I really wanted to like Bryan Singer’s new film Superman Returns much more than I did. Yet I was bothered by the very first publicity photo I saw from the film, which turned out to be a sign of the movie’s overall tone. Why was Superman’s cape brown? The traditional reds on Superman’s costume have turned much darker and browner in the new movie. Superman is meant to wear bright colors, matching the spirit of hope he embodies; it’s character like Batman who wear dark colors. Brown is drab and dreary. And Superman Returns is darker and drearier than it should be.

That’s a surprise, since Singer so admires Richard Donner’s original Superman movie from 1978. Now here’s a case of art finally receiving its proper recognition in the course of time. Donner was fired from Superman II (1981), much of which was reshot by director Richard Lester, who did not share Donner’s mythic vision of the character. This led to Lester’s Superman III (1983), an unfunny comedy built around Richard Pryor, and the utterly disastrous Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). But as the years passed, the reputation of Donner’s Superman grew, and fans even managed to piece together an unofficial cut of Superman II, which reincorporated much of Donner’s footage (see “Comics in Context” #90). And now, over a quarter of a century later, Bryan Singer has not only designed Superman Returns as a homage to Donner’s film, but made clear that it is a sequel to Superman II, thereby deleting Superman III and IV from continuity, This does not stop Warners from selling DVDs of III and IV, but Warners is also issuing an official DVD of the Donner cut of Superman II. It seems that sometimes the good guys do indeed win. at least in the world of film history.

Singer follows the letter of Donner’s Superman in terms of continuity, but what I wonder is, does he truly capture the celebratory spirit of that epic adventure film?

Superman Returns’ opening premise is that Superman has been gone from Earth for five years: after Earth scientists determined the location of Krypton, Superman went there via spaceship to see for himself. Of course, he found out what we all know: it had been blown to bits.

I see why Singer and his writers came up with this five year gap. For one thing, metaphorically it stands for the far longer gap in time between Superman II and the new movie. Time in the Superman movies seems not much different than time in the comics. Thanks to recasting, the characters look no older, but now they’re in a world with cell phones, personal computers, and flat screen TVs. (I am now sounding a spoiler alert.)

The five year gap also makes possible the existence of the four-year-old son of Superman and Lois, conceived during their tryst in Superman II. When I first read that Lois would have a young son–born out of wedlock–and a boyfriend in the new Superman movie, I was amazed. Just how much influence over the movies does DC have? Didn’t DC protest? For that matter, wasn’t there any Warners executive who said, maybe a movie aimed at family audiences shouldn’t condone illegitimate births? Or have social mores really changed that much? Somehow, on seeing the movie and realizing that the kid is Superman’s child, it bothers me less. Perhaps it’s that the situation is handled so matter-of-factly.

But the Superman that we know from the comics and even from the Donner movie would never have left Earth for five years. Isn’t one of the points of the Donner movie that Superman made a mistake in giving up his super-powers in order to have a relationship (okay–to be blunt, to have sex) with Lois? Once Superman gives up his powers, the three Phantom Zone villains wreak havoc and nearly take over the world. In Superman II’s closing moments Superman promises he will never abandon his role as Earth’s guardian again. And yet, according to Superman Returns, that’s just what he did.

Moreover, we are to believe that people started forgetting about superman during his long absence. All right then, what’s happened on Earth in the last five years? Among other things, there have been the 9/11 attacks, the tsunami disaster, and Hurricane Katrina. When such catastrophes struck, wouldn’t people wish that Superman were around to help? Would Superman, after being absent from Earth for five years, ever forgive himself for not being here to cope with these catastrophes? As a wise man has said, with great power must come great responsibility.

While paying homage to Donner’s film in so many ways, Singer’s Superman actually veers very far away from it. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. I was recently interviewed by Newsweek’s radio show about Superman Returns, and I was asked how it resembled Singer’s X-Men movies. My answer was that Singer’s Superman, like the X-Men, is an outsider, whose origin and powers separate him from the “normal” human race. Why would Superman spend five years looking for Krypton if he thought of Earth as his home? Singer’s Superman recalls his father Jor-El (in quotes from Marlon Brando in Donner’s movie) instructing him that he can never truly be one of them–the people of Earth. Singer’s movie seems to argue that Superman can never have a relationship with Lois, even though she is the mother of his son. She has moved on, and has a new, human boyfriend. (The boyfriend is played by James Marsden, who was Scott Summers, alias Cyclops, in the X-Men movies. In those movies the romance between Scott and Jean Grey falls flat dramatically, but Marsden’s appealing, sensitive performance in Superman Returns suggests that he and Singer could have treated the Scott-Jean relationship much differently.) Like dateless Clark Kent, Superman must remain alone.

