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Summary
Summary
The first full-fledged history not just of the Man of Steel but of the creators, designers, owners, and performers who made him the icon he is today, from the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy
"A story as American as Superman himself."-- The Washington Post
Legions of fans from Boston to Buenos Aires can recite the story of the child born Kal-El, scion of the doomed planet Krypton, who was rocketed to Earth as an infant, raised by humble Kansas farmers, and rechristened Clark Kent. Known to law-abiders and evildoers alike as Superman, he was destined to become the invincible champion of all that is good and just--and a star in every medium from comic books and comic strips to radio, TV, and film.
But behind the high-flying legend lies a true-to-life saga every bit as compelling, one that begins not in the far reaches of outer space but in the middle of America's heartland. During the depths of the Great Depression, Jerry Siegel was a shy, awkward teenager in Cleveland. Raised on adventure tales and robbed of his father at a young age, Jerry dreamed of a hero for a boy and a world that desperately needed one. Together with neighborhood chum and kindred spirit Joe Shuster, young Siegel conjured a human-sized god who was everything his creators yearned to be: handsome, stalwart, and brave, able to protect the innocent, punish the wicked, save the day, and win the girl. It was on Superman's muscle-bound back that the comic book and the very idea of the superhero took flight.
Tye chronicles the adventures of the men and women who kept Siegel and Shuster's "Man of Tomorrow" aloft and vitally alive through seven decades and counting. Here are the savvy publishers and visionary writers and artists of comics' Golden Age who ushered the red-and-blue-clad titan through changing eras and evolving incarnations; and the actors--including George Reeves and Christopher Reeve--who brought the Man of Steel to life on screen, only to succumb themselves to all-too-human tragedy in the mortal world. Here too is the poignant and compelling history of Siegel and Shuster's lifelong struggle for the recognition and rewards rightly due to the architects of a genuine cultural phenomenon.
From two-fisted crimebuster to über-patriot, social crusader to spiritual savior, Superman--perhaps like no other mythical character before or since--has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his times and our aspirations. In this deftly realized appreciation, Larry Tye reveals a portrait of America over seventy years through the lens of that otherworldly hero who continues to embody our best selves.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his latest, journalist Tye presents a comprehensive look at all things Superman, charting the history of the famed hero and detailing everything from his creation during the Great Depression by Jewish high school students Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel to his evolution into cultural icon. Along the way Tye touches on Superman as seen in film and on television, the struggles of his creators to gain recognition for their work, and everything in between. Having previously performed several Superman novels, Scott Brick proves a perfect narrator for this audio edition. His reading is clear, compelling, and conversational, and he knows just when to modulate his tone or cadence for emphasis and clarity. Always entertaining, this audiobook is a must for fans of the Man of Steel and anyone interested in comic book history. A Random House hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's Tye's (Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, 2009, etc.) merry, dizzyingly detailed history of America's first and greatest superhero. Superman made his debut in 1938 in Action Comics #1. The brainchild of Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, two young dreamers from the tough Jewish precinct of Cleveland, Superman was an instant hit and remains an American icon. Tye explores the reasons for Superman's enduring popularity by examining the lives of the many people who created and re-created the Man of Steel. Siegel and Shuster soon lost artistic control of their superhero, but others maintained the core of his appeal while changing the details of his image and story to fit the times--a chiseled and invincible image in the 1950s, for instance, then a more nuanced and vulnerable image in the '70s. While he always fought for what was right, what was wrong would change, from fascism to pollution to greedy financiers, and so on. Able to leap from medium to medium in a single bound, Superman was also a marketing goldmine. He starred in a radio show in the '40s (taking on the Ku Klux Klan in the first episodes) and became a movie star in an earlier serial but more significantly in the later films with Christopher Reeve in the starring role. Superman conquered television in the 1950s, as George Reeves donned the red-and-blue costume, and there has seldom been a period