Actually, it’s as if he’s more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman. We have to adapt to his rules if we enter his world. We can never change him too much, or we lose what he is. There is a persistent set of characteristics that define Superman through decades of creative voices and it’s that essential, unshakeable quality of Superman-ness the character possesses in every incarnation, which is divinity by any other name.
But never mind all that, you say; there’s really only one question everyone wants to ask when the subject of Superman comes up: If he’s so goddamn super, why does he wear his underpants outside his tights?
Growing up with Superman, I accepted his “action suit” as part of the package. It was common for the advanced races in pulp illustrations to sport capes, tights, and exterior underpants, as if foremost among the natural consequences of millennia of peace, progress, and one-world government would be a vogue for knee-length boots on men. For me, the real insight into Superman’s distinctive look arrived much later, when I discovered some photographs of circus strongmen in the 1930s. There among the taut tent guy ropes and painted caravans at the country fair was the familiar, faintly disturbing overpants-belt combo, here worn by men with handlebar mustaches, pumping dumbbells in their meaty fists and staring bullishly at the camera. Finally it made perfect sense. The solution to the riddle of the ages was here all along in the boring old past, where no one had bothered to look. Underpants on tights were signifiers of extra-masculine strength and endurance in 1938. The cape, showman-like boots, belt, and skintight spandex were all derived from circus outfits and helped to emphasize the performative, even freak-show-esque, aspect of Superman’s adventures. Lifting bridges, stopping trains with his bare hands, wrestling elephants: These were superstrongman feats that benefited from the carnival flair implied by skintight spandex. Shuster had dressed the first superhero as his culture’s most prominent exemplar of the strongman ideal, unwittingly setting him up as the butt of ten thousand jokes.
With its most obvious feature out of the way, the Superman costume has more to reveal about our hero and his appeal. From his creation, Superman was as recognizable as Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, or Santa Claus. He was immediately intriguing, immediately marketable. Aggressively branding the lead with his own initial had never been done before and was a masterstroke of marketing know-how. Superman wore his own logo. He was his own T-shirt. His emblem was the flag of a personal country, and, like the Red Cross, he was welcome anywhere.
The red and blue contrast added a patriotic touch of Stars and Stripes Americana to the character, and in a series where the scale of Superman’s activities tended to profit from the panoramic long shot, the primary colors of his constantly mobile form helped to identify the hero even when he was little more than a distant speck against the skyline of Metropolis. The trailing cape also had practical uses, giving the illusion of movement and speed to static images—the sharp, modern editing techniques of the Siegel and Shuster narrative style did the rest.
Back to that chest emblem. Superman—so unashamedly special, so absolutely individual that he wore his own initial as a badge—reaffirmed human dignity by looking ahead to another time. Shuster and Siegel had envisaged a future when we’d all wear our own proud emblems of revealed, recognized greatness, when technology would simply be a tool to help us express the creativity and connectedness that was the birthright of our golden superselves.
In Superman, some of the loftiest aspirations of our species came hurtling down from imagination’s bright heaven to collide with the lowest form of entertainment, and from their union something powerful and resonant was born, albeit in its underwear. He was brave. He was clever. He never gave up and he never let anyone down. He stood up for the weak and knew how to see off bullies of all kinds. He couldn’t be hurt or killed by the bad guys, hard as they might try. He didn’t get sick. He was fiercely loyal to his friends and to his adopted world. He was Apollo, the sun god, the unbeatable supreme self, the personal greatness of which we all know we’re capable. He was the righteous inner authority and lover of justice that blazed behind the starched-shirt front of hierarchical conformity.
In other words, then, Superman was the rebirth of our oldest idea: He was a god. His throne topped the peaks of an emergent dime-store Olympus, and, like Zeus, he would disguise himself as a mortal to walk among the common people and stay in touch with their dramas and passions. The parallels continued: His S is a stylized lighting stroke—the weapon of Zeus, motivating bolt of stern authority and just retribution. And, as the opening caption of the Superman “origin” story from 1939 suggested—“AS A DISTANT PLANET WAS DESTROYED BY OLD AGE, A SCIENTIST PLACED HIS INFANT SON WITHIN A HASTILY-DEVISED SPACE-SHIP, LAUNCHING IT TOWARD EARTH”—he was like the baby Moses or the Hindu Karna, set adrift in a “basket” on the river of destiny. And then there was the Western deity he best resembled: Superman was Christ, an unkillable champion sent down by his heavenly father (Jor-El) to redeem us by example and teach us how to solve our problems without killing one another. In his shameless Technicolor dream suit, he was a pop star, too, a machine-age messiah, a sci-fi redeemer. He seemed designed to press as many buttons as you had.
