Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman | Hacker News Reader

Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman

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81 pointssamclemens77 comments

This story, in part, is the inspiration for the book "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", which I would highly recommend!

Came to say the same thing, excellent book, highly recommended.

> This Superman was pure, doing good in the world for goodness’ sake, not for rewards or recognition.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Superman so much. There's a place for characters like Batman, the Spectre, and Constantine, but sometimes, I just want the lighter aspect that Superman brings.

Unfortunately it typically results in a boring story, since you know the all powerful being is going to win and get awarded for saving the city with little personal conflict involved, besides by having to choose between saving the damsel in distress or saving the city (which is nullified when you consider his ability to go super-speed/freeze time). The most that can come from these stories is a villain that has a unique madness, or uses unique methods to achieve their goals.

I once read an interesting article from a comic book writer arguing that villains are inherently more interesting than heroes - because villains plan, build, and create, and can do so for any of infinite motivations, whereas a hero typically just reacts to things a villain has done, and does so for basically the same reasons as any other hero.

I can't find the source or remember the author unfortunately..

I saw the same take in other contexts, and it made a lot of sense.

Basically, heroes having superpowers is the core of the issue: they are by definition above everyone else, and are in a position to topple the world order to push their objectives.

Assuming they want to make the world a better place, they’d probably succeed in being a kind of messia, and if they can reach their goal the story ends and the franchise is done (alternatively new heroes are born within the same franchise, but it’s another line)

Assuming they want to fix the world in a way that is problematic, or are straight evil from the start, they’ll fit in the villains slot.

In the end, the only path for overpowered heroes keep a series going on is for them to keep the status quo eternally. It can be explicited or the series might just never progress towards its end goal, but that’s a basic necessity for a superhero series to have any longevity.

The interesting side effect of that is, these heroes will often live in deeply flawed societies with rampant crime and/or inegalities, villains will usually have a back story justifying their anger but extreme means to solve it, and the heroes will still be there to stop that villain but neatly keep that rotten status quo.

I kind of see the group that Doctor Strange is a part of as planning, building, and creating an organization dedicated to protecting Earth from invasion.

A lot of heroes are basically shown as superpowered police officers. Which is obviously a reactive job (outside of PSAs, community watch, and other such things). Militaries are more creative and active, and less reactive, so the heroes in military-like (or war-like) settings are more like the villians, only for good or order.

Modern superheroes overwhelmingly protect the status quo, villains challenge it and the only way the writers can make them obligatorily evil is have them kill people for no reason. Try noticing it, a lot of villains are really quite admirable apart from random, illogical, shoehorned-in violence.

I’ve heard many actors say this too.

And if you play D&D or various RPGs you might also discover that the “evil” characters have so much more potential for interesting storytelling.

Sturm Brightblade had a very interesting character arc in the extended Dragonlance Chronicles. It can be done if you really try.

In general, there's a device to sketch out a compelling villain; Take your hero with all its motivations and remove the moral compass.

I've always defended the much-disliked fake Mandarin character from Iron Man 3, Trevor Slattery, on the basis that he is basically the man Tony Stark would've been were it not for the latter's genius and indomitable will. Both characters share the same vices: women, booze, and a vastly overinflated ego, but Slattery is weak and allows himself to be pushed around by greater, sinister forces. Whereas Stark not only refuses to be pushed around, but he does have that inner moral compass, even if ruthlessly following his own ethics leads to trouble (that whole Ultron initiative, for instance).

The "moral compass" usually being "is portrayed favourably" vs "is not portrayed favourably", while doing basically the same actions.

as in no hesitation towards their goals.

I've been listening to the companion podcast to The Last Of Us and the theme of the show was basically described as asking the question "What's the most terrible thing you would do for love?"

The show gets around the thing your describing by having almost everyone technically be the villain and justifying their villainy in any number of ways.

Lex Luther had my interest when he claimed to be able to turn a sand pile into an atomic pile while in prison. LL was always my favorite villain.

I would disagree on the whole. I assume most stories – film, video games, television, comics, literature, etc. – end with the protagonist victorious in some way. I care more about the journey, and Superman stories take me on enjoyable (and many times, emotional) journey's for the most part.

At the risk of my recommendation itself being a spoiler, I can recommend the movie “Fallen” with Denzel Washington.

An excellent film.