when some sort of Superman TV show has not been on the air. At his best, Tye ably narrates the stories of the many actors, artists and writers who influenced Superman. Occasionally, he offers details only true devotees will care about or be able to follow--e.g., the ever-changing story of what exactly happened on Superman's home planet of Krypton. Fun, enlightening pop-culture history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With all of the comic-book live-action movie extravaganzas competing for the summertime blockbuster box-office dollar every year, it's not surprising that an in-depth study of the longest-running costumed, caped superhero is also coming to market. Unlike the many fawning fan appreciations that lurk malignantly in the stacks, Tye's accessible work is more than worth reading for the historical content. Tye not only considers the non-comic-book manifestations of the Man of Steel but he also delves into the behind-the-scenes drama that saw creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster quickly relieved of their creative rights to the character they created. He also mentions other fictional characters from which Siegel and Schuster borrowed attributes in the creation of Superman. For instance, Doc Savage lent Superman some of his best stuff, like his formal first name, Clark, which was in itself a nod to film star Clark Gable. Savage also had superhuman strength and a moral compass, attributes strongly identified with Superman. More in-depth, perhaps darker than most comic-book histories, this is the best addition to the Superman literature in some time and should be of great interest to collections with a strong commitment to comic books and graphic novels.--McKulski, Kristen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"SUPERMAN!" gasps Lois Lane, freshly scooped from beneath the nodding carbines of a South American firing squad. "Right!" says the boxy blue-and-red figure who holds her in his arms. "And still playing the role of gallant rescuer!" His mouth is set in a kind of grimace, but with dimples. Is he frowning? Tautly grinning? And what can he mean by "still playing the role"? This is only the second Superman comic ever, from July 1938, and already our hero - caped and airborne, with Lois coiled against his unbreachable bosom - is carrying a freight of superirony. Then again, as we learn from "Superman," Larry Tye's exhaustive and engaging book, irony attends every phase of this story. Superman's creators - Jerry Siegel (writing) and Joe Shuster (drawing) - were a pair of Cleveland geeks whose underdoggery was purer almost than the alpha-male prowess of the pulp heroes they adored: Tarzan, Hugo Danner, Clark (Doc) Savage Jr. and so on. Both the sons of immigrant Jewish tailors, Siegel and Shuster were uncool, and they were girl-less. They had no money. Shuster, the artist, was horribly nearsighted. And how they toiled, through lost nights of teenagedom, at their secret weapon: their madeup ultrabeing, their hero to out-hero them all. First, in a misfire, he was naughty (a mind-reading tramp called "the SuperMan"), then he was good. Then very good. At last, on what Tye calls "a hot summer night of divinelike inspiration," it happened: the elements fused, and the 19-year-old Siegel, scribbling madly in his bathroom, came up with the doomed planet Krypton, Lois Lane, Clark Kent the mild-mannered reporter. . . . Four years later, after many rejections, the boys finally got a Superman comic onto the newsstands: Action Comics No. 1, June 1938. The comics writer Grant Morrison, in his 2011 book "Supergods," describes the cover image as looking "like a cave painting waiting to be discovered on a subway wall 10,000 years from now." Superman, his body flexed with a terrible rectitude, is hoisting a car over his head and crushing its front end against a boulder. In the foreground a man flees wildly, "clutching his head," as Morrison observes, "like Edvard Munch's Screamer, his face a cartoon of gibbering existential terror." And no wonder: this Superman is dynamically angry, an avatar of decency outraged, bashing through doors and tossing goons over the treetops. "Don't get tough!" growls an interrupted wife beater. Says Superman: "Tough is putting mildly the treatment you're going to get! You're not fighting a woman, now!" Equally potent are the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" shenanigans of poor Clark Kent, his alter ego, heartily scorned by Lois. Sad, really, that this magnificent and double-natured figure had already been sold, rights, image and all, to the publishers of Action Comics for $130 - a deal that Tye, with hyperbole worthy of a Golden Age comics editor, calls the "original sin" of the comics industry and "a swindle on the order of the Dutch West India Company's 1626 purchase of Manhattan from the natives for $24." (In "Supergods," Morrison takes a soberer view: "Superman was a foot in the door.... I'd suspect that both Siegel and Shuster imagined they'd create other, better characters.") AND so he was launched - not