Superman, Cleveland’s hometown superhero, still soars at 75

By Michael Sangiacomo

Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

Seventy-five years ago this week, someone walking up to a newsstand in Cleveland might have seen something new — a gaudy, yellow-covered comic book with a man dressed in a circus outfit lifting a car. The magazine bore the equally gaudy title of “Action Comics.”

A perfect copy of that 10-cent comic recently sold for $1.2 million, but at the time just seeing the book on display would have meant more than money to the two young Cleveland men who created the character.

Superman, a concept Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had come up with five years earlier while in high school, had finally arrived. Comics would never be the same, and soon Superman would be among the most recognized characters in the world.

Yet the superhero who spawned numerous television series and films, including a movie due out in June, has never been fully embraced by the city of his birth. And while it’s pretty hard to find a place where people have not heard of him, few know the idea came from Cleveland.

Superman rose from humble beginnings. The legend, as told by Siegel himself, says that one hot summer night in the early 1930s, the teen tossed and turned, unable to sleep in his home at 10622 Kimberley Ave., in the Glenville neighborhood.

He stared out his bedroom window at a giant moon, his head spinning with the tales of science fiction he loved to read. He wished he could fly.

He jumped out of bed and hastily wrote down his ideas for a man who could not exactly fly but was so mighty that he could leap hundreds of feet into the air. He would have the strength of Hercules and the invulnerability of Achilles and would be the hero of the dispossessed and downtrodden, just like the people of Depression-era Cleveland.

The character would be more than a man, he would be a superman.

The next morning, the teen rushed to the home of his artist friend Joe Shuster, and after several fits and starts, they created the familiar character known as the first and greatest superhero.

It took Siegel and his artist friend four years to find a publisher that shared their vision. Siegel’s daughter, Laura, said he saved many of the discouraging missives they received from publishers. Some of them may even be on display in Cleveland later this year during one of the events marking the anniversary.

On April 18, 1938, despite the postdated “June” on the cover, “Action Comics” No. 1 was released featuring Superman.

“Superman was more powerful than any politician and more effective than any social activist,” said Laura Siegel Larson, whose father died in 1996 at the age of 81. Shuster died in 1992, a few weeks short of his 78th birthday.

“In that first issue, Superman saved the life of an innocent woman on death row, stopped a wife beater, punished some bullying thugs and brought corrupt politicians to justice,” she said.

“These were very real social evils his readers were powerless to conquer, and they loved seeing someone who could,” she continued. “My father wanted to do all those things for society, but he was just a kid from Cleveland. What he could not do, he had Superman do.”

The comic-book adventures of Superman have run continuously from that day. There have been thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of comic-book adventures of Superman fighting everything from wife beaters to world-eaters, with many whimsical stories in between.

He’s turned up everywhere. Superman’s visage, right down to the spit curl and the famous costume, has appeared on clothing, toys and lunchboxes since the late 1930s. He was on the radio, then on cartoons and in movie serials in the 1940s.

From the page to the screen

Many people fondly remember the George Reeves “Adventures of Superman” TV show that ran in the 1950s and is still in syndication. “The Adventures of Lois and Clark,” “Smallville” and “Superboy” were other successful television series.

Perhaps the most anticipated venture was the first Christopher Reeve movie in 1978, the first of four Superman films he starred in.

The new movie “Man of Steel,” starring Henry Cavill, will be released June 14. There will be a special showing that night at the Capitol Theatre, 1390 West 65th St. Renowned Cleveland artist Derek Hess will give away a poster he created for the event.

Though the latest issue of “Action Comics” would be approaching No. 1,000 if counted in a traditional method, because of restarts and reboots the latest issue is a mere No. 19.

Today’s Superman bears a physical resemblance to the hero created by Siegel and Shuster, but his costume is different — more military-looking and less flamboyant. Though comic history is never lost, it can be “retconned” -- subjected to “retroactive continuity” — so that in the current comics, Superman has been in action for only five years and is as youthful as ever.

Siegel and Shuster stopped providing Superman material around 1948, but Siegel returned to DC and his creation in the mid ‘50s and kept on into the next decade.

Once the floodgates opened in 1938, hundreds of imitators appeared from startup publishers based mostly in New York City.

