By Chris Oakley

For generations, Superman has been as much a part of the American landscape as the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon. His square- jawed features have graced magazine and book covers, newspaper pages, movie and TV screens, Broadway theaters, game boards, websites, and even (thanks to tattoo parlors) the biceps of at least one NBA star. So it’s a bit ironic to recall that this all-American icon originally sprang from the mind of a Frenchman, Jules Verne...

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Verne was already a fairly well-established figure in literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic by the time he created the Superman character, and after his first Superman book he would be the most famous French author of his generation. As Verne himself recalled in a newspaper interview twenty years after the fact, the original basic concept for Superman came to him one night in June of 1873, when he awoke from a vivid dream in which he’d seen a uniformed man flying high above Paris at blinding speed; he spent four hours dashing off a short story based on that dream and showed to a friend the next morning. The friend urged him to expand it to book length, and a week later Verne began work on his first draft of Man of Steel, the novel that would mark Superman’s debut on the world stage.

Every great hero needs a great villain to play off against, so accordingly when Verne began his second draft of Man of Steel in the fall of 1873 he added a megalomaniacal ex-colonel and science genius named Rex Lothar to the mix. Though neither Steel nor any of its three sequels ever explicitly mentions Lothar’s nationality, most readers and literary scholars believe him to be German; Verne had, after all, been traumatized by his homeland’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and held bitter feelings toward Germany from that time on. Furthermore, in several passages of the Superman books Lothar glowingly praises the German Empire and its Kaiser, Wilhelm I.  Last but not least, the first two Superman books make repeated mention of Lothar’s hideaway being located somewhere in the Black Forest.

Verne completed his final draft of Man of Steel on March 31^st, 1874 and sent it off to his publisher the next day. By early June the first hardcover prints of the book had gone on sale in Paris bookstores; in August, British literary magazines started carrying English-language translations of the first chapters.

Inevitably, word of Verne’s newest creation made it across the Atlantic, and before long American readers were clamoring for Man of Steel to be published in the United States. Their wish came true in January of 1875, when the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown, & Co. printed the first American hardcover editions of Verne’s novel and made them available for sale at bookstores in Boston, New York, and Hartford. By then Verne, responding to both popular demand and the insistent urgings of his own muse, had started writing the first draft of the book’s sequel, Lothar’s Vengeance. And it wasn’t long before Superman started catching on in other parts of Europe; by the time Verne sent the final draft of Vengeance off to his publisher in early November of 1875, Man of Steel had been translated into Italian and Spanish and a Portugese edition was going to press.

Even in Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm I had denounced the book as a patent slander of his army’s officer corps, readers were thrilling to the Man of Steel’s heroics; so-called "Superman clubs" were formed in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart for fans of the Superman books to discuss the hero’s exploits and enact their favorite scenes from Man of Steel or Lothar’s Vengeance. Polish independence advocates adopted Superman’s confrontations with Lothar as a metaphor for their own struggle to break away from the Russian empire.

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Yet it was in America that the Superman books would enjoy their greatest popularity. As had happened in Germany, devotees of Man of Steel and its sequels formed Superman clubs to share their passion with like-minded people; the first such club in the United States was organized in San Francisco in March of 1876, just over six months before Verne began writing the first draft of his third Superman book, The Phantom Jail.

By the time of Custer’s Last Stand, there were already 40 such clubs in America. Indeed, Custer himself had applied to join one back in his home state of Ohio and was awaiting their reply when he set out for his ill-fated attack on the Lakota.(The club membership committee was still considering his application when they received word of what had happened at Little Big Horn.)

Custer was not the only prominent American of that era to take avid interest in the Man of Steel; inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison both relaxed from their grueling labors in the lab by reading excerpts of the Superman books, and legendary Western lawman Wyatt Earp took a copy of Lothar’s Vengeance with him when he became sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona. Famed baseball slugger Cap Anson tucked a picture of Superman inside his uniform shirt whenever he came up to bat, thinking it was a lucky charm.¹ Even anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman once privately confessed to having a soft spot for the flying crusader.

