, God willing, it'll be worth as much as the original.

Anyway, on to the actual content. For the debut appearance of a major character, there's little attention given to any kind of an origin story; indeed, how he came to Earth is given all of one page. His home planet, Krypton, is merely "a distant planet [that] was destroyed by old age." His parents--neither Jor-El and Lara nor Ma and Pa Kent--were named, their roles taken by "a scientist" and "a passing motorist."

The rest of his story, which takes up about four or five pages total, presents him as a hellion of justice:

• He saves an innocent woman from the chair by kidnapping the real killer (how he tracked her down is never explained), breaking into the governor's mansion, tearing down with his bare hands the steel door leading to the man's bedchambers, and passing along the confession.
• As Clark Kent, he takes a called-in tip on a wife-beater; as Superman, he promptly rains hell upon the man, who faints when his knife breaks on the Man of Steel's skin.
• As Clark, he gets sent to the war-torn South American republic of San Monte, but instead goes to Washington, DC (hilariously, the caption emphasizes that his train isn't going to South America!) where he chances upon a corrupt senator and a sleazy lobbyist, who I presume are profiteering off the war. He tracks down the lobbyist and...does his thing, and the story ends on a cliffhanger.

Interestingly, the third of these four mini-stories demonstrates that Superman is capable of vengeance as well as justice while also setting up the Clark Kent/Lois Lane dynamic. At a social event, Clark "allows" a man to cut in to his dancing with Lois Lane, showing himself to be a complete wimp; as Superman, he chases down and smashes the man's car to bits, leaving the cad hanging from the top of a telephone pole.

And there you have the early Superman: a blunt instrument acting in the name of all that is good. The text and artwork lack finesse, but readers didn't want finesse--they wanted someone able and willing to batter down doors and right wrongs by any means possible. Along the way, he codified what a typical superhero ought to look like: colorful tights with contrasting briefs, like an old-time circus strongman; long, flowing cape; and big, eye-catching chest emblem. Later superheroes, such as Batman, wore an identity-concealing mask or cowl, but the Man of Steel has nothing to hide.

Well, nothing, that is, except his identity. This first issue also codified the idea of the civilian alter-ego. Cool powers like flight and X-ray vision and super-speed are all well and good, but they can only go so far in making the world a better place. Sometimes, it takes another kind of superpower: the skill to craft perfect words. A well-honed article can outrage a populace enough to demand the amendment of a law; or tug at the heartstrings enough to spur a charity event for those living in some far-off, war-torn nation. That's where reporter Clark Kent comes in: Instead of taking to the skies as Superman, he takes to the streets as Clark, keeping an ear out for potential leads on stories.

SUPERMAN Y2K



Here's a self-contained Superman story set during New Year's Eve 1999....and 1620...and 1847...and 1916. No, there's no time-travel involve. The years leading up to 1999 are flashbacks, illustrating how deeply the Luthor family is intertwined with Metropolis' history, and how far removed Lex is from previous generations...and, more importantly, why.

If you look at the front cover, it's not hard to discover that Superman's cyber-nemesis Brainiac is the source of the millennial pain. In a nutshell, he's wormed his way into LexCorp's Y2K-compliance software and is causing havoc in everything that's made by LexCorp...and this encompasses just about everything in Metropolis and beyond. A thrilling adventure with Superman and the Justice League ensues.

It's clear that much has changed since the Man of Steel's debut. Once, long ago, comic books were self-contained affairs, with complete stories that ran usually between two or three issues at most. Over time, the overarching stories spread to four or five issues across several titles, resulting in the reason why I'm not a terribly big fan of the medium! I literally have no space for all of that, whether on my shelves or on my hard drive. I like the characters very much, don't get me wrong; it's simply that my knowledge of the comics is restricted to what I can borrow from my library. (And if I do buy comics, it's usually for a feature like this.)

Fortunately, Superman Y2K is pretty self-contained, even as it features plot points from DC's ongoing lines. Lex Luthor has a small daughter (money's an aphrodisiac, I'm sure, but somehow, the thought of him having children unnerves me); Superman and Lois Lane are happily married; the Justice League is at the height of its power; and all is well with the world.