Really? It’s true that Superman II, in both the Donner and Lester versions, contends that Superman cannot have both his superhero career and a life with Lois. It’s like those old pre-feminist movies in which women could not have both a career and marriage, like The Red Shoes (1948). (So this is The Red Boots?)

Yet in the comics Clark and Lois have been married for years now. Singer’s Superman reminded me of how much John Byrne turned the traditional idea of Superman upside down in The Man of Steel (1986). Byrne’s contention was that Clark is more “real” than Superman, that Superman, having been raised on Earth since infancy, considers himself an Earthman. If Superman is an immigrant, then he is thoroughly assimilated. In the comics, Clark’s marriage to Lois is a sign that Superman considers himself part of normal human society. Note too that Smallville takes Man of Steel even further: not only does Smallville’s Clark consider himself first and foremost a member of human society, but he is suspicious and resentful of Jor-El and other Kryptonians.

(By the way, notice that on his return to Earth in Singer’s film, Superman’s first major feat is to rescue a plane that is not only carrying Lois but also a space shuttle. Could this be a homage to the “space plane” rescue in Byrne’s Man of Steel #1. That would be appropriate since Man of Steel and Superman Returns are both “relaunches” of Superman. Similarly, I suspect that Superman’s near-demise in Superman Returns may be inspired by the famous “Death of Superman” storyline in the 1990s comics.)

Donner’s Superman movies now strike me as dated in its contention that Superman and Lois must remain apart. Other Superman stories have now demonstrated that their romance is far from “impossible.”

In fact, I even wonder if Donner’s movies really support the notion of Superman as alienated outsider. There’s the emphasis on Clark’s childhood and adolescence: it was Donner’s Superman that first established that Smallville was in Kansas, and that Clark is a product of the American midwest and traditional heartland values. (By casting Eva Marie Saint as Ma Kent and recycling some of Marlon Brando’s dialogue as Jor-El, Singer has not only reunited the leads of On the Waterfront in a new movie, but made them the hero’s father and mother figure.) There is nothing alien or alienated about Christopher Reeve’s sunny portrayal of Superman as all-American idealist. Reeve’s Superman even memorably carries a flag in one of the final scenes of Superman II. He’s not only one of us, he’s specifically an American. And isn’t the point of the ending of Donner’s first Superman that Superman rejects Jor-El’s thesis of not “interfering” in the lives of Earth people? By extension, doesn’t that mean that Superman no longer regards himself as separate from them, as Jor-El claimed he was?

The triangle in Superman Returns is like that of a screwball comedy, like His Girl Friday (1940), which., appropriately enough, has a reporter as female lead. There’s the hero, the Cary Grant part; there’s the Rosalind Russell part of the woman who used to be involved with the hero, and would be a perfect match for him, but instead has gotten romantically involved with someone else; and then there is the somebody else, who is nice but bland, the Ralph Bellamy part, as here played by James Marsden. And the rules of drama decree that Cary ends up with Roz. But Superman Returns ends with the triangle unchanged: Lois is still with the Marsden character, and Superman will merely watch over his son from afar. No wonder this denouement feels unsatisfactory.

Then again, I found it hard to care much for Brandon Routh’s Superman or Kate Bosworth’s Lois. They’re okay, and Routh is good at recapturing some of Christopher Reeve’s characterization of Clark. But Routh and Bosworth aren’t memorable, and that’s a big problem when audiences can see Tom Welling and Erica Durante give more vivid portrayals of Clark and Lois every week on Smallville, or hear Tim Daly and Dana Delany act the same roles to perfection every night on Boomerang’s animated Superman. Others have commented on how little dialogue Singer’s film gives Superman/Clark and Lois; Kevin Spacey’s Luthor, in contrast, gets plenty. Is it that Routh and Bosworth weren’t good enough to do more dialogue, or did the movie simply deny them the opportunity?

