Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 42

Though the Man of Steel draws heavily from a
rich tradition of heroic supermen, from Samson to
Hercules, as well as everything from the circus
strongmen of the time to pulp heroes like Doc
Savage, his most obvious roots lie in the lives and
culture of his two creators.
in adolescent wish fulfilment on the other. Meek and mild Clark Kent would rip
open his shirt to reveal the Superman beneath, a hero who in his early adventures
didn’t fight super-villains, but was a social
crusader who went up against true-to-life
criminals – not least like the armed robber who killed Siegel’s father a year before
the creation of Superman.
On perhaps a more subconscious level,
Siegel and Shuster drew heavily from the
story of one of their religion’s central figures when shaping Superman and his origin story: Moses. Substitute a massacre of
Jewish boys with an exploding Krypton; a
basket with a rocket ship; the Nile river
with outer space and Pharaoh’s daughter
with Ma and Pa Kent, and the theme remains the same: a refugee escapes certain
death and lives among an alien race, with

everyone believing he is one of them until
the revelation of his inherent difference
leads to his becoming a leader among men
and a symbol of truth and justice. The similarities are way too obvious to ignore – no
matter how much later film adaptations
might try and present Superman as another, though rather more controversial, Jew.

Up, Up and Up Again

Superman’s meteoric rise and near-unparalleled popularity (at one point, it was estimated that more than 80% of all American children were reading his adventures)
redefined the comic book genre. Superman was followed by an explosion of superheroes, most of which – with all due
deference to the tremendous work done
by the non-Jewish creators of the likes of
Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman –

were created or co-created by young Jews,
including the Green Lantern, Batman,
Captain America and the Flash.
And even if superheroes fell out of favour for a period after 1945, Jews were
very much instrumental in their “Silver
Age” revival in the ‘50s and ‘60s, bot h
when editor Julie Schwartz revitalised
many of these characters for DC, and when
Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber) created the
characters that would be the cornerstone
of the Marvel Comics empire – more often
than not with Captain America co-creator
and justly-crowned ‘King of Comics’, Jack
Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzburg).
And this is to say nothing of the Jewish
comic book creators – from Will Eisner to
Harvey Pekar to Neil Gaiman – whose work
outside of the superhero genre elevated the
entire comics medium to something far
more respectable and respected (if more
niche than ever), helping to prime it and its
most famous genre into something that has
been exploited by Hollywood to the tune of
billions of dollars. But that – and the industry’s last 75 crazy (and often very Jewish)
years – is a story for another day. JL