flying yet, still leaping in eighths of a mile, but with the wind beneath his cape. He proliferated and diversified into different lines of comic books. A slow and fantastical increase in powers was witnessed, as the collective reader-mind became absorbed in his possibilities. Tye (whose previous books include a biography of Satchel Paige) is very good on this, on the steady daydreamlike magnification of Superness: "His million-decibel yell had enough intensity and pitch to topple tall buildings. What if a building fell on him? A tickle at most. His nostrils were super-acute. His typing was super-fast. ... His gaze was intense enough to hypnotize a whole tribe of South American Indians at once. He could converse with a mermaid in her native tongue and beat a checkers expert his first time playing." He was a champion of the oppressed, and his values were solidly New Deal - he took down slumlords, arms dealers and random unincorporated bullies. In real-world court he successfully faced first Wonder Man and then Captain Marvel ("the World's Mightiest Mortal"), charging them with being Superman knockoffs. But he was a lonely, lonely man-god. Was he even a real superhero? On his native Krypton (now destroyed) he would have been normal, after all: it was only Earth's "slighter gravity pull" that gave him his superstrength. And Lois might dote upon the all-conquering Superman, but she despised Clark Kent. Was there anyone out there who cquld love them both - love him, that is, in the totality of his being? Displaced religiosity swirled, still swirls, around him. He is Christlike in his virtue and singularity. He is also, according to Tye, Jewish, from his Judaicsounding real name, Kal-El, to the Moses-on-the-Nile echoes of his infantile voyage to Earth. Tye diagnoses Superman's "lingering heartsickness" as "survivor's guilt" and adds, "A last rule of thumb: When a name ends in 'man,' the bearer is Jewish, a superhero or both." Tye's account of Superman's 1946 run-in with the Ku Klux Klan is slightly muffled, perhaps because it has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. (The radio show "Adventures of Superman" took on the Klan in a 16-episode series called "Clan of the Fiery Cross.") But he makes up for it with a sizzling portrait of the extraordinary Mort Weisinger, a brutal, obese bottomliner who was also, in a crowning Supermanic irony, the franchise's most fabulous and poetic editor. When Weisinger fired a well-respected artist in 1966, and said artist then asked if he'd heard right, Weisinger said, "Do you need a kick in the stomach to know when you're not wanted?" And yet it was the Weisinger years that gave us Brainiac, Bizarro, the full terror of kryptonite, a gorgeous, pulsing sprawl of Superman mythology. "He divined a fairy-tale universe," Tye writes, "with its own laws of nature." For me the story lessens in excitement the closer it gets to the present: the predictably gritty reboots of the comic book, the megabucks '70s and '80s movies. As a reading experience, this all represents a bit of a petering-out. It's in the middle of Tye's book, in the thick of it, that you find the luscious old-school moments - as when George Reeves, less than thrilled to be TV's first Superman, introduces himself to Phyllis Coates, the new Lois Lane, and says, "Well, babe, this is it: the bottom of the barrel." He's quite wrong, of course: Superman will be 75 next year, and his barrel is apparently bottomless. Mighty, solitary, wearing his underpants on the outside as if in an endless anxiety dream, he flies on. Lois and Clark: George Reeves and Phyllis Coates starred in the 1950s television series "Adventures of Superman." James Parker writes the Entertainment column for The Atlantic.
Library Journal Review
Tye (Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend) presents the definitive history of Superman. Though much has been written about the Man of Steel, no book has dealt with so many aspects of the character through time. This is a compelling history of how Superman's nerdy teenage creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made the character the figure we know, how Action Comics brought him to life, and how Superman ultimately became a comic book, radio, television, film, and merchandising juggernaut. Readers learn Superman's religious affiliation and see how his attributes, plot lines, and enemies have morphed to suit each era in which he has existed. Tye also discusses how those associated with Superman suffered misfortune with uncanny regularity under the "Superman Curse." Ultimately, readers gain an understanding of how the character was brought to life and how numerous individuals and organizations have shaped his fate over the decades. VERDICT Tye is an excellent storyteller, and this work is thoroughly researched. The result is a rich history full of lively heroes and villains-much like a comic book. Essential for Superman fans and popular culture historians.-Elizabeth Winter, Georgia Inst. of Tech. Lib., Atlanta (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.