This is why I only read comics or graphic novels with a single story line that ends. Greed renders superhero comics meaningless. Publishers don't want to stop making money from these characters, which means they can't stop telling stories, which means events in the plot sooner or later are undone and have no impact on future events. Why should I give a shit if Robin gets killed by a space alien if he's going to be resurrected, or time travel will undo it, or the comic jumps timelines, or the comic is simply rebooted? It reduces the stakes and the drama to zero.

If you were to tell publishers "you've got five years and after that you can never use any of these characters ever again" those would be some incredible comics worth reading!

I had always assumed that "Superman" had been intended to be a parody or response to Nietzsche's eponymous concept, albeit only having managed to be a superficial, weak, and ineffective one (and based on a misunderstanding to boot).

To me, the superhero trope represents the new hero in the age of industrial warfare. You need someone with superpowers to make a difference as an individual in the post World War I era given how deadly conflict has gotten. The heros of the Illiad just needed swords.

Actual article title begins with “How”.

Leading how is a linkbait trope and our software removes some of those.

The software isn't perfect by any means but this time it worked fine!

There was a remarkable edge case in the /new queue last week,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713166 ("[How*] Russia Decides to Go Nuclear (foreignaffairs.com)")

A single word establishes the gap between "this is the hypothetical procedure of how a nuclear war would start" and "a nuclear war is starting".

These bot edits can be pretty distracting when they go wrong!

That's true, although "How Russia decides to go nuclear" is linkbait in its own right and includes a (weaker) form of the same confusion.

You really don’t think the intent of the article was changed by this editorial choice? Or are you saying that the intent of the article was linkbait?

I don't think that was the intent of the article. I do think it was the intent of the title—it's a linkbait trope and that's why we edit it in the first place. But even without leading 'how', it's still pretty baity. A better solution would have been to drop it altogether in favor of the subtitle: "Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman". Maybe I'll do that even though it's obviously too late to make much difference.

This is exactly why I wish you and HN would have a lighter hand with title editing. The original title is meaningful and conveys importance from the story, the automated edit makes the original title sound nefarious where it’s not, and your choice to use the subtitle strips all conveyed meaning entirely.

“How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture” isn’t only “baity”, there’s an incredible wealth of context in the title that gets lost if you edit it. Granted your manual edit is less obviously harmful, but it’s definitely not better than the actual title either.

I think it's better because Superman is more specific than American Pop Culture.

People always comment on HN title edits based on the cases that they noticed and disliked. That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. From my point of view, meaningful discussion would have to be about what general rules or practices could improve HN's quality as a whole. For example: leave titles unedited? that would be catastrophic. Edit them differently? if so, how exactly? Edit titles such that no one is ever annoyed by an edit? impossible.

Obviously the way we do it isn't perfect and there are going to be false positives no matter what we do—but I'm not aware of any other approach that would lead to significantly greater front page quality. Quite the opposite actually.

One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. I'm sorry that didn't happen in the case of this title and your complaint—but it usually does work out. If it didn't, title complaints (either about edited titles or unedited ones) would be far more dominant here than they are. That's actually how we learned to do things this way. Community feedback is a pretty rigorous trainer.

> That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on.

I notice them all the time and I don’t remark on them most of that time because I’m trying to observe the posting guidelines and I’m loathe to open up my email client to question each one.

> One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop.

That’s a fair point, but the existing practice of editing titles by default creates a fair bit of this problem and complaining comes with strong incentives to ignore the problem if you disagree with the solution.

I appreciate 99.999% of how you run this community, but this one sticks in my craw a lot because it’s so well designed to confirm built in assumptions and so poorly designed for refinement. But mostly because it’s so hamfisted. Like… you have so many already built in tools for signaling that something is probably low quality without editing anything! Why not just dim the “bait” words, or even only show them to people like me who keep “showdead” on?

I get a lot more from authors’ titles than I get from the externally edited version of them I often see here. So much so that I often click links I don’t even care about just because I suspect their titles are edited and I wonder what they originally said.

I doubt you’ll reach the same conclusion I have (that it’s better just to not edit titles at all), but I hope you can understand that any editorial process for submissions here that alters submitted content makes all of the content suspect to me, and that I’d rather be upset by a published title than have an artificial one instead.

As I said above, not editing titles at all would be catastrophic; this seems rather obvious from a quick look at the rest of the internet. HN's "bookish" (to use pg's old word) front page is the #1 thing that makes HN HN. I'm willing to try to improve it but when you call us hamfisted I feel like you're disrespecting both how hard this problem is and how much attention and care we put into it.

