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.