More interesting than the main story are the flashbacks I mentioned earlier. The story begins on December 31, 1620, where "alien" settlers (read: Pilgrims) encounter the Algonquin natives (and their Luthor-esque chieftain) and broker a long-standing peace. This sets up a flashback/present-day counterpoint wherein a kind, friendly Luthor of New Year's Eve Past welcomes "aliens" with open arms, only for Lex Luthor to loudly decry the presence of "the alien" in his city (viz. Superman) and treat his subjects, underlings and those who owe him anything as if they were ants underfoot; all the while making extravagant and quite unwelcome displays of his wealth, most notably replacing the "New Year's Ball" on Metropolis' equivalent of the Times Square building with a gigantic "L," a move which the entire crowd finds hopelessly tacky. Throughout these flashbacks, it becomes clear that New Year's Eve has symbolic value within the story as a time of old wrongs "be[ing] forgot and never brought to mind," as the song says, and of keeping one foot in the possibilities of tomorrow.

Yet Superman Y2K is most interesting as a Luthor story: As a wealthy industrial dynasty, the Luthors had kind hearts throughout most of their life in the Metropolis of old. In 1847, socialite Edna Luthor successfully scolds an anti-Irish crowd by reminding them that the city has always welcomed outsiders since its very beginnings; in 1916, Harris Luthor strongarms his staunchly pacifist brother Wallace into providing steel for World War I. A tearful Wallace says, "Let's go downstairs...let's drink and dance...and laugh with friends and family...for I think tomorrow...the world will be a very, very different place."

By what I can only presume is 1969 (the caption only reads "thirty years ago"), the family has hit rock bottom. Once a well-respected, well-loved man, old man Wallace Luthor is now reduced to living in a tenement on Suicide Slum, with an abusive, racist son who berates him for not managing his empire well enough while nearly strangling his toddler son Lex. ("You wanna be a good-for-nothing illegal alien, boy? You wanna be someone else's dog? That it?!") Such an upbringing taught Lex valuable lessons, for he ended up rebuilding the Luthor fortune by the sweat of his own brow within twenty years. Then, Superman arrived, a human-looking alien imbued with superhuman powers since birth. An outsider. A threat to Lex's status and hegemony, someone who can lord it over humanity without ever having to put effort into anything. Except Lex got it wrong, badly wrong: Superman serves humanity out of love, and strives to obey human laws and codes of conduct because it's just the right thing to do.

When another alien--Brainiac 2.5--shows up and usurps Lex's control (and what is absolute Y2K compliance other than a demonstration of total control?), he's rightfully pissed about it. No alien is going to take everything away from him, least of all his own daughter, whom he loves in his own unique way.

The tale ends on a cliffhanger, with a gigantic Brainiac looming over Metropolis, to be resolved in Superman 154, Adventures of Superman 576, Man of Steel 98, and Action Comics 763. I'm...considering tracking things down, because of course Superman's going to give him a right thumping. "How?" is another question, one I will answer in a later edition of the Millennium Museum.

The Year 2000 Problem

Since Halloween is almost upon us, I figured now's as good a time as any to talk about the thing that indirectly inspired the creation of this Museum, and also formed the "plot" of the Halloween 2014 celebrations:

The Year 2000 problem, colloquially dubbed "Y2K."

TL;DR version, as best as I can summarize: Complex circuitry and processors have an internal clock, which keeps track of date and time. Storage space was at a premium in the earlier days of the computer age, and programmers strove to save space wherever they could. They usually took the shortcut of abbreviating the "year" space from four digits to two. For example, 9/10/2018 would be rendered as 9/10/18. This was all well and good for the twenty or so years that we could count on the computer to assume "1980."

However, someone realized that most hardware and software would not recognize "2000," and accordingly go back to "1900," thus causing errors and glitches on a sliding scale, from mere annoyances to catastrophic systems failures.

I concluded the "Millennium Bug Signal Intrusion" arc of Halloween 2014 with Orson Welles' closing words from his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds: "This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that 'The War of The Worlds' has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!" I chose that very carefully, because, like The War of the Worlds, the hysteria surrounding Y2K far eclipsed the problem itself.

To that end, I'm going to split this article into two parts, the first dealing with the factual problem; the second dealing with the problem as it existed in the public consciousness.

1. JUST THE FACTS

84% believe that it will trigger at least a 20%+ drop in the stock market -over 1800 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, given its current levels- and some business bankruptcies.

Two-thirds (66%) believe that it will cause at least an economic slowdown, a rise in unemployment, and some isolated social incidents.