It’s fun to see Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s Superman TV show, as a bartender, complete with Jimmy’s bow tie, in the new movie. That show’s Lois, Noel Neill, is 85 in real life (though to judge from a photo in The New York Times, looks amazingly good), but it’s disturbing that the film casts her in a deathbed scene.

What I liked the best about Superman Returns was the thing I liked least about Donner’s original Superman: the way Lex Luthor is portrayed. My editor Ken Plume and I disagree about Gene Hackman’s Luthor in the first movie. Ken makes the point that this half-comedic version of Luthor represents a necessary transition from the camp super-villainy of the 1960s Batman TV show to super-villainy treated more seriously. I will agree with Ken that beneath the bad wigs and execrable fashion sense (bad even for the 1970s), Hackman does have moments when he conveys a palpable sense of evil and menace. And yes, his aides Miss Teschmacher and, especially, Otis are considerably goofier than he is, although being the straight man to their buffoonery doesn’t make him look more sinister.

But Superman was released in 1978, the year after the original Star Wars, which demonstrated the dramatic impact of a villain who is played entirely seriously, as Darth Vader was. Vader became an icon of evil in popular culture. Significantly, nobody copied the Superman movies’ comedy version of Luthor: not the comics, not Lois and Clark, not the 1990s animated series, and not Smallville. Everyone working on Superman seemed to realize that the movies had gotten Luthor wrong. The somber, imperious menace conveyed by the Luthor of the 1990s animated series, as voiced by Clancy Brown, gets Superman’s greatest nemesis right.

This brings me to the subject of the new animated TV movie, Superman: Brainiac Attacks, which recently premiered on Cartoon Network before being released on DVD. I had been looking forward to this, too: it had been announced that Tim Daly and Dana Delany were returning to voice Superman and Lois, and the promotional art featured the familiar Bruce Timm designs from the 1990s series. So imagine my shock when I watched the movie and discovered this was a case of a wolf in Timm’s clothing, or, rather, designs.
It turned out that people from The Batman, the drastically inferior successor to the 1990s Batman animated series, were behind this TV-movie.
The writer has said in an interview that Superman: Brainiac Attacks was not meant to be in continuity with the 1990s Superman animated show. But if it’s in the same visual style, with the same two lead voice actors, shouldn’t we expect it to be in continuity? But no, though in Justice League Unlimited, which followed the continuity of the other 1990s DC animated show, Luthor had lost control of Lexcorp and had vanished from Earth, here he is back in his office, without explanation. And whereas in the previous animated series it was Luthor who made contact with Brainiac on the latter’s first visit to Earth, and Luthor had been attempting to resurrect Brainiac, according to the TV movie, they’d never met before. It would not have been hard to make the Luthor/Brainiac continuity of the TV movie conform to the previous series.

Even worse, Clancy Brown and Corey Burton were not brought back as the voices of Luthor and Brainiac. Luthor is instead portrayed as a goofball far worse than the Luthor of the Donner movies. I suspect the heavy hand of a Warners corporate decree at work, declaring that from now on Luthor must be a jerk. As for Brainiac, the sinister computer intelligence, he has developed an uncharacteristic tendency to chuckle. In contrast to the imaginative, well-crafted, character-driven storylines of the 1990s Superman series, Brainiac Attacks just turns Brainiac, the ultimate cerebral menace, into a gigantic robot monster, who lumbers about wreaking destruction, and then lumbers some more.

And then there’s Brainiac Attacks’ version of the Phantom Zone, which Superman can fly into and out of at will. But isn’t that ignoring the whole point of the Phantom Zone, which is that it is virtually inescapable (as Clark found out in the last season finale of Smallville)?

Enough about this disaster. Before I embarked on this tangent, I was about to say that I very much liked Kevin Spacey’s depiction of Luthor in Superman Returns. Spacey’s made a specialty of portraying villains that are larger than life yet credibly dangerous, from the first role that won him fame, on the TV series Wiseguy, through Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995). It has been reported that Spacey himself insisted on toning down the sillier side of the movies’ Luthor. Certainly it helps that this Luthor displays his trademark baldness (we see the bad wigs, but Spacey’s Luthor almost never wears them), and that he dresses in a far more imposing manner. One might think that a genius like Luthor would prefer a girlfriend with brains, but, no, Donner tradition decrees that he be given a new beautiful bubblehead in the person of Kitty Kowalski, who lacks Miss Teschmacher’s partly redeeming vivacity. Thankfully, Spacey’s Luthor’s henchmen aren’t buffoons like Otis.

