My Ten Favorite Superman Stories
by Sam Thielman
I love Superman. He was originally conceived as a vagrant corrupted by ultimate power in a short story by Jerry Siegel called “The Reign of the Superman.” Siegel was scared of girls and introverted with other boys, too. He didn’t do well in school. His buddy Joe Shuster illustrated it; the boys couldn’t give the thing away. Eventually they ran it in the third issue of their own fanzine, Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization.
They revamped the character from a vagrant into a foundling alien and tried selling him as a hero, which no one wanted. Editors told Siegel that Shuster’s crummy art was holding him back. They persevered, and eventually the story went to a down-at-heel ex-cavalry officer who was trying to market comic strips to the big newspaper syndicates by publishing them in booklets. He had hired a couple of gangsters to print his color covers, a decision he would eventually regret. When the story went to press as the lead feature of Action Comics no. 1, the publisher, Harry Donenfeld, hated it so much that he insisted Superman stay off the cover for the next six issues, at which point Superman was such a smash hit that the cover of Action no. 7 assured readers that Superman was “appearing in this issue and in every issue!”
Jerry Siegel lived a hero’s tragic origin story—but not Superman’s. Like Bruce Wayne, Siegel was entranced and inspired by Douglas Fairbanks as Zorro; like Thomas Wayne, Siegel’s father was gunned down when he was a kid. The need to get back at the world, to speak to it in language it could understand, was probably felt as deeply by Siegel as it could be by anyone; he was the fatherless son of Jewish immigrants watching the Depression take hold, and he was watching the Soviets and Nazis take turns razing his ancestral homeland of Lithuania. But Siegel didn’t become Batman. He wrote Superman, and when his time came, he joined the army like everyone else.
DC Comics spent decades in court litigating Siegel and Shuster’s rights to their signature creation, and while the pair won out, their victories were mostly posthumous. Everything Superman-ly appears with the pair’s name attached, alongside “By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family,” a significant feat, given how much super-material there’s been over the years, from Fleischer Studios’ one-reel cartoons to the forthcoming James Gunn movie.
These days it’s hard to think of superhero stories without at least a little exhaustion, given their cultural ubiquity. The central idea of superhero comics was always to get good high-concept characters and then farm them out to anyone who could write and draw them effectively enough to entertain children—notoriously picky customers who are lavishly unrestrained in their affections once they’ve settled on an object. The disposability of the talent was always a core business proposition.
The authors of these characters were seldom remunerated fairly, and sometimes they were simply erased wholesale. But the fact remains that many of their stories persist because the people who made them were gifted, even though they were working in a system that was badly compromised.
So here are a few I think you should search out when you hit the back–issue bins. I’ve included lists of reprints where applicable, in case you prefer the library.
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