Over half (56%) believe that it will at the least result in a mild recession, isolated infrastructure and supply problems, and some runs on banks.

One-third (34%) believe that it will at the least result in a strong recession, local social disruptions, and many business bankruptcies.

One-fourth (26%) believe that in additional to all the above, the Y2K problem will at least result in political crises within the United States, regional supply and infrastructure disruptions, and regional social disruptions.

One-tenth (10%) believe at least that the United States will suffer another depression (or worse), that financial markets will collapse, that the national infrastructure will be crippled, and that martial law will be declared in some local areas. (http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_isitreal.html)

As you can see, the Year 2000 problem sat in a sliding scale. Generally, it proved to be a whole lot of nothing precisely because it spurred programmers to prevent it from getting to the stage of total catastrophe. There were a few things here and there, as the Nostalgia Nerd points out, but nothing like what was hyped on TV and in print.

2. OH NOES! OH NOES!
I remember Y2K: The Movie, and am in the middle of tracking down a copy of it for review (to little luck, sadly). One thing I can tell you for sure is that there were a lot of emergency-preparation books, pamphlets, and videos, all of which were fairly common-sense guides for what to do in case of, say, hurricanes, mass blackouts, and other phenomena, but with a "Y2K" wrapper and perhaps some new text to boost sales. There were so many Y2K-specific books put out that they're still common about 20 years on, their price tags so far removed from their original $19.99 price tags*.

In my search for information, I came across a video on Digg.com, in which computer-management consultant Peter de Jager is quoted: "Business would come to a halt," with "billions of dollars lost." Understandable. But from there, the public imagination ran wild, and the 'Bug spun out into airplanes falling from the sky, nuclear power stations spontaneously going into meltdown, pacemakers going awry, rivers and seas boiling, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...sorry, I couldn't resist. The point still stands, though. As for planes and nuclear power-plants, we all suddenly forgot that humans are in control of such things, and if the 'Bug affected a plane, the pilots would merely switch over to "manual" and land it safely. If a power-plant suddenly started developing problems, those in charge of its operations would, again, switch over to manual controls. Still, nothing beats a good image with a lot of hysteria to go with it.

The biggest purveyor of mass panic was Alex Jones, who started out on Austin public-access TV and then found a national platform on major news networks with the coming of the new millennium. On 12/31/99, he described on his radio show scenes of chaos vivid enough to top even The War of the Worlds broadcast. (I'm not a fan of his, and would rather not give him a direct platform. If you know where to look, the 1999 broadcast is readily available.) The show may have had one or two grains of truth, such as a nearby gas station running out of food, gas, and water, but I'd wager that it was because demand exceeded supply, as people rushed to get said supplies just in case. Choice line: "It's absolutely out of control. It's pandemic, ladies and gentlemen." Erm....I think he meant "pandemonium" there, 'cause "pandemic" usually refers to the spread of some terrible disease. Or did he? The word choice might well have been intentional, so as to add one more bad thing on top of everything else.

More discerning listeners might notice frequent use of "I have a good source," which means he was making it up from one kernel of actual information. Basic Journalism 101--if you have a good source, NAME IT. Don't say "Oh, I have a good source," 'cause that's as bad as saying "A friend of a friend told me" or those two dreaded words, "Some say..." and "Experts say..." What experts? Who says?

He described all these apocalyptic scenes with the fervor of a zealot...and then, on 1/1/2000, we woke up in the morning, many of us rather badly hung over from all the champagne and free-flowing booze from the night before. Surprisingly, the world around us was still very much intact if tilted at a 45-degree angle.

Looking back, Y2K was only one of many other concerns. There was a lot of religious end-of-the-world prophecy, which media such as End of Days and Dracula 2000 marketed on (as did the Millennium series, if to a lesser extent). Nostradamus, millenarianism, and our own technological hubris snowballed into a veritable whirlwind of terror. In my case, all of that plus the usual seventh-grade bullshit, which sort of turned the event into "the forgotten New Year's Eve." I seriously can't remember a thing about it, save for brief flashes of Blackadder: Back and Forth on Channel 11 and of being relieved that the world did not, in fact, end at the stroke of midnight.

Happy Halloween, dear readers!

(*See what I did there? I put "there, they're, and their" into one complete sentence! Boo-yah!)