But perhaps the most devoted celebrity Superman buff in America was showman P.T. Barnum, who in October of 1876 secured the rights to produce a theatrical version of Man of Steel in New York City. "I’ll make them believe men can fly!" he boasted to a friend, and spent a huge sum of his own fortune trying to make good on that boast. But for once the great impresario’s instincts turned out to be wrong-- his genius at staging circus spectacles didn’t necessarily translate into success in conventional theater, and his adaptation of Man of Steel closed after just four weeks. That failure may have had something to do with the subsequent lackluster sales of The Phantom Jail in the United States when the American edition was published in August of 1877.

Undaunted by his New York failure, Barnum went back to the drawing board and retooled his show, and in the spring of 1878 his adaptation of Steel embarked on a second and more successful theatrical run in London. Meanwhile, Verne was in the midst of writing the first draft for his fourth and final Superman novel, The Doomsday Battle. This was the hardest of all the Superman books for Verne to write for many reasons, not the least of which was that Verne had long ago made the decision to kill off his beloved character at the end of the story. It would take him more than three years to finish the book, and when the finished product began making its way to bookstores around the world in September of 1881 it touched off a massive outcry among readers everywhere.

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For a while, Verne found it necessary to drop out of sight to avoid the wrath of Superman devotees who were incensed with him for having had the gall to kill their favorite character. Following a path that would later be trod by fellow Frenchman Paul Gauguin, Verne fled Paris to enjoy a respite from the controversy in the tranquil islands of French Polynesia. He would spend over two years there, waiting for the brouhaha over the Man of Steel’s demise to fade away.

But when he returned to Paris in February of 1884, he found that the controversy hadn’t faded much at all. Indeed in some quarters it had actually intensified; at one point, the noted author took to carrying a revolver to defend himself against those who might seek to vent their displeasure by physically attacking him. While there is no record of him actually using that revolver, one can imagine him being thankful for its presence.²

Not that the flap hurt the book’s sales any; Doomsday, in fact, became the most financially successful book of the entire series. And for every person who condemned Verne’s decision to terminate his character, there were an equal number who applauded it, saying the Man of Steel’s self-sacrifice in the final pages of Doomsday provided an uplifting way to close out the series. Among them was a member of the San Francisco Superman club who would one day become a famous author in his own right, Jack London.

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Interestingly enough, Doomsday also helped spawn the first examples of a phenomenon most people more commonly associate with our modern Internet culture. Superman buffs who disagreed with Verne’s decision to do away with the Man of Steel and wanted to find an artistic outlet for their frustrations began turning out short stories in which the hero miraculously survived his final showdown with Rex Lothar and went on to bring other evildoers to their knees; these tales are regarded by most scholars of pop culture as the forefathers of today’s "fan fiction" stories. With copyright laws being somewhat less stringent in Verne’s time than they are today, there was little danger of legal trouble befalling the authors of these stories-- indeed, Verne himself secretly became an avid reader of them in the final years of his life.

At the time of his death in 1905, Verne had completed the first draft of a book tentatively titled The Rebirth. Written in reaction to nearly two decades’ worth of reader pleas to revive the Superman character, the unpublished manuscript envisioned an almost Christ-like resurrection for the slain hero followed by a struggle with a new foe who, like the Man of Steel, was survivor of the hero’s long-vanished home planet. With Verne’s passing, however, the manuscript was locked away in a trunk, where it would remain for almost seventy years.

But there was hardly any shortage of people to carry the Man of Steel’s mantle after Verne was gone; in 1907, he graced movie screens for the first time in a 21-minute silent short directed by cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith. The movie played to packed houses everywhere  it went, and soon people began to call for a longer Superman film to be made.

P.T. Barnum’s theatrical version of Man of Steel was revived on Broadway in 1912 by another legendary show business impresario, Flo Ziegfeld. After a wildly successful three-month run at the Shubert Theater, the play went on tour across the United States and Canada, playing to packed houses in most of the cities where it was staged. From there it went on to become a hit in Europe; by November of 1913 it had played in nearly every major European city from Glasgow to Zurich, and plans were made to hold a special performance of Steel in Vienna for the Austrian royal family. However, World War I would intervene to put a halt to those plans....