But what’s most important is Spacey’s manner as Luthor. He still makes jokes and phrases things humorously. But whereas Hackman’s Luthor
came off as a vulgar clown, a used car salesman wielding nuclear missiles, Spacey’s Luthor is much more persuasively a criminal mastermind, whose surface repartee masks sinister depths. When Spacey’s Luthor cracks a joke, it comes off as a sardonic witticism. And when Spacey’s Luthor confronts Superman, he is pure menace.

From one perspective, Luthor’s schemes in the Singer and Donner films, which amount to killing millions of people in the service of a far-fetched real estate deal, are ludicrous. But I now realize that Donner’s movie contained the seeds of the Luthor of Man of Steel, the 1990s animated series, and Smallville: the businessman who is insensitive to the welfare of the public.

The third act, with Superman’s struggles over Luthor’s new continent, and his subsequent near death, move at a leaden pace. This sequence also makes no sense.

Earlier, Luthor returned to the Fortress of Solitude, where the crystal-computerized (?) version of Jor-El told him all about the attributes of Kryptonian crystals, First, why did Superman leave the Fortress unprotected, when Luthor knows about it? (In Donner’s cut of Superman II, Superman destroys the Fortress, probably for that reason.) Wouldn’t Jor-El have designed the Fortress so that intruding Earthmen couldn’t activate it?
And why doesn’t the movie do something with the fact that the crystal-Jor-El mistakenly addresses Luthor as “my son,” thereby setting up Luthor metaphorically as Superman’s evil brother, even as an Anti-Christ, if you accept the idea of Superman as Christ figure?

So, Luthor tells us that he got the crystals to duplicate the properties of Kryptonite, and then he uses them to create an entire greenish continent. So shouldn’t Superman grow weak and fall down dead as soon as he flies over the Kryptonite continent? But instead he flies down, though he loses enough of his powers so that Luthor can deck him. Luthor impales him with a dagger-like Kryptonite crystal. Lois later removes most of the Kryptonite crystal, but a small chunk remains in Superman’s body. Superman is nevertheless able to lift the entire continent–which, remember, duplicates the properties of Kryptonite–into outer space. Yes, he collapses and nearly dies afterwards, but that feat should have been utterly impossible! And why didn’t the movie do more with the symbolism of Luthor raising a continent that is a negative version of Kryptonian geography?

In contrast, Superman’s encounter with Kryptonite in the first movie is relatively brief. But Superman Returns draws out his agonies. And when Superman recovers, the celebration is muted. We see Martha Kent, his foster mother, in the crowd waiting outside the hospital for news. Where is the joyous reunion scene between mother and foster son?

Remember the traditional finale of the previous Superman movies, with Christopher Reeve flying high above the Earth in space, then breaking the fourth wall by catching sight of us and giving us a big, winning grin, as he soars off? (It’s a more spectacular version of the memorable end of some of the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons, in which Clark winks at the audience.) Singer attempts to duplicate this shot at the end of Superman Returns, but Brandon Routh’s Man of Steel merely looks impassionately forward rather than giving us the smile we expect. It’s a dreary ending to a drab and dark movie. As John Williams’ Superman march sounded during the closing credits, reminding me of all the energy and joyousness in the Richard Donner for which he wrote it, I realized just how much Singer had missed the target.

SUPERMAN RETURNS TO 1960

After years of wondering whether I could fit various examples of DC’s fifty dollar Archives reprint volumes into my budget, and usually deciding no, I was pleased when DC finally started its inexpensively priced Showcase series instead, each offering five hundred pages of reprints in trade paperback form.

In time for the release of Superman Returns, DC has issues Showcase Presents Superman, Volume 2, collecting Silver Age tales from Action Comics and Superman from 1959 through 1961. This was a period of explosive creativity in the seven Superman-related titles edited by the late Mort Weisinger. In many aspects these stories fall far short of the standards of sophistication that readers expect from superhero comics today. But forty-five years ago the audience for comic books was primarily small children, and Weisinger was successfully targeting that market. Editor Julius Schwartz seemed to be aiming at intelligent teenagers as well, and in 1961 Stan Lee would start the revolution in superhero comics that would retain many of his readers into adulthood. But Schwartz and Lee were unusual in pushing the envelope in the early Silver Age.