But if the story of Jesus has a central theme, it’s surely this: When a god elects to come to Earth, he has to make a few sacrifices. In order to be born, Superman was called upon to surrender a few of his principles. As the price of incarnation, the son of Jor-El of Krypton was compelled to make a terrible bargain with the complex, twisty forces of this material world. That S is a serpent, too, and carries its own curse.
Irony, the cosmic “stuff” of which it often seems our lives are secretly woven, had the perfect man in its sights all along. And so it came to pass that our socialist, utopian, humanist hero was slowly transformed into a marketing tool, a patriotic stooge, and, worse: the betrayer of his own creators. Leaving his fathers far behind on the doomed planet Poverty, the Superman, with his immediate need to be real, flew into the hands of anyone who could afford to hire him.
Superman’s image and name, his significance, spread in wider and wider ripples at the speed of newsprint, the speed of radio. He had managed to plant the standard of Krypton in the soil of Kansas and Metropolis. A strong, elegant, and handsome alien had arrived to set a precedent that rang a bell with audiences. Where would the next hit superhero come from? How to follow up Superman without copying him—which many tried—and triggering a lawsuit? It seems obvious now. The answer was to reverse the polarity. Superman was a hero of the day, bright and gaudy and ultimately optimistic. What about a hero of the night?
Enter Batman.
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It all began in 1938 on a dark and stormy night in New York’s midtown, when editor Vin Sullivan at Detective Comics was instructed by his boss to whip up a new hero in the Superman mold, one that could capitalize on this new fad for “long underwear characters,” as the superheroes were becoming known. They imagined that Superman’s muscular extroversion might find a suitable counterpart in the introversion of the detective genre. Just as the “action” in Action Comics had proved to be the perfect springboard for Superman, this new character would complement Detective Comics’ primary diet of mystery, crime, and horror.
Bob Kane, born Robert Kahn, was twenty-three in 1939 when Batman made his debut. His collaborator on the new strip was Bill Finger, two years older than Kane. They called Finger the finest comics writer of his generation and always described him as the dreamer of the team. Kane the artist, by contrast, had a head for business. It’s easy to see where this melodrama is headed, and it may help explain why you will certainly have seen Bob Kane’s name in association with any and all Batman products, but not Bill Finger’s.
Kane’s cold, commercial intelligence was all over Batman from the start. Where Superman felt like the happy result of trial, error, and patient refinement, Batman was cl
early the product of applied craft, cleverly but rapidly assembled from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts. His appearance was based on a number of sources, including the lead character from a 1930 silent film entitled The Bat Whispers (the resemblance is slight, but the idea of the bestial alter ego is there); Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches for an “ornithopter” flying machine, its design based on the wings of a bat; and 1920’s The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Bill Finger saw Batman as combining the athleticism of D’Artagnan from the novel The Three Musketeers with the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes. But the strip also showed the undeniable influence of the 1934 pulp character the Bat, a hooded crime fighter who paralyzed villains with a gas gun—like Batman, he was motivated to choose his particular crime-fighting guise when a bat flew in his window during one particularly intense and pivotal brooding session. Another bat character, the Black Bat—a district attorney scarred in an acid attack—appeared almost simultaneously in his own scalloped cape and black mask. The two coexisted until the early 1950s: the Black Bat in the fading pulps, and Batman in the comics. There was very little about Batman that could not be traced directly back to some recent predecessor, but what he had was soul and staying power.