When word got out that the initial Superman comics were selling in unprecedented numbers, publishers could not create comics fast enough. One, Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, would sometimes surpass Superman offerings with sales of more than a million issues each month. The titans battled for newsstand supremacy until DC sued Fawcett into oblivion in the early 1950s.

The one character from DC Comics who gave Superman competition was his opposite, a character who embraced the dark as much as Superman embraced the light. Batman appeared one year after Superman’s debut.

FITZGERALD’S TAKE

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald can’t say he is a huge fan of Superman, but he read a few of the comics when he was growing up. He recognizes that Cleveland is in the unique position to boast that it is the birthplace of perhaps the most recognizable character in the world.

“It’s this incredible, iconic, American brand and symbol,” he said. “The fact that it came out of Cleveland is something special that we should be proud of. The whole history of how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came out of nowhere to do this is such a Cleveland story, an American story.

“I don’t think Cleveland has done enough to let people know that Superman was created here,” he said.

AIRPORT SUPERMAN CENTER

A Superman welcoming center that opened in October at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is a step in the right direction toward making Superman a bigger part of the city. And there is some other light on the horizon that many hope will be the glow of Kryptonite.

“Positively Cleveland is talking about relaunching the city’s brand,” FitzGerald said. “Right now the city is known for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and its sports teams. There should be a way to incorporate Superman into that.”

Positively Cleveland, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, brought together the people who later became the nucleus of the nonprofit Siegel and Shuster Society, formed to honor Superman and his creators. The group’s early meetings took place at the agency’s office.

But when a former member of the Superman group spoke out against the society, Positively Cleveland quietly backed out of the picture and has done little to promote Cleveland as the real-world Krypton.

There is no listing of Superman in agency brochures. There is a mention on its website, but it’s buried.

Colette Jones, vice-president of marketing, and Lori Hotchkiss, director of communications, said that will change.

They said they will include information about Superman’s connections to Cleveland on the website and would aggressively promote that Superman is a Clevelander.

“Right now, all we do is give people who come in and ask about Superman a map which shows many of the important sites in the city,” Hotchkiss said. “That was provided to us by Carol and John’s Comics [in Kamm’s Corner]. We also send people to The Plain Dealer for more information.”

Hotchkiss said Superman is difficult to promote because there is no physical place to send people to, like the Rock Hall or the “Christmas Story” house.

“If there were an attraction to refer people to, we would certainly do it,” she said.

Over the decades there has been talk about a Superman museum or statue, but there are two problems with both of those ideas: money and DC Comics.

No one has offered to pay for either project, though there are rumblings of a movement for a statue.

Because a museum or a statue would include the likeness of Superman, the owners of that likeness must sign off.

DC Comics and parent company Time-Warner are diligent about granting such licenses because Superman’s image must be kept pure.

There is one Superman museum, located in the southern Illinois river town of Metropolis.

‘Superman Day’

This week, though, Superman will be honored in Cleveland. Mayor Frank Jackson will declare Thursday “Superman Day” in a 1 p.m. ceremony at City Hall.

While Jackson said he was not a comic book aficionado in his youth, he said he is a fan of Superman and recognizes the value of the Man of Steel to the city.

“A lot of important people came from Cleveland, including Garrett Morgan [whose inventions included the traffic signal] and Olympic athlete Jesse Owens,” he said. “Superman, invented by two young men in Glenville, is right up there and is important to the city.”

The mayor said he did not know why previous administrations did not do more to recognize the superhero’s role in Cleveland. He said he hopes to change that.

“The exhibit at the airport is a good start,” he said. “We want people coming into the city to be aware that Superman was born here.”

Laura Siegel plans to be in Cleveland on Thursday to share in the honor and remind people about her father’s intention to create a human superman.

“My father identified with Clark Kent, who was mild-mannered on the outside and had unseen strengths within,” she said.

“The true genius of Superman is both his dual identity and his compassion for the human race. He chose to use his unsurpassed powers for the good of mankind, usually for people he didn’t know. He longed to be human and even masqueraded as Clark so he could walk among us and feel what it was like to be of this planet.

“I hope the world will join me in remembering my dad, Jerry Siegel, his artist partner Joe Shuster and my mother, Joanne Siegel — the original model for Lois Lane — as we all celebrate 75 years of the adventure, inspiration and fun we’ve had because of Superman.”