I first encountered many of the stories in this Showcase volume as reprints in annuals when I was a boy, when my tastes were not yet developed enough to be bothered by the awkwardness in the dialogue or the logical holes in the plots. But i was dazzled by the imagination in these comics, and enthralled by the surprising emotional resonance in the best of Weisinger’s stories. Rereading old favorites in this collection, I still find much to admire amidst the dated dross.

The thing I like best about this Showcase volume is the credits. Although Lee and to a lesser degree Schwartz informed readers who write and drew the stories, again this was unusual at the time. Now, finally, I know who it was who wrote these tales which proved so memorable to me in my childhood, demonstrating to me some of the potential of the superhero genre.

Here in this volume, for example, is “The Old Man of Metropolis” from Action Comics #270 (November 1960), a story I described in one of the earliest installments of this column (see “Comics in Context” #4). The great Curt Swan drew it, bringing out its psychological drama with sensitivity and quiet, but subtly devastating emotional power, and now I know that it was written by the prolific Otto Binder.

Reading it now, it is all too clear that when Clark Kent settles down for a nap, what happens over the main body of the story is a dream, or rather, a nightmare. Clark/Superman finds himself transported into the future, where he has become an elderly man, who has lost all his super-powers. Binder thus masterfully uses the iconic image of Superman, the ultimate icon of strength, power and virility, to dramatize the physical deterioration of old age. Superman spends most of the story in costume, serving to continually remind us of his youth, yet now his hair is turning white, his face is wrinkled, his build is good for an old man but hardly what it was, and he is even forced to wear glasses not as a disguise but in order to see.

What I didn’t notice as a boy is the motivation for Superman’s nightmare about old age: he reads an essay that Supergirl, who hasn’t yet begun her public career, has written envisioning her own heroic career as Superwoman “when my cousin Superman reaches old [age].” The teenage Supergirl looks forward to this time, but the dream shows that Superman himself has subconscious fears that he will physically decline with age as an ordinary mortal does. Moreover, Binder is suggesting that though Superman acts like a father towards his young cousin, protecting and teaching her, he subconsciously fears that she will supplant him when she grows up, as indeed she does in the dream.

One may not expect to find subtlety in a Weisinger-era Superman story, yet here it is. Rereading the story in Showcase for the first time in decades, I was particularly impressed by the scenes between Superwoman and the aged Superman. She never acts with blatant cruelty towards her elder cousin. But, through Binder’s understated dialogue, and Swan’s superb command of facial expressions and body language, Superwoman’s essential insensitivity towards her cousin becomes clear. She folds her arms in impatience towards him, as if controlling her anger towards a misbehaving child. They have reversed their former surrogate parent-child relationship. Later, it turns out that she has even supplanted Clark as a reporter at The Daily Planet. In this guise, she gives him a beaming smile, like a mother trying to make up to her son for being angry. But there’s a certain condescension to her attempts at kindness. She tells him she will restore his fame by writing articles about him, but as she photographs the sad old man changing from Clark into Superman, readers should suspect that she is also exploiting him for her journalistic career. And look at the uncaring expression Swan put on her face as the elderly Superman makes his exit: she has now lost interest in her surrogate father figure.

It’s now part of comics legend that Weisinger used to ask the kids at the barber shop what they wanted to see in the comics. Why would children want to see a story about Superman in old age? I suspect that from time to time writers like Binder used the opportunities they had as comics writers to smuggle thorough themes that concerned them personally. Binder and Swan did such an amazing job with “The Old Man of Metropolis” that even as a boy, when old age and death seemed so far off in the future I need not think about them, it made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps even children have subconscious fears of mortality that this story played upon.

This Showcase volume’s great revelation for me is how often the name of Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, turns up credited as writer of the stories. So much of what has been written about the work Jerry Siegel and Superman’s other creator, artist Joe Shuster, confines itself to the stories they did in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But here is Siegel, two decades or more after Superman first appeared in comics, still exploring the possibilities of his great creation and further extending the character’s mythos.

