Superman is a superhero created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and featured pervasively in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character debuted in Action Comics issue #1 in June 1938 and has since become a paradigm for superhero characters.
Creation Siegel and Shuster met at Cleveland's Glenville High School. The two published a science fiction magazine together, aptly titled Science Fiction. It was a stapled, mimeographed pamphlet containing drawings by Shuster and stories by Siegel under various pseudonyms. Only five issues were produced and are now considered collectible. One copy was sold in 2018 for $50,000. Siegel's short story "The Reign of the Superman" (with illustration by Shuster) concerned a bald-headed villain, vaguely reminiscent of Flash Gordon's Ming the Merciless, bent on dominating the world.
Siegal and Shuster formulated a concept of the superman, with the character being a physically powerful hero. They pitched this unsuccessfully to newspaper syndicates as a comic strip. Siegel sent it to National Comics in New York, where it remained unpublished. When a publisher had difficulty deciding on an appropriate cover for a new magazine called Action Comics, an employee produced Siegel's and Shuster's proposal, which depicted Superman lifting a car with his hands. The publisher allegedly called it "ridiculous" but ultimately decided to put it on the cover. He wrote Siegel and Shuster and asked them if they could put together a 13-page story for the debut of Action Comics.
Siegel and Shuster cut and pasted their newspaper strip into comic book form and sent it off. In the summer of 1938, the first issue of Action Comics was published. By the fourth issue of Action Comics, its popularity had grown a significant amount. Astounded, the publisher is reported to have gone down to his local newsstand and asked a nearby child why he chose Action Comics. The child supposedly replied by expressing his favor for the featured Superman comic.
Early years Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938). Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to the company for $130 and a contract to supply the publisher with material. The Saturday Evening Post reported in 1960 that the pair was being paid $75,000 each per year, still a fraction of DC's Superman profits. In 1964, when Siegel and Shuster sued for more money, DC fired them, prompting a legal battle that ended in 1967, when they accepted $200,000 and signed away any further claim to Superman or any character created from him. DC soon took Siegel's and Shuster's names off the byline. Following the huge financial success of Superman in 1978 and news reports of their pauper-like existences, Warner Communications gave Siegel and Shuster lifetime pensions of $35,000 per year and health care benefits. In addition, any media production which includes the Superman character must include the credit, "Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster".
Throughout the decades of Superman's existence, DC sued several competing comic book publishers for introducing superheroes with similar powers. Among these companies were Fox Feature Syndicate for its character Wonderman, and Fawcett Comics for its character Master Man. In 1941, DC filed a lawsuit against Fawcett over their top-selling character of the time, Captain Marvel, whom DC saw as a Superman clone. During the National Comics Publications v. Fawcett Publications case, Fawcett fought the lawsuit, and continued publishing Captain Marvel, who surpassed Superman and other superheroes in sales in the mid-1940s. By 1953, the case had been in litigation for 12 years and in court for five. The case was decided in DC's favor. Fawcett paid DC a fine and ceased publication of all Captain Marvel-related comics. DC would acquire the rights to Captain Marvel in the 1970s and the former rival characters would be presented as allies, with Captain Marvel often serving as Superman's substitute in emergencies.
Golden Age
By the time the US had entered WWII, Superman had invoked an economic golden age in the comic book industry and had engendered the new genre of the "superheroes" (though whether Superman can be named the first superhero is controversial), which by then had included Batman, Captain America, Namor, Captain Marvel, Robin, the Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman.
By this time, the character had also leapt from the comics into other media. In 1939, Superman's adventures were seen in newspaper strips, although they were often reprints of what was already appearing in the comics. Also, The Adventures of Superman radio program was broadcast to the nation with millions of listeners. While Captain Marvel beat him to live action cinema in The Adventures of Captain Marvel (in a serial originally intended for Superman), a series of animated cartoons produced by Max Fleischer hit theaters in 1940s.
After the war though, many of Superman's contemporaries found themselves slowly being forgotten after the boom became a bust. Throughout the late 1940s and the duration of the 1950s, Superman was by far the most popular character in comics. By the mid-1950s, there were few characters able to challenge him. Only Batman, Wonder Woman and a few other Golden-Agers remained. During this time, Superman's powers became more and more grandiose. They would expand to include heat vision (heat rays emitting from his eyes), the ability to breathe in space, and the power to travel through time. Superman's adversaries also grew more fantastic and mighty, but more issues of the comics involved "imaginary stories" which could result in any number of scenarios (either as a cause or an effect) and did not affect the continuity of future issues. These grander powers would be replicated within the Silver Age Superman.
