Last Friday, July 11, a movie titled Superman reportedly opened in theaters. It’s not the first feature-length movie to feature my favorite superhero. Nor the last, probably.
By the time I was old enough to read comic books. Superman had been saving innocent people and punishing villains for about 30 years, after emerging from the imaginations of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in April 1938.
His real name wasn’t ‘Superman” of course. His parents, back on his home planet Krypton, had named him Kal-El, and sent him off in a small rocket ship just before the planet exploded, killing almost everyone. (Supergirl and Krypto the Super Dog also escaped somehow.) I somehow missed learning about the interesting fact that the planet’s destruction had been caused by the excessive use of electricity by the Kryptonian civilization, to run its technology.
A cautionary tale, from decades ago?
The Kryptonian baby’s spaceship landed in Smallville, Kansas, and the baby was adopted by farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent, and given the name “Clark”.
Obviously, this child was not born in the U.S. and therefore qualified as an undocumented immigrant, as uncomfortable as that might be for us to consider. No birthright citizenship for Clark Kent. His adopted parents probably forged a birth certificate, so Clark could register with Social Security, and get a job.
We know about forged birth certificates, here in America.
I guess there was no way for Jonathan and Martha Kent to know that their adopted son’s Christian name was actually Kal-El. So the name on the forged birth certificate would no doubt be “Clark Kent”. (His middle name is “Joseph”.)
Clark wasn’t cut out to be a farmer, apparently, because he moved to a big city called Metropolis after high school, to become a journalist. (I don’t recall that he ever attended college? Maybe I just forgot. At any rate, I can assure everyone that you don’t need a college education to become a journalist, speaking from personal experience.)
When I was a kid, back in the 1970s, Clark would duck into a phone booth at the first sign of trouble, and quickly change into his superhero costume. Phone booths were a common feature of the urban landscape back then. I’m not sure how Superman handles that part of the job nowadays, now that phone booths are a thing of the past. Another reason why cell phones were a bad idea.
Back in 1938, when Superman appeared in the Detective Comics issue, Action Comics #1, the bad guys that Superman needed to subdue were the capitalist robber barons who had caused the Great Depression. But a few years later, the bad guys had become German Nazis, and one of Superman’s key tasks was to encourage American boys to enlist in the Army or Navy during World War II.
I imagine the bad guys, now, are either Democrats or Republicans, or both. Or maybe the tech overlords in Silicone Valley.
Back in those early days, Superman had hardly any rivals, in terms of ‘super heroes’. About the only guy who came close was Tarzan, who was amazingly strong and knowledgeable in the ways of the jungle, but couldn’t actually fly, or see through solid walls. Batman came along one year later, in 1939, but he only came out at night, like a bat. So Superman still had to handle the daytime shift.
Remarkably, Superman still looks about 30 years old, so obviously one of his super powers — in addition to flying, X-ray vision, and being impervious to AR-15s — is the ability to remain 30 years old, forever. Somehow, he has managed to pass that same ability on to Lois Lane.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster started the trend, and now we have so many superheroes, it boggles the mind. And supervillains, too, of course. You can’t have the one without the other. The website SuperheroDB.com has a list of 57,042 superheroes and supervillains. They claim it’s a “complete list.”
But Superman was really the first. And really, no one has replaced him. Or can replace him.
I don’t even think AI can replace him.
When I was 14, I saw the 1978 movie titled Superman, featuring Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel. In that movie, Lois Lane actually died in an accident. But Superman then flew around the earth fast enough to make time go backwards, and was able to save Lois from the accident before it happened.
I would like to see time go backwards, right about now. For so many reasons.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.