When I first saw Siegel’s and Swan’s “The Two Faces of Superman,” from Superman #137 (May 1960), it was reprinted in a Superman Annual and labeled “an imaginary story,” the designation that Weisinger gave to stories that diverged from official continuity, exploring other directions that the characters’ lives could have taken. They were the predecessors of Marvel’s later What If and DC’s Elseworlds. I see from the reprint in Showcase, however, that “Two Faces” was originally called merely an “untold” story. As unusual as the events it recounts may be, they were still meant to be part of canonical continuity.

As its title suggests, Siegel’s “The Two Faces of Superman” is a variation on that perennial theme of superhero comics: the evil twin. Duality itself is a major theme of the genre, as in Siegel’s hero’s dual roles of Superman and Clark Kent, of Kryptonian alien and American citizen. In DC’s new coffee table book Superman Cover to Cover, Alvin Schwartz, the writer who conceived of Bizarro, reveals that he consciously intended Bizarro to represent Superman’s Jungian shadow, his dark side. But Bizarro has been presented as childlike or (dare I say it?) mentally retarded, prone to uncontrolled tantrums but somehow still innocent, much like the traditional 1960s version of the Hulk. He represents the immature child within the adult’s subconscious.

Super-Menace, the villainous version of Superman in Siegel’s “Two Faces,” is more definitely the evil side of Superman’s personality given physical form as a separate entity. The premise of Siegel’s story is that during its journey from Krypton to Earth, the rocket carrying the infant Superman struck an alien space ship. (Considering the inconceivable vastness of outer space, how likely is such a collision? And if the infant Superman’s rocket was slightly deflected by the alien vessel, wouldn’t that have knocked it off course? So does that mean that Jor-El did not intend the rocket to land in Smallville? These are questions we might ask about this story nowadays, but they are irrelevant to the purpose of Siegel’s dark fairy tale.) The collision activates a device that creates a duplicate of the Kryptonian rocket and the baby inside. Both rockets land on Earth, where the duplicate Superbaby is found and raised by gangster ‘Wolf” Derek and his wife Bonnie.

As a boy it never registered on me that the characters in Superboy stories were wearing old-fashioned clothing. Rereading “Two Faces” now I was startled to realize that Swan puts Bonnie the moll in a 1920s flapper outfit. Even though this story was published at the start of the 1960s, since Superman had debuted in 1938, he was still being portrayed as having been a toddler in the early 1920s. (Actually, by this logic, I suppose that baby Kal-El really should have landed on Earth in the late 1910s!) I recall that when Weisinger retired at the end of the 1960s, DC announced in its comics that the time period of Superboy’s adventures was now going to be considerably updated.

The opening caption of the story announces it as a “three-part novel.” Actually, it took up the entire issue, and that is as long as comic book stories got back then. This was a special event, and Siegel’s story has an epic feel, not only spanning settings ranging from Krypton to deep space to Earth, but spanning time, covering the entire length of Superman’s life, from Superbaby to Superboy to adult. From the standpoint of 2006, isn’t it interesting to see Weisinger use of the word “novel” to describe a self-contained comics story of unusual length? In “Two Faces” and other “novel”-length Weisinger stories, we see forebears of today’s graphic novel concept.

Throughout this story Siegel follows the parallels between the life of Superman, from infancy into adulthood, and the life of his literal evil twin over the same period.

There’s a great deal that just doesn’t work by today’s standards. It’s hard enough to believe that Ma and Pa Kent could control a super-powered baby; that’s why, starting with John Byrne’s The Man of Steel, recent versions of the Superman legend have him develop his super-powers after infancy, slowly from childhood through adolescence. How could this gangster and his wife control their super-powerful baby, especially when they actively encourage him to be destructive? Jonathan and Martha Kent did such a good job raising young Clark that he became an obedient, well-behaved Superboy. Wouldn’t his teenage evil counterpart have gone through a period of rebelling against his parents? Maybe we can accept the name of “Super-Menace” for Superman’s evil counterpart as an adult, but “Super-Brat” and “Super-Bully” just sound kitschy as names paralleling “Superbaby” and “Superboy.” And since Superboy was operating publicly in costume in his teens, in the Weisinger-era continuity, why did “Wolf” and Bonnie keep their own super-powered kid under wraps until well until adulthood? In the final chapter, there’s the silver-haired Wolf and Bonnie, who could have had their “Super-Bully” even take over the world for them years before.