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In Hollywood, meanwhile, work on a feature-length film version of the Superman legend continued steadily; Cecil B. DeMille, who would later gain fame for his two cinematic epics adapted from the Ten Commandments, was sparing no expense to make his version of Man of Steel a box office smash-- and he had enlisted celebrated movie swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to put the finishing touch on his masterpiece.

DeMille’s screen version of Steel finally opened on March 3^rd, 1919 in New York City. It played to a sold-out house whose audience included not only many of DeMille’s peers in the film industry but also a number of prominent figures from other fields; among those in the front row that night were then-mayor James Walker and future mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, opera star Enrico Caruso, baseball hero George Herman "Babe" Ruth, and writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Audiences and critics alike were almost unanimous in their praise of the movie, and it went on to become the highest-grossing film of its day; in fact, DeMille’s Steel set box office records that would stand until MGM released Gone With The Wind 20 years later.

In 1926 Germany’s Fritz Lang left his own cinematic mark on the Superman legend with Metropolis, an expressionistic film that made the Man of Steel’s hometown almost as much of a major character as the Man of Steel himself. Its leading man, Emil Jannings, would receive the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences first-ever Best Actor Oscar the following spring. That, and the fact that Metropolis was the first Superman script not directly based on Verne’s novels, made it stand out among the countless cinematic and stage portrayals of the great hero.

Lang had hoped to make a sequel, but the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazi Party derailed those plans; he was eventually forced to flee to America, leaving his proposed second Superman script behind in the process.³ Not until the late 1940s would Lang once again have the opportunity to put his vision of the Man of Steel up on the silver screen....

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1933 saw the Man of Steel take his extraordinary saga into yet another entertainment medium. An American newspaper syndicate tapped a pair of aspiring cartoonists from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, to draw a serialized weekly comic strip based on the Superman books. It was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up; the previous year they had tried to interest comic book publishers in a concept for a series based on a team of superheroes they called "the X-Men"⁴ only to be turned down flat by every company they approached. For them, the Superman gig represented a second chance to show their talents to the masses.

Their Superman strip debuted on June 23^rd, 1933 in 50 East Coast newspapers; a month later it would start appearing in the Midwest as well. By September the strip was regularly being published in West Coast papers, and in February of 1934 the Man of Steel made his Canadian debut in the comic pages of the Toronto Globe and Mail. Its creators received an average of between 10,000 and 15,000 letters a week from fans dazzled by Siegel and Shuster’s rendering of the Superman saga, some of whom were first-time comic strip readers. It was clear before too long that Siegel and Shuster had a bona fide hit on their hands....

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With the success of the Superman comic strip, it wasn’t long before talk began circulating in Hollywood of once again putting the Man of Steel on film. This time, it would be 1932 Olympic swimming champion and matinee serial action star Buster Crabbe who donned the red cape and blue uniform of Verne’s legendary flying hero. Crabbe, an avid Superman reader since the age of ten, looked forward to both the chance to portray his favorite character onscreen and the opportunity to leap from his usual serial gigs to a full-length feature film.

The vehicle for his leap, an updated version of Man of Steel set in modern-day San Francisco, would put him opposite legendary actor- director Erich von Stroheim as a Nazified Rex Lothar; the project was co-directed by Stroheim with fellow cinema veteran Victor Fleming, who had previously scored at the box office with the children’s fantasy Babes In Toyland and would later hit box office gold with his screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s book Gone With The Wind.

It was a bit of a miracle that the Stroheim-Fleming directorial team didn’t self-destruct in the first week of filming; Stroheim and Fleming were both driven personalities, and Stroheim in particular was a perfectionist who insisted on the utmost realism in his casts’ performance. At least twice during principal photography and once in post-production Stroheim and Fleming came dangerously close to getting violent with each other, and Fleming actually did get in a fistfight with one of the special effects engineers over an improperly done sound effect.

But luck was with them, and on Easter weekend 1937 Universal Pictures’ adaptation of Man of Steel-- retitled Superman vs. the Iron Horde so it wouldn’t get confused with the 1919 version --started its maiden US theatrical run. School vacation matinee showings helped the movie pick up steam after a sluggish start, and by the time its first US run ended in mid-June it had become the third-highest grossing film of the 1930s.

