Birds are easy to draw when they’re flying - pointy oval with a triangle coming off of each side.
A basic airplane shape, admittedly, closely mimics that of a flying bird, at least for the models and styles most often seen above our cities.
But PEOPLE, even with their hands on their hips, do NOT look like pointy ovals with two triangles coming out of them… even from far away.
This is why the whole Superman™ meme confused me:
“…it’s a bird!”
“…it’s a plane!”
“It’s SUPERMAN!™”
REALLY? Surely a guy with a cowlick and a six pack hurtling through the sky looks more like a rocket. Surely. Even when the cape is sort of pulled behind him by the velocity, at best he resembles a wine bottle with a napkin tied around the neck thrown by an all-star quarterback.
I’ve had problems with Superman. Maybe not 99 of them, but a more than healthy amount to carry against a fictional character.
Clearly stating: I have never had a qualm or concern regarding the concept and practice of truth, or the quest for and distribution of justice, but that American Way thing’s been a little bit harder to nail down, definition-wise, over the decades.
As a kid, I thought I understood… it had something to do with picket fences and black+white movies and apple pies and baseball and being polite on the street to one another. Age has evolved this viewpoint somewhat, but no matter how kryptonite jaded my outlook has been, I can’t ever entirely blame Superman. We’re both nerds from from Kansas. Well, me originally, but he grew up there. Go Jayhawks.
Kansas City, Kansas. Nineteen Seventy Four. Early June.
Eight years old.
I think I got paid maybe a dollar every time I helped with the grass in the summer; my job was to trim around the edges with the hand clippers. I saved this money to buy comic books.
My strategy: most for my money. So when they started producing 100 page mega comics for only 60 cents, I was right there grabbing one off the circular wire rack at the TG&Y drugstore.
“The Superman Family.” First issue (No. 164.) Stories included -
Krypto becoming a Hollywood dog star (he did his own stunts);
Superman forced to marry three women (for some reason);
and “The Death March”, where Clark Kent’s boss makes the entire Daily Planet team re-enact his disgraced Confederate General grandfather’s trek across the desert.
That’s what I was reading in the backyard, sitting on the yellow aluminum tube swing set: their team ran out of water because the boss had secretly drunk it all - Clark Kent took some from the radiator of their Jeep and purified it with his heat vision, but when he offered it to his boss, he swatted it away, proclaiming that he didn’t need it because “we whites are a superior breed.”
That’s how I remembered it. For twenty years.
I have a copy of the book now, right beside me, and I almost got it right, the word was “rugged” instead of superior, but the basic story details were accurate, which was pretty good retention for an eight year old because I only got the opportunity to read it that once.
I wasn’t a really cry-y kid, but my eyes filled right up. I finished the story and then went to my mother, who asked why I was crying, and I showed her the book, and she calmed me down and gave me a popsicle, then called the operator to speak to a comic book company, all the way in New York City.
I’m a MARVEL comic guy. This is why. My mother did not ban me from reading comics, but she did begin to take me to the actual comic book store to get them, where she spoke to the proprietor about what titles might be best for a young black kid looking to keep his heart from getting broken while remaining aware of the sometimes ugly truths about the world.
“The X-Men.” the shopowner told her. “Made by a totally different company. Stories about being different and equality.”
Done.
I don’t know what my mother said to the man in New York City. I believe she got the editor-in-chief on the phone. He must have been expecting a compliment: I’m almost certain I remember the words “Shame on you” being spoken. We didn’t make a lot of long distance calls in our house… they were expensive - so I remember almost every one.
I missed about 20 years of Superman. I did go see the movie at the drive-in with my cousins in ’78, and got one more Superman comic, but that was about it.
Almost exactly twenty years later I told this story to my wife in the basement of my mom’s house back when we first got married… showed her a copy of the comic. She picked it up and read the story.
“Well, the man’s an incredible jerk,” she said, “but, you know, that’s his name.”
I was confused. “His name is Jerk?“
“-no, he’s Perry White. White is his last name. He’s talking about his family. They’re the Whites.”
I’ve told this story a lot. It used to end there, with me in a sheepish trombone slide sound recognition moment.
However, a bit later in life I was assured by industry professionals that the tone of the dialogue, as accidental as it could have been, was most likely entirely intended in the manner in which it was originally perceived. I learned that some of the stories in these discounted “super spectacular” editions were reprinted from the early 1960’s and most likely reflected a particular editor’s tone and opinion.
Thus, an unfortunate subtlety soured my entire view on a narrative, which was doubly unfortunate now that I’ve discovered
Lois Lane NO 106 from 1970, where the reporter transforms herself into a black woman for 24 hours then DARES Clark Kent to say he wouldn’t marry her if she decided to remain that way,
The Superman radio serial where he went up against the KKK, broadcast nationwide in the 1940’s,
And of course, the one other Superman comic I bought in 1978, a giant edition where Superman fought Muhammad Ali on a planet with a red sun - equal level playing field (Superman gets his powers from a yellow sun - on a red sun planet he loses them) and Ali definitively wins the bout. I must’ve read that a hundred times. I bought two copies.
Flying is okay. Heat vision. Freeze breath. Strength. Those are things a kid can imitate, but never learn to do. I have worn glasses most of my life and have never been mistaken as someone else when I took them off, so Clark’s spy skills are also absolutely off the charts and not in my wheelhouse.
I am still a MARVEL guy, through and through. I identify more with the scrappy science hero than the Olympian god. But where the character of Superman has related to me is through his nearly 100 years of willingness to keep a steady job, instead of mine for diamonds and just kick back.
In all his iterations Superman is powerful enough to take whatever he wants; instead he is willing to go to work, usually in a suit, and then do the work, whatever it is, while not merely representing, but demonstrating truth and justice.
That is the very best definition of “The American Way”, and why Clark Kent is my favorite DC hero.
Go Jayhawks.
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