These questions didn’t bother me when I first read the story as a boy. As i said, this is a dark fairy tale, and follows a fairy tale’s logic. The mythic power of this story lies in Siegel’s paralleling the life of Superman and the life of his evil counterpart through the decades, through three phases of their lives. Though Weisinger and Siegel surely didn’t think in these terms, one could read “Two Faces” as a metaphor for how the dark side of Superman–his own Dark Phoenix–grew from infancy hidden within the hero’s subconscious, gathering strength to finally emerge in adulthood. In the final chapter Superman’s shadow self finally bursts forth, to challenge Superman’s conscious personality–his Jungian ego–for supremacy. Significantly, even as a teenager, “Super-Bully” tried to frame Superboy for wrongdoing, as if the unconscious shadow self was attempting to corrupt the conscious personality.

There’s also some nice intentional comedy in the story, as with Wolf and Bonnie’s pride in watching their adopted son’s first crimes. “His first safe!” marvels Wolf. “Gosh, it almost makes me feel sentimental!”

Remaining in concealment (and metaphorically, in the subconscious), Super-Bully/Super-Menace grows envious of Superboy/Superman’s life, and wants to take his place. In the final chapter Super-Menace, using his superhuman hearing, discovered that Wolf and Bonnie only pretended to show him parental love; they actually regarded him as a “freak” whom they were out to exploit. “I hate Superman for having had loving foster parents! I’ll kill him!”

When Super-Menace and Superman finally meet, Superman shows him that he isn’t even “real”: Super-Menace is merely “an unearthly force manifested in human form.” You could read this as meaning that Super-Menace doesn’t represent Superman’s true personality, but is merely a formerly buried aspect of his subconscious.

Or, again, though Weisinger and Siegel probably did not consciously think this through, it is noteworthy that Super-Menace has no secret identity, no human identity like Clark Kent that has become a part of society. What they clearly did realize is that Super-Menace has no emotional foundation in parental love. The “love” that Wolf and Bonnie showed him was no more real than his physical body. Hence Super-Menace has no real core to his being: he is a hollow version of Superman. He has also never truly become an adult; he is still effectively an orphaned, unloved baby. Sobbing like a child, the enraged Super-Menace defies Superman: “I hate your human body! I hate all the things that you are that I can never be! I’ve got to destroy you!”

On the point of murdering Superman (his good self), Super-Menace (the shadow self) realizes that his rage is misdirected, and that his entire life was a waste. In realizing this, he has finally achieved a sort of psychological maturity. He confronts Wolf and Bonnie, and accuses them, “My life could have been a blessing, but you, with your rotten cunning, twisted it into . . .something terrible.” Super-Menace then commits suicide, destroying his evil foster parents in the process.

It may be unrealistic to have Super-Menace completely reverse the direction of his life upon learning his parents hated him. But, remember, this is a story that follows the logic of a child’s fable. Consider how much importance the memory of his parents–both his Kryptonian ones and the Kents–have had on Superman, molding this man who could have become humanity’s greatest enemy into its greatest hero, the champion of life. Wolf and Bonnie warped Super-Menace’s mind just as Jonathan and Martha Kent guided the formation of Superman’s personality. Super-Menace’s sense of self is as strongly tied to his foster parents as Superman’s is to the Kents. So there is a poetic justice and logic that learning the harsh truth about his foster parents would lead to Super-Menace’s self-destruction. What would happen to Batman and Spider-Man were they to discover that Thomas Wayne and Uncle Ben had really been criminals?

You surely know about Krypto the Super-Dog and perhaps about the other Super-Pets from Silver Age Superman comics, but have you ever heard of the nasty Kryptonian super-animal? It’s the “Flame Dragon from Krypton” introduced in the story of the same name by Jerry Siegel and artist Wayne Boring, first published in Superman #142 (January 1961), and reprinted in this Showcase. I first saw this story as a reprint in the very first superhero comic I ever read: World’s Finest #142 (by coincidence, the same number), whose cover story was the eerie, even tragic saga of the nobody who briefly became the all-powerful villain, the Composite Superman. I’ve always liked the Flame Dragon, and now I realize one of the reasons why. Perhaps Weisinger and Siegel merely intended to appeal to kids’ fascination with movie monsters. After all, this was the same time that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave us their own dragon, Fin Fang Foom, as well as other monsters in the years just before Fantastic Four #1. Hence, the Flame Dragon was the counterpart to Godzilla, just as the better known Titano was Superman’s version of King Kong, complete with the giant ape’s fondness for a beautiful human woman. But pitting Superman against the Flame Dragon also makes him a modern version of the monster slayers, and especially the dragon slayers of mythology, like St. George and Siegfried.