One month later the publisher we know today as DC Comics printed the debut issue of a monthly Superman magazine that expanded on the adventures Siegel and Shuster drew for their weekly newspaper strip. The magazine also marked the debut of a masked avenger who combined elements of the Man of Steel, Thomas Edison, Zorro, Sherlock Holmes, and even John D. Rockefeller; dubbed "the Batman" because of his bat- like disguise, the new crimefighter would turn out to be the match that lit the fuse for an explosion in the growth of the superhero phenomenon.

In September of 1937 Siegel and Shuster’s X-Men comic strip finally made it into the funnies pages of American newspapers; that same month mystery writer Dashiell Hammett published his classic short story "The Fastest Man Alive", a nail-biting thriller about a federal agent who became endowed with super-speed after being accidentally exposed to a strange mixture of chemicals. By the spring of 1938, science fiction magazines were regaling their readers with such serial adventures as "The Green Lantern", a rollicking if somewhat melodramatic saga of an intergalactic cop who busted criminals of the future using a special energy ring; "The Incredible Hulk", a tragic mutant monster story that predicted the toll of atomic radiation on the human body seven years before Hiroshima; and "The Punisher", a shoot-‘em-up about a reformed gangster-turned-private detective who matched wits with mad scientists and killer robots. Chester Gould, who had first staked his claim to comics success with the crime strip Dick Tracy, hit paydirt again in August of 1938 with a weekly newspaper serial called ‘Spider-Man’ that focused on the exploits of a college photography student who gained enhanced physical and mental capabilities after being bitten by a cosmic ray-mutated spider.

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A few months after Spider-Man’s debut, two new superheroes inspired by Greco-Roman mythology joined the ranks of comic book crimefighters; DC’s main rival at the time, Fawcett Publishing, introduced Captain Marvel, the superpowered alter ego of a shy teenaged radio station intern, while DC itself countered with Xena the Amazing Amazon, the saga of an archeologist who unbeknownst to most of her peers was the reincarnation of an ancient warrior queen and used her ancestor’s suit of armor to battle the underworld.

Even Ernest Hemingway got into the superhero game, publishing the novella Captain America in March of 1939; Captain America gripped millions of readers in the US with its wrenching but ultimately triumphant story of a medical experiment volunteer who dedicated his life to combating evil after being injected with an experimental strength-enhancing serum.

But it was still Superman who set the bar for the superhero genre, and in June of 1939 a 14-chapter serial titled Superman vs. Metallico began packing matinee houses all over North America. Character actor J. Carroll Naish portrayed the title villain, an embittered ex-soldier transformed by a lab accident into a metal monster bent on destroying not only the Man of Steel but all of humanity. Naish’s performance as Metallico was highly believable, perhaps too believable; by the time the final chapters were filmed Naish was receiving 300 hate letters a day and LAPD detectives had to guard him to protect him from physical assault.

In any case, Naish’s make-believe villainy would soon be eclipsed by the all-too-real evildoing of Adolf Hitler: eleven days after the final chapter of Superman vs. Metallico was distributed to theaters, the Nazi juggernaut invaded Poland, touching off the Second World War.

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As Kaiser Wilhelm I had done when Jules Verne first published Man of Steel, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels denounced Superman as an intentional slight of the German soldier’s honor. Indeed, according to Goebbels that was the least of the Man of Steel’s sins; harping on the fact that Verne was French and Siegel & Shuster, the artists who drew the Superman comic strip, were both Jewish, the propaganda boss branded the Man of Steel a symbol of the depravity and hatred of the Third Reich’s enemies.

Not that Siegel and Shuster were all that distressed about being deemed persona non grata with the Hitler regime; on the contrary, they took huge pride in the anti-Nazi storylines they spun out for their readers. One particularly gratifying moment in their careers came in February of 1940 when a letter was forwarded to them from a London reader by the British embassy in Washington praising the Superman comic strip as "a wonderful tonic for the imagination and a richly deserved thumb in Hitler’s eye." The reader was then-Lord of the Admiralty and soon-to-be-prime minister Winston Churchill, who had been getting copies of the strip from a comics buff at the British consulate in New York.