Why are the kid's religious beliefs worth mentioning in this article?

The Jews are a people - an ethnicity, more or less - in addition to a religious group. Not all ethnic Jews are religiously Jewish. It’s worth mentioning because the story of how second-generation Jewish immigrants essentially invented the superhero genre, maybe the most American of genres, is… cool. It’s unexpected and interesting. What do you have against telling that story?

Ougon Bat/The Golden Bat [1] predates Super-man by 8 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bat

The article also mentions the book Gladiator, available from standard ebooks

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-wylie/gladiator

> Gladiator, first published in 1930, tells the story of Hugo Danner, who is given superhuman speed, endurance, strength, and intelligence by his father as an experiment in creating a better human. We follow Hugo throughout his life viewed from his perspective, from childhood, when Hugo first discovers he’s different from others, to adulthood, as Hugo tries to find a positive outlet for his abilities around the time of the first World War.

> Gladiator has been made into a 1938 comedy movie, and is thought to be the inspiration for the Superman comic books—though this has not been confirmed.

@rafram I don't think there is any doubt people who are jewish have had an important cultural influence on US media - Robert Crumb, MAD magazine etc - and some of their cultural background plays a part in that...but the whole idea of the 'new world' USA was assimilation in that '30's era, not celebrating ethnicity and past backgrounds.

'Jewish immigrants essentially invented the superhero genre' is a real stretch in this context. There were plenty of other cultural influences, particularly Japanese, in book and comic form that predate and were major influences on the US golden age of comic book explosion in popularity.

> but the whole idea of the 'new world' USA was assimilation in that '30's era, not celebrating ethnicity and past backgrounds.

Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time. Not as Whites to be assimilated. This is what makes Superman becoming such a large part of pop culture interesting.

And if you think the whole idea of the US at that time was about assimilation, not celebrating ethnicity, look up the "German American Bund" (I'd give you a link but have to restart Firefox).

'Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time'.

I know this is the popular broad stroke concept of between wars American culture but in reality it was a lot more varied. The 'United States' was anything but united in that era. Huge numbers of blacks where migrating north to Chicago to work in manufacturing, different states had very different relationships with ethnicities and religions. NYC was always a very Jewish city for example.

Another example of rejecting assimilation and celebrating other cultures were the German American Bund as you note, with large rallies etc celebrating the German National Socialist movement by German immigrants.

Until the 1920s, something close to 80% of all houses in Chicago were covered by enforceable restrictive covenants preventing Black families from moving in:

https://www.chicagocovenants.com/

(I volunteered for this project, will do so again soon, and recommend it; it's super fascinating, and if you go shoot me an email).

Redlining, the practice of refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominantly Black neighborhoods, continued up through around 1970.

The entire city of Chicago is defined by these apartheid-styled racial boundaries. I live in Oak Park, across Austin Blvd. from an almost totally Black neighborhood; Oak Park exists precisely because it was not redlined, and so wealthy white families could feel comfortable buying homes there. I grew up in Beverly, where a similar border exists at around 90th and Ashland:

https://interactive.wttw.com/firsthand/segregation/mapping-c...

You can look at where all the crime is in Chicago and see a map of C and D-graded tracts today. When Uber first launched here, their service map resembled these maps as well!

And! Lots of infrastructure projects were designed to enforce redlining or to break up political power bases of previously marginalized minorities that were starting to gain power. UIUC and the Dan Ryan were plopped down where they are for those ends.

Why should have anything against telling that story? Are we ok with this flavour of editorialization now?

"XIX Catholic scientist invents pasteurization" - I truly fail to see the "coolness" of it.

The originator of the Big Bang concept is basically always described as a Catholic priest. The juxtaposition between faith and science, compared to the union of the two, makes people think.

This is an interesting part of the story because of the marginalization of Jewish immigrants during that interwar period.

It is a (short) biography which means it is about the life and experiences of the artistst, not just their works.

The article mention how the Jewish cultural background influenced Superman, eg superman arriving like Moses.

But does the article even talk about the religous beliefs of the kids?

There are ethnically Jewish people, and religiously Jewish people. The latter can be by choice, but the former cannot by definition. Siegel and Shuster are ethnically Jewish. As such, their Jewish culture would have been part of their influence in creating the Superman.

