99% Invisible - 82- The Man of Tomorrow

Episode Date: June 20, 2013

I’m willing to concede from the get-go that I might be wrong about the entire premise of this story, but Superman has never really worked for me as a character. I preferred the more grounded Marvel Comic book characters, like … Continue reading →

Boys and girls your attention, please. This is 99% invisible. Presenting a new exciting radio program featuring the thrilling adventures of an amazing and incredible personality. I'm Roman Mars. Faster than an airplane. More powerful than a locomotive. Impervious two-pullets. I'm in the sky. Look, it's a bird. It's a plane. It's Superman. I'm willing to concede from the get go that I might be wrong about the entire premise of this story, but Superman has never really worked for me as a character. I prefer the more grounded Marvel comic book characters like Spider-Man, who lived in real cities and had human thoughts and feelings. Superman is basically invincible, unrelatable, and who's establishment.

And even though I really love the first Christopher Reeves Superman movie, it contains a perfect example of why I don't really dig the character. This is a 25 year old spoiler alert, but at the end of the 1978 movie, all the greatness of that film is nearly undone by the fundamental flaw of having a character that is all powerful when Superman flies around the earth backwards and turns back time. The first thing we got to get clear is that he's not share. He doesn't turn back time at the end of Superman 1. That's Glenn Weldon, author of Superman,

the unauthorized biography, grasping for an explanation. It's been long established in the comics that if he flies faster than the speed of light, he travels in time. So that's exactly what he's doing, except he's just spinning around and around the earth, really, really fast.

So the reason everything goes backwards is not because he's actually spinning the earth backwards on its axis, making time go backwards. We're just watching him travel back in time. We're seeing it through his eyes. So that's what's going on there. This is my Wackadoo theory that I'm gonna stand by. Firmly, despite the fact that there's some stuff in the movie that kind of contradicts it,

I still plow ahead further. This music that I'm talking over is from the Superman movie soundtrack. You know what it's called? It's called Turning Back the World. I'm teasing Glen Weldon because I feel like I know him because in addition to being the unauthorizedographer of Superman, he's also a panelist on NPR's pop culture happy hour podcast, which is great. It comes on on Friday.

I listen to it on Friday. So I got in touch with Glen because I thought if I can't appreciate Superman as a character, maybe I can appreciate him as a design, a supremely successful design. And the first thing Glenn told me is that I needed dispense with this notion that Superman should be relatable. The thing you have to understand about Superman is that he was never intended to be the character that we identify with. He's not a hero like Batman, he's not a hero like Spider-Man who have foibles and psychological hang-ups that we recognize and empathize with. He's not the hero we identify with. He's the hero we believe in. It's different. He's an inspiration. He's supposed to be better than us. That's right there in the name. He's called Superman for a reason. He exists to say we can be better.

We can achieve these ideals. There are so many things that the creators of Superman, Jerry, Sequel and Joe Schuster got right in the design of Superman from the very beginning. The first thing they got right was being first, first to market. It difficult to pinpoint which character qualifies as the first superhero. It's Gilgamesh, or Hercules, or or the Phantom or the clock. It's worth looking into the clock. But Superman is certainly the first of a type that dominated popular culture

from the moment he debuted in 1938. And the idea was simple. Well, he was created to be basically a circus strongman. That's where the design of the costume came from. And that's what Seagal and Schuster intended. He was just like us, only bigger, stronger, better. So he could do everything that we could do, only do it more. That's where the Superman idea came from. It's very simple. That's why this character stuck around because the iconography is simple. Red, blue, and yellow, even the color blind can see. Red, blue, and yellow, that's that's important. You have to keep everything about this character as simple as possible. You couldn't fly at this point. He didn't have any of the other sensory powers. He was just a guy that Seagull and Schuster would drop into the middle of a scene with a bunch of thugs, and they would try to attack him, and he would

shrug them off. This was the engine of the story. This is where the adventure, this is where the fun of those early stories came from, just him showing over and over again, that he was stronger than everybody else. So when I came to the fundamentals, Seagull and Schuster just nailed it. They did. They created something great, and everyone knew it. But as Superman endured, they had this fantastic public R&D period. They just keep uppping the ante. They kept making him bigger and more powerful and started throwing in all these other, or trying to, they started trying to throw in all these other powers,

