The Most Mundane Man in Metropolis

By WILL LEITCH

For a character who has been central to American pop culture for more than 80 years, Superman, it really must be said, is pretty darned boring. Since 1938, he has worn the same outfit. He has worked the same job. He has hung out with the same people. He has even kept the same haircut, except for a month or two in the 1990s, when a few strands poked out a bit behind the ears, an offense for which Superman can be forgiven, considering that he had recently died.

Superman is a fictional character who, by his very nature, cannot change, which would be fine were he a supervillain bent on global domination, a tortured ad man facing dramatic cultural change at the end of the 1960s or simply a wisecracking rabbit. But Superman can't change in a specific, creatively crippling way: He must be absolutely perfect at all times. He cannot lie, he cannot kill, he cannot pirate music. He cannot be anything other than the ideal beacon for us all to aspire to be, to admire from below.

Superman is always saying that he is a shining example of what humans can be, but we humans know better: He is the embodiment of what we are not and never were. He is a lack of frailty personified. He can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but we can't relate to that. A vigilante like Batman, who wants to put a fist through some creep's face, that we can understand.  

Larry Tye's "Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero" attempts to track the history of an icon that has no real history. The story of his creation, by high-school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is in many ways the beginning and ending of his journey. From Superman's first appearance in Action Comics No. 1, the basics were all there: the cape, the exploding home planet, the dorky Clark Kent alter ego (modeled by Siegel and Shuster on themselves), the physical invincibility, even Lois Lane. There were a few important additions made along the way—Kryptonite was actually introduced by the radio show, not the comic, and Lex Luthor was in fact an afterthought modeled after Siegel's and Shuster's earlier, evil vision for a superman. Forgettable characters like Superdog came and went. But, mostly, Superman was Superman initially and forever.

The main reason for this was that Superman was an instant smash, the best-selling comic the week that it was released and just about every week since. (Most of the early buyers were schoolchildren, but Joe DiMaggio, then only in his second year in baseball, used to ask his less-recognizable Yankees teammates to buy copies and sneak them to him when no one was looking.) Any good capitalist knows that you don't mess around with your flagship product; this success, more than his status as a platonic ideal, explains why Superman remains so constant.

The biggest news that Supes has made in the past 20 years was in the early 1990s, when DC Comics briefly killed him in "Superman: Doomsday," a terrific series of comics that nevertheless were irrelevant two years later, when he inevitably came back to life. (They filled the two years with stories of superheroes mourning, replacement superpeople failing to fill his shoes and finally the buildup to the hero's return.) The series was a huge smash, if only because killing Superman was sort of the only story option DC had left.

Mr. Tye, rather than craft a thesis that explains how such a static character has remained so popular through so many different eras, overloads the reader with anecdotes. The story of how DC obtained the rights to Superman at a Dutch-buying-Manhattan price—the original sin of American comic-book history—is rich enough to be a book of its own (it is, actually, 2005's "Men of Tomorrow"), but Mr. Tye merely touches on it before getting bogged down in arcane contract details. The tale of poor doomed George Reeves, the television actor who played Superman in the 1950s before either committing suicide or being murdered (depending on which conspiracy theory you subscribe to), has been made into a feature film ("Hollywoodland"). It's all neatly summed up by Mr. Tye in two paragraphs. One minute Reeves is a star, the next minute he is dead.

Even Christopher Reeve, the affable Broadway actor who became the embodiment of Superman in a way no one had before, is glossed over. Reeve, like everyone who has played Superman, became so connected to the role that he never escaped it, something he came to embrace late in his life. His Superman was basically Cary Grant—witty, funny and noble, harking back to a beloved type from an earlier era. But Mr. Tye spends more time discussing producer Ilya Salkind's money woes than Reeve's reinvention. And he spends even more time that giving plot summaries.

Mr. Tye relentlessly keeps his focus on the fictional character of Superman, but real-life stories keep popping up all over. I kept hoping that he would dispense with the endless Wikipedia-esque plot summaries of various Superman comics and get back to the human beings who created this character and were so profoundly affected by him. After all, they are capable of change.

Yet Mr. Tye is so close to his subject that he has trouble seeing anything else. There is no question that Superman has served as a symbol of American power, strength, ideals and resolve, but he is, after all, just a cartoon character. Mr. Tye sees changes in the culture and attributes them to Superman just because he happens to be writing a book about him. I have no doubt that kids were inspired to eat their cereal and brush their teeth at an increased rate by listening to Superman implore them to do so on the radio. I do highly doubt, however, that when America, reeling from Waco and the World Trade Center bombing and Rodney King, "needed a break and a hero in the fall of 1993" it was TV's "Lois & Clark" that provided "a great escape." And I wish I would have known that, when the later Superman TV show "Smallville" hit the air, its "launch in the wake of 9/11 gave America a hero it could believe in when it needed one." That might have helped, I think.

The theme of Superman's relationship to America is, in fact, an important one, which Mr. Tye clumsily tackles but can't quite get his arms around. Superman reminds us of who we once were (or, more accurately, who we like to pretend we were). The difference of his world and ours is precisely the point. The first two "Superman" films with Reeve worked because they contrasted his square-jawed do-goodnickism with a Metropolis that resembled the New York of "Taxi Driver" far more than that of "An Affair to Remember." Bryan Singer's less successful "Superman Returns" was overly reverent toward those Reeve films, stacking one level of nostalgia on top of another.

The next step for Superman is another big-screen reboot, "Man of Steel," due out around this time next year. Starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent and Russell Crowe as Jor-El (Superman's dad), the film continues the movie tradition of casting bigger stars to play the supporting characters than the man in the blue tights himself. It is fitting that the producer of the film is Christopher Nolan, who reinvented Batman in the "Dark Knight" movies. One suspects that he'll have less luck with reinventing Superman.

As is the case with Mr. Tye's book, Superman is a black hole at the center of every story. Because he is invincible, because he can do everything better than anyone else can do anything, you run out of things to do with him.

Publicado en The Wall Street Journal, 16/06/2012

Ilustración: Curt Swan/Superman (1960)