It was also established shortly after World War II that Superman had begun his career years earlier in the town of Smallville, under the name of Superboy. Stories about Superboy tended to be illustrated in an idyllic fashion and has been compared to the Saturday Evening Post. Superman also became a hit in live action. The 1948 self-titled serial and its sequel Atom Man vs. Superman with Kirk Alyn as Clark Kent/Superman were both box-office smashes—the former being the biggest of all time—and his television show The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves, was an integral part of the so-called "Golden Age of Television".
As shown in the original Golden Age comics - including Action Comics #1 (1938), Superman #1 (1939), and Superman #61 (1949), as well as in later stories such as Secret Origins (vol. 2) #1 (1986) - noted scientist Jor-L discovers that Krypton is about to explode, yet he cannot convince his fellow Kryptonians to save themselves. However, he manages to construct a spaceship to save his infant son, Kal-L. The ship launches just as the planet explodes, with Kal-L landing on Earth in a farm country town (later identified as Smallville) around the time of World War I. In this version, John and Mary Kent (passing motorists who witness the spaceship landing) take the infant to an orphanage and soon return to adopt the child, naming him Clark. In his 1942 novel, George Lowther changes the names Jor-L, Kal-L and Lora (Superman's birth mother) to Jor-El, Kal-El, and Lara. According to an interview with Joe Shuster shortly before his death, the name "Clark Kent" was chosen as a combination of actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor.Mietkewicz, Henry. "Great Krypton! Superman was the Star's Ace Reporter", The Toronto Star, April 26, 1992.
Clark grows up on the Kent family farm, slowly discovering that he possesses various superpowers, but at first unaware of his Kryptonian origins. After the deaths of his adoptive parents, Clark decides to use his powers for the benefit of humanity, constructing a stylized costume and moving to the nearby city of Metropolis. Clark begins work as a reporter at the Daily Star newspaper and soon makes his debut as the world's first superhero, Superman.
The earliest Superman stories were written by Siegel, and drawn by Shuster in a style heavily influenced by comic strip artist Roy Crane. According to Jules Feiffer, "Shuster represented the best of old-style comic book drawing. His work was direct, unprettied - crude and vigorous; as easy to read as a diagram.... Slickness, thank God, was beyond his means" (Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes, 1965). In the last interview Shuster gave before his death, he explained that he had modeled the visual appearance of Clark Kent on himself and movie star Harold Lloyd, and that of Superman on Douglas Fairbanks Senior. Lois Lane was modeled after Joanne Carter, who would later marry Jerry Siegel after the comic became a success. The skyscape of Metropolis was inspired by that of the city of Toronto, where Shuster had spent most of his childhood, and the newspaper employing Clark Kent, originally the Daily Star, was named after the Toronto Star for which Shuster had been a paperboy. (Mietkewicz, above)
With Superman's quick success, the demand for Superman stories exceeded the creator's ability to produce them. Although the stories continued to carry the Siegel and Shuster byline, progressively more of the work was done by assistants in the Siegel and Shuster studio (Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971)), but the use of assistants was not always successful. According to Jules Feiffer, Shuster "could not draw well, but he drew single-mindedly -- no one could ghost that style. It was the man. When assistants began 'improving' the appearance of the strip it went downhill. It looked as though it was being drawn in a bank" (Feiffer, above). One story in which Superman encountered a fictional cartoonist provided a tongue-in-cheek look at how such work was delegated. The story, which purported on the title page to tell "how comic strips are written and drawn", showed a studio filled with "artists -- stacks of them -- figure men, background specialists, inkers, letterers" as well as script-writers, all devoted to the production of stories about a Superman-like character, while the original creator of the strip was, to Superman's consternation, kept busy answering his fan mail ("King of the Comic Books", Superman #25, 1943).
In the early stories, Superman is the only science-fiction element. He is described as the champion of the helpless and the oppressed, and he combats real-world social evils: munitions manufacturers, dangerous conditions in mines and a hit-and-run drunk driver (in Superman #1), rigged prize fights and corrupt businessmen (in Superman #2), child abusers and wife beaters (in Superman #3) and crooked cops and politicians (in Superman #7). By 1940, more extraordinary antagonists began to appear in the stories, including giants, mad scientists and dinosaurs. Superman's powers also developed during the 1940s, including vast increases in strength and acquiring the ability to fly - the earliest comics depict Superman able to leap only an eighth of a mile at a time. In Superman #61 (1949), Superman finally learns of the existence of Krypton. Superman becomes an honorary member of the Justice Society of America, though he only participates in two capers in the original Golden Age stories (All-Star Comics #8 and 36).