some of which worked, some of which really didn't. One of the first weird powers he had early on was the ability to contort the muscles of his face to change his appearance and pass himself off as somebody else. Now that doesn't square with the iconography of a guy who's really better than us, who can just do what we can do only more. So it went away because it's not the power of a superhero, that's the power of a villain,

it's kind of adopting somebody else's disguise so we can go undercover. It's just not that doesn't square with him. And when you have powerful enough iconography, you can make missteps like that. And it doesn't have a lasting effect. The other powers that took are things like super hearing and super vision. These things and telescopic vision, extra vision, these things are about traits that we possess that just get boosted. That's what this character is about. Later on, of course, we get things like super hypnotism and superventure

lequism, certain products of an age of comics called the Silver Age of Superman, when things got really weird. It happens to be my favorite era of this character because things just get bananas and Superman has become so powerful at this point that the focus starts to shift away from him onto Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson, the people around him, the super dog, the super monkey, the super cat, the super horse, all these other things around him. He becomes the patriarch of this extended family of people in Blue Lung John's. But beyond the comic book superfan, none of that stuff filtered too far out into popular culture and stuck around.

The one power that did develop later, that got folded into the very core of the character, was flight. Originally he could just jump around, and on the page, that's fine. You see him in mid-air. But as soon as the Flaisher animated shorts came along, the very first couple, he jumps around like that,

and it looks dumb. He looks like a flea. It just doesn't work. So very soon after that, on the radio show, the sound of him jumping around became a suspended sound of wind noise. So it was clear that he was flying through the air, defying gravity.

And that's what happened in the Flicer shorts. But it took the comics a long time to agree that Yelkake can fly. Because again, the thing he could do was be better than us, but this idea of somebody being able to hover in mid-air was just too much of a break initially, from the kind of grounded, relatively grounded stories that Siegel and Schuster were telling. But once he did take to the air, once he did become a capable of flying and defying gravity, that became the thing that he's identified with.

The tagline of the 78 film is, you will believe a man can fly, because there's something primal about that. There's something that man has always wanted to do, and so we got this guy in brilliant blue lognarons and a flying red cape who can do it. And that's what we look to him for. That's what we recognize in him now today, but it wasn't always the case. As you go through the history of Superman,

England Walden's book, you find a character that adapts in strange ways to reflect the zeitgeist and anxieties of the time. But certain qualities get written into Superman's DNA that form the real basis of what makes Superman Superman. And it has nothing to do with the way he looks. Ultimately, what I found over the course of the writing the book is that a lot of this stuff comes and goes, the red shorts can come and go, the spit curl goes away, it comes back. He

gets a different costume, he gets this weird electrical blue costume in the 90s, everything cycles. But it's not what he looks like, even though that is considered the iconography of this character. Not what he looks like that makes him super mad. It is what he does and why he does it. Number one, he puts the needs of others over those of himself and be he doesn't give up. So those two elements, if either one of those two elements are missing, are brain instinctively rejects it.

It doesn't feel like a Superman story for some reason. Which makes telling, compelling, and nuanced Superman stories pretty difficult. But while Nargis, that nuance is not what Superman is about. We've reached a cynical age where we don't trust altruism. That's what he's there for. He's there to represent it. He's there to say, here's truth. Here's what it looks like. Here's justice. here's what it looks like. Here's compassion,

which is a big part of him. And also, you know, he's called the Man of Tomorrow because that's been part of his DNA from the beginning. He's called the Man of Tomorrow long before he was called the Man of Steel. It was his original nickname, basically, because he helped point the way to the future to say, here's what we can be. Here's, if we're better to each other and better to ourselves, here's what we can do. So that's, it's easy. I'm a pretty cynical douchebag in most of my life, and this one area about this character, I don't know, I believe in him. ... 99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Jess Gettner from the NPR for recording Glenn Wellton for us.

We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but you can always catch up with us online at 99%invisible.org. Radio Tepio from PRX.