A related thought experiment: in Shuster's case, substitude Jewish for Canadian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Shuster

Both work for me, and in the context of how two young men impacted U.S. settler culture, with its profoundly Anglo-Saxon basis, it is entirely valid to identify their cultural, religious, and/or political background.

Others have commented on Jewish ethnicity vs religion, but I would also like to add that this article is about events in the 1930s. Shortly after, the Holocaust[1], an event in history particularly known for the death of millions of Jewish people, took place in the 1940s. Adolf Hitler was appointed in 1933 and there was a buildup to the Holocaust and World War 2, so the context that they were Jewish in the 1930s is pretty significant.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

70 million people died over six years in WWII, the vast majority Russians. 1930's USA has little bearing on European geopolitics and the creation of golden era superman comics.

An animated data-driven documentary about war and peace, The Fallen of World War II looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.

https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU

> Superman, an illegal alien, had come millions of miles not to be featured on the front page of the Daily Star, but to save mankind from itself, its ugly awful self.

Wrong. Superman is not an illegal alien because he does not belong to the human species, and most laws, including immigration law, do not apply to him.

He belongs to a fictional extraterrestrial species, the Kryptonians. To infringe the law under most jurisdictions you first need to be a person, and Superman falls into a legal void due to being a non-human extraterrestrial, and there is no legislation or jurisprudence that establishes a legal framework for them.

We don't have immigration laws for extraterrestrials. And if one of such laws was enacted as a result of his presence, it would not make Superman an illegal immigrant because his "illegal" entry would precede whatever law we create to govern the entry of extraterrestrials, making it ex post facto (laws cannot apply retroactively).

My understanding as a non-lawyer is that legal personhood is not predicated on membership in the human species. It is predicated on whatever precedent has established. And that there are important distinctions made in law between legal persons and natural persons. Which is why even a corporation can be considered as having personhood, and why there has been some controversy as to whether great apes in general have legal personhood.

Both legal personhood and natural personhood are just legal constructs that aren't defined by species except through precedent, which could change at any time. And, of course, membership in the human species in a scientific sense is certainly meaningless legally, as can be seen with abortion law. A fetus is not universally granted personhood rights, despite being a human in terms of genetics and taxonomy.

Slavery is another example where we can clearly see that natural personhood, as defined by the courts, was not synonymous with membership in the human species.

So, whatever unwritten standards are being used to determine personhood by the legal system could very well apply to extraterrestrials, for all we know.

In fact, the very notion of a species didn't exist when these legal concepts were invented. They go back at least to English Common Law, if not Roman Law or Biblical law or earlier.

And today I found out a female donkey was acquitted of bestiality with a human on account of testimonies to her virtuous character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial#Ferron_case

> Jacques Ferron was a Frenchman who was tried and hanged in 1750 for copulation with a jenny (female donkey).[16][17] The trial took place in the commune of Vanves and Ferron was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.[18] In cases such as these it was usual that the animal would also be sentenced to death,[19] but in this case the she-ass was acquitted. The court decided that the animal was a victim and had not participated of her own free will. A document, dated 19 September 1750, was submitted to the court on behalf of the she-ass that attested to the virtuous nature of the animal. Signed by the parish priest and other principal residents of the commune it proclaimed that "they were willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature."[16]

It is still a legal void.

Can an extraterrestrial have legal representation? or represent themselves? If you are not a person you cannot participate in contracts or sign legal documents. It is a complete mess of a situation if you think about it.

And there may be also legal definitions that would have to be revised.

For example, if you enter US territory from space, you technically did not cross any borders, you simply entered American airspace without crossing a border.

If what's penalized is crossing a border, there would be no crime there.

In that case, it's a good thing he's around to stop the non-human villains, since presumably the laws about killing and whatnot wouldn't apply to them either.

Not being a person also means you have no rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial#Historical_animal...

> in ecclesiastical courts the animals were routinely provided with lawyers

Kriptonians are not in the terrestrial Tree of life and are therefore not animals (not part of the kingdom Animalia, which makes you an animal). Therefore animal law would not apply to a Kriptonian due to being a non-animal.

That seems like a mighty big claim to be arguing in an ecclesiastical court. You're saying that God didn't create all life (including Kryptonian life) on the fifth and sixth days? We might have to have a trial for heresy.

Edit to add: I believe from the wikipedia article that ecclesiastical courts would assign lawyers to all defendants, regardless of their nature.

Luckily those courts have no jurisdiction now.