When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made the United States an official combatant in the Second World War, the Man of Steel was quickly drafted into the war effort. The US government commissioned a series of posters featuring Superman that variously promoted causes like saving for war bonds, donating scrap metal or rubber for the war effort, and registering for the draft. In both their weekly strip and their monthly magazine, Siegel and Shuster now stressed patriotic themes in their storylines; the supercriminals and gang bosses who had been Superman’s main adversaries in the early days of his comic career gave way to Nazi saboteurs and Japanese warlords.⁵

Superman’s diamond-S logo was adopted by resistance movements throughout occupied Europe as a companion to the "V for Victory" graffiti symbols chalked on walls and streets in defiance of the Nazi occupation armies. When Buster Crabbe made his second silver screen appearance as the Man of Steel in the 1943 film Superman Goes To Mars, a third of the movie’s profits were donated to the Allied war effort. As American troops advanced through western Europe following the D-Day invasion, they left behind copies of the Superman magazine that were eagerly snatched up by French, Belgian, Dutch, and Italian kids, some of whom had never seen a comic book before in their lives until then.

As the wartime partnership between the West and the Soviet Union dissolved into the acrimony of the early days of the Cold War, the Man of Steel’s oldest and most diabolical adversary underwent another transformation in his identity. When the first Superman TV series made its debut in 1951, Rex Lothar was reincarnated as a Communist spy chief who was obsessed with destroying the super-powered adversary he viewed as the ultimate symbol of capitalist America. But as had been the case with his previous selves, the Cold War-era Lothar invariably came out on the losing end of his confrontations with Superman. The actor who portrayed the Man of Steel in the series wasn’t quite so lucky in facing his real life personal demons: George Reeves was killed under highly suspicious circumstances three years after the series ended its original broadcast run.

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From the time the original Superman TV show went off the air until the late 1960s, the Man of Steel was largely the province of Saturday morning cartoons and comic book shops, and some of his fans worried that Verne’s legendary superhuman sentinel might soon be in danger of losing his resonance with older readers. But in the early 1970s three major events happened that revived his true legacy as a hero for all ages. The first happened in 1971, when Warner Brothers released its cinematic adaptation of The Doomsday Battle; featuring former TV star Richard Chamberlain as the Man of Steel and depicting some of the most intense battle sequences moviegoers had ever seen, the movie touched several responsive chords in a nation traumatized by a decade of assassinations and social unrest and the bloodshed of a six-year-long war in Vietnam.

The second event came a year later with the publication of Strange Visitor, an anthology of short stories and essays about Superman by well-known authors from around the world. The pieces ranged from the scholarly (a meditation by Isaac Asimov on the notion of Superman as Christ figure) to the poignant (a "lion in winter" story by Herman Wouk portraying a much older Superman trying to cope with the fact of outliving both his friends and his enemies) to the satirical (a cynical riff by Truman Capote on Superman’s relationship with his adopted homeworld) to the just plain bizarre (a stream-of-consciousness offering by Hunter S. Thompson in which the notorious gonzo reporter fantasized a late-night conversation between himself and the Man of Steel in a Tijuana gin joint).

But the third and most important event didn’t happen until 1974, when Jules Verne’s first draft of The Rebirth finally saw the light of day after being lost for decades. Author Ray Bradbury took on the job of polishing the manuscript up for publication, and he would succeed brilliantly in his task; when the finished version of Rebirth finally hit bookshelves in the spring of 1977, it was a worldwide sensation, spending thirteen months on the New York Times bestseller list (holding the #1 ranking for five of those months).

The late ‘70s and early ‘80s saw the Superman revival continue with a four-issue DC miniseries based on The Rebirth; a Francis Ford Coppola-directed remake of Man of Steel; the release of the original Cecil B. DeMille version on home video; and the commissioning by the Verne estate of a sequel to Rebirth. In the next decade, two new Superman TV series, one a new animated show and the other a romance- oriented syndicated live-action series, turned Generation X viewers on to the legend of the Man of Steel.

Just in time for the 130^th anniversary of the first publication of Man of Steel, Warner Brothers released a movie adaptation of The Rebirth as part of a planned five-movie franchise series adapted from Verne’s original manuscripts. Judging by the huge crowds that turned out to see the film, and the interest surrounding its projected sequels, it’s clear that time hasn’t done anything to diminish the hold Verne’s character took on the world’s imagination back in the 1870s.

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