Superman

Debuting in Action Comics #1 in 1938, Superman became an icon of American masculine heroism and has been featured in comics, radio, television, movies, a musical, and various product tie-ins. Throughout most of his career, Superman embodied a normative white heterosexual masculinity that adapted to broader currents in the cultural construction of American manhood.

Created by writer Jerry Siegel and cartoonist Joe Schuster, Superman was rocketed as an infant from the dying planet Krypton and its red Sun to Earth, where the yellow Sun and weaker gravity gave him incredible powers. Through the “Man of Steel”and his alter-ego Clark Kent, Siegel and Schuster, both Jewish, expressed their ambivalent relationship to American masculinity. Kent, a mild-mannered, bespectacled, newspaper reporter in the fictional city of Metropolis, reflected stereotypical notions of Jewish men as urban, timid, overly intellectual, sexually inept, and feminized. Yet Kent was also thoroughly grounded in the rural midwestern values of his foster parents, the presumably gentile Kents of Smallville. Superman, meanwhile, was an immigrant shorn of Jewish characteristics and [Page 448]possessed of a heroic muscularity that drew on dominant cultural images of ideal manhood.

Superman's strength and foes changed over time, reflecting broader American fears and anxieties. Prior to World War II, Superman's powers were enormous but limited, and, in the context of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he displayed a social conscience that led him to target rapacious businessmen rather than menacing aliens. After the United States entered World War II, however, Superman put aside criticism of the economic order to urge the defeat of what Superman's creators called the “Japanazis.” Because Clark Kent accidentally failed his eye examination, Superman had to battle homefront saboteurs and urge Americans to buy bonds.

During World War II and the Cold War, Superman represented American manhood at its most conservative: clean-cut and muscular, politically neutral, respectful of authority, and a faithful worker. In the face of hostile military powers and such rival ideologies as fascism and communism, he asserted that “truth, justice and the American way” (as the 1950s television series put it) were essentially the same things (and were backed up by tremendous physical strength). In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Superman's physical powers escalated to nearly infinite levels. To humanize the character and retain plot tension, Superman's writers created Kryptonite, irradiated fragments of the hero's home planet, which weakened him when he was exposed to it.

In keeping with broader notions of middle-class manhood during the 1950s and 1960s emphasizing fatherhood and family togetherness, Superman gained new domestic responsibilities, and his family expanded to include Superboy, Supergirl, and various superpets. Writers also gave Superman's love life more attention, with Lois Lane and Lana Lang vying for his affections. Superman even considered marriage; but even in this era of the valorization of home and family he seemed unable to reconcile himself to suburban fatherhood, perhaps because marriage implied emotional dependence, and thus weakness.

By the late 1960s, Superman was again reassessed amid growing resistance to the Vietnam War, increasing doubts about the moral rightness of American military actions, and the rise of feminism and identity movements among nonwhite and gay men. His near omnipotence lost favor with readers aware that normative American manhood faced challenges in a politically and economically complex world. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, a series of four Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve revived the character's popularity.

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