And now you're saying the Vatican is not a sovereign state?! You're digging yourself deeper and deeper 29athrowaway. I fear for your soul.

Superman doesn't live in the Vatican. And if he did, because the crime rate is so low, the plot would be so boring that nobody would have ever bought the comic and nobody would know Superman.

The next best thing to the Vatican: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V5bFcDHjasQ/T_EVGAgszFI/AAAAAAAAA...

> ex post facto (laws cannot apply retroactively)

Funny enough, deportation is regarded as a civil matter and thus the ex post facto clause does not apply here. Nothing in the constitution prevents the U.S. from deporting him to Antarctica. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C3-3-...

Whether or not Superman is illegal or not, he is at least undocumented. And given the historical context and the authors, it's not a stretch to say that Superman is, in part, the story of a refugee trying to make it in America. Which is something than many people described as "illegal immigrants" identity with.

Things have progressed since the 1930s. At this point Superman would be a stateless person, and there are presumably a variety of international treaties that govern how he can be treated.

I also believe that his alter ego, Clark Kent, is documented as an adopted child of the Kents. It would have been much easier back in the day for infants to be recognized as natural born US citizens regardless of whether or not they were as home births were much more frequent, and IDs such as social security numbers weren't automatically given to infants at birth. Given Superman's discovery as a white appearing infant in Kansas, there would be no reason for the government to presume he was not a natural born citizen. And if they did presume this, they'd have to climb a mountain to legally prove it (not being accused of a crime, good luck getting a court to require a DNA test to show that he is a literal alien).

As for Superman the alter ego? How would anyone prove he isn't a US citizen? They don't even know who he is.

Legally, Superman is undistinguishable from an object until granted personhood, or declared something else, like property or an animal.

He was granted personhood with his adoption papers.

If I adopt a cat from a shelter that doesn't make it a person.

You don't get human adoption papers when buying cats from shelters. It's not even an adoption, per se, when it's a cat, we just call it that. Sam I am.

> it would not make Superman an illegal immigrant

It makes it an "illegal immigrant" for the author who's most likely a liberal (as they call it over there in the United States), after all he/she does write for lithub.com, I don't think there are many fans of rolling coal writing for that magazine.

Put into that perspective whatever earns his/her story liberal points is a plus, and reminding the audience how hard a life "illegal aliens" have in the US ("even Superman would have been treated as a illegal alien!") certainly gains the author those points. Bills need to be paid, ideological positions need to be strengthened, it's a constant and never-ending battle.

What is next then? are migrating birds illegal aliens? monarch butterflies? plankton? furbies? tamagotchi? meteorites?

It never ends.

Comments like this are why I love this site.

> laws cannot apply retroactively

In some jurisdictions they certainly can. Even in places which apparently don't allow this, remember we've all got recent experience of how rapidly existing rules and frameworks can be changed if/when the situation demands[0].

The UK's War Crimes Act 1991[1] is one example, and didn't the current US administration once propose capital gains tax changes with a degree of retroactivity? ("Advisors look for ways to lessen Biden’s proposed retroactive capital gains tax hike"[2]).

[0] ... and maybe even when it doesn't :(

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1991/13

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/02/advisors-look-for-ways-to-of...

For the US apparently the following is the operating Supreme Court precedent. Ex post facto criminal laws are banned, but not civil laws.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...

> The Supreme Court has generally rejected ex post facto challenges to laws imposing retroactive tax liability.1 In Kentucky Union Co. v. Kentucky, the Court emphasized that not all retroactive laws are ex post facto, as the prohibition on ex post facto laws applies only to retroactive criminal laws.2 The majority further opined: “Laws of a retroactive nature, imposing taxes or providing remedies for their assessment and collection, and not impairing vested rights, are not forbidden by the Federal Constitution.” 3

So they can't put you in prison directly. But they can levy a tax that's impossible to pay, and then put you in prison for failing to pay taxes...

> So they can't [..]

Umm, having seen what happened over the last three years, and (looking further back) what happened after 9/11, my working hypothesis is that if our elected representatives are placed under enough pressure, then if enough of them act in concert they can rewrite any rules they want to.

No. You'd have to read the full text (fairly short) of the link. Anything involving prison time is effectively a criminal law.

The UK also used the extremely heavy hammer of retroactive legislation against some benefits recipients who were made to work without pay: https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2014/07/08/retrospective-legis...

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