What seems odd about this story is that its finale is not the defeat of the Flame Dragon, which takes place two pages before the end, but yet another of Superman’s schemes to deceive Lois into thinking he is not really Clark Kent. This time Superman puts on a show for Lois with the aid of Batman and Supergirl, who masquerade as a doctor and nurse. So is it that Clark Kent is afraid Lois will prove he is Superman? Or is the unspoken subtext that Superman fears that Lois will find out that he is really the much more mundane Clark Kent in his everyday life?

The Flame Dragon is another example of Weisinger and Siegel’s efforts to depict Krypton as a world of marvels. It turns out that Siegel is credited as writer for the map of Krypton at the end of this Showcase volume, which features such natural wonders as the Fire Falls, the Jewel Mountain, the Scarlet Jungle, the Rainbow Canyon, and the Gold Volcano. Looking at this map is like looking at a map of Oz, with all of its fictional wonders.

As portrayed in the Superman movies and in Byrne’s Man of Steel, Krypton is a forbidding place. Smallville and recent comics depict the Kryptonians as an imperialistic people, bent on conquest. But for Weisinger and Siegel, Krypton was a lost paradise.

This theme is the basis of the best known tale in this Showcase collection, “Superman’s Return to Krypton” written by Siegel and drawn by Boring, and originally published in Superman #141 (November 1960). By accident, Superman finds himself cast back in time and marooned on Krypton shortly before the marriage of his parents, Jor-El and Lara. Calling himself by his Kryptonian name of Kal-El, Superman becomes Jor-El’s friend and assistant, without revealing their true relationship, and helps Jor-El in his efforts to save the Kryptonian people from the catastrophe he foresees. Superman also falls in love with the beautiful Kryptonian actress Lyla Lerrol. (According to Weisinger’s tradition, each of the women Superman loves has two “L’s” in her name. Weisinger did not explain why Lex Luthor also has a double “L.”)

Siegel tries, but he just cannot make the romance between Superman and Lyla touching. And what about Lois? Well, Superman doesn’t think he will ever see her again, but Siegel also suggests that Lois may be somewhat superficial. Superman thinks, “Lois loved me because i was Superman, but Lyla loves me for. . . myself! I’m just an ordinary mortal!”

Certainly this story is founded on the fantasy that one could be reunited with his deceased parents, as Superman is here. But i think that this tale works best as an expression of longing for the past, for a lost paradise that one can never truly regain.

Weisinger insisted in his stories that though Superman could travel through time, it was impossible for him to alter the past. There is one memorable tale in which Superboy goes back in time and attempts to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, only to be paralyzed by Red Kryptonite wielded by a time-traveling Luthor, who is unaware that this is the night of Lincoln’s murder. In “Superman’s Return to Krypton,” Superman hopes that he can prevent Krypton’s destruction, yet step by step he watches history take its inevitable course. He gives himself over to hs romance with Lyla, knowing that they are both doomed. As it turns out, another accident (and one which isn’t at all credible) spares Superman’s life, but, like Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick, he is the sole survivor who must watch as everyone else perishes. Weisinger’s and Siegel’s vision of the inevitability of time is a tragic one, and hence it is surprising to find it in a children’s story.

Much has been made of Siegel’s and Shuster’s Jewish-American background, as the children of immigrants. The fact that Kryptonian names like “Kal-El” seem to have Hebrew roots suggests that Weisinger and Siegel may have been conscious of Jewish themes in the Superman legend. Thus in “Superman’s Return to Krypton,” Krypton may be a metaphor for the Old Country, the home of Siegel’s ancestors: Europe before the World Wars and the Holocaust, another lost paradise, at least in the memories of those who left, that was doomed to destruction.

It’s too bad that Richard Donner’s Superman movie made Krypton look like such an austere, barren place, instead of the paradise of Siegel’s imagination. Otherwise, wouldn’t “Superman’s Return to Krypton” make the basis of a potentially great movie?

Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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