His villainous opponents, who would proliferate during the life of the strip, were, if anything, even less original; introduced in the first issue of Batman’s own title in spring 1940, the Joker’s appearance was a straight lift from Conrad Veidt’s 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs—to see the famous pictures of Veidt in the role is to wonder how they got away with it. The character also incorporated influences from the Coney Island mascot, and, of course, the playing card itself. Nineteen forty-two’s Two-Face, his features half-erased by an acid attack (sound familiar?), literalized the symbolic image of warring personalities on the movie poster for Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Spencer Tracy’s 1941 Oscar-winning mug was split into two halves—one handsome, the other demonic and deformed.
Bob Kane and his studio opted for a heavy, Gothic woodcut effect and weirdly distorted anatomy in their artwork, cheerfully improvising impossible contortions of the human frame in order to make a particular sequence work. He repeated poses he liked over and over again in story after story, making Kane’s Batman an oddly posed, self-conscious figure whose cape often appeared to have been carved from solid mahogany. Set design was perfunctory—the police commissioner’s office suggested by two chairs, a telephone, and a gruesome table lamp—but it was as much as the young, raw Bruce Wayne needed to frame his simple desire for vengeance. The best of Kane’s ghost artists, like the gifted Jerry Robinson, who drew the first Joker story, brought a shadow-drenched atmosphere of dread and mystery to Batman’s world of paneled mansions, urban alleyways, and deserted chemical factories, setting him apart from his competitors.
Batman’s first appearance on the cover of Detective Comics no. 27 in May 1939 was more orthodox than Superman’s. A circular balloon promised “64 Pages of Action,” while a banner stripe reads, “STARTING THIS ISSUE: THE AMAZING AND UNIQUE ADVENTURES OF THE BATMAN!” The word adventures suggested a hero, at least, and mitigated the sinister vampiric aspect of Batman’s appearance.
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This image, even cruder than Shuster’s Action Comics cover, shows two men in hats on a rooftop overlooking an urban skyline and gawking at an eerie spectacle unfolding in the sky. One man holds a tiny, ladylike gun, marking him as some delicate variety of crook. Batman swings in from the right, with his Bat line disappearing off the top right-hand corner, attached to nothing. He’s a dramatic figure with the outstretched scalloped wings of a giant bat. He has a third man in a grip that leaves the unfortunate victim’s legs kicking and dangling over the streets of the city far below. Although it is meant to be night, the sky is a searing acidic yellow, perhaps to suggest the intense reflection onto low cloud of the teeming city below. The effect is of a Magritte painting, where it’s day and night, impossibly, at the same time.
All in all, it lacks the powerful composition of Superman’s debut. Kane was simply not as good an artist as Shuster, and it showed, but the deeply spooky nature of this hero was expressed in no uncertain terms. The six-page introductory story opened with the same striking, spiky silhouette, posed this time against a full moon rising over the city. What Bob Kane lacked in draftsmanship, his chunky potato print lines made up for with atmosphere and a style that was somehow suggestive of European Expressionist cinema.
Where Superman had broken and established rules and catapulted his readers into the middle of a new kind of action, Batman played it safe with an opening caption that told readers everything they needed to know:
“THE ‘BAT-MAN,’ A MYSTERIOUS AND ADVENTUROUS FIGURE FIGHTING FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND APPREHENDING THE WRONG DOER IN HIS LONE BATTLE AGAINST THE EVIL FORCES OF SOCIETY—HIS IDENTITY REMAINS UNKNOWN!”
A hand-drawn logo read “The ‘Bat-Man,’ ” while a red box below carried the byline Bob Kane. There was no mention of Bill Finger, even though he wrote “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” along with hundreds more of the best Batman stories until his last in 1964.
The opening story frame brought us into the home of Commissioner Gordon, currently entertaining his “YOUNG SOCIALITE FRIEND, BRUCE WAYNE,” a bored young man who puffs heroically on a pipe while asking the question “WELL, COMMISSIONER, ANYTHING EXCITING HAPPENING THESE DAYS?” The middle-aged police chief was a keen smoker too, igniting a cigar that sent a miniature mushroom cloud into the air between the two.
“NO-O-,” Gordon began tentatively. Then, as if the most intriguing element of the story were a mere afterthought: “EXCEPT THIS FELLOW THEY CALL THE ‘BAT-MAN’ PUZZLES ME.” When Gordon was summoned to the scene of a brutal murder at a nearby mansion, Wayne tagged along, as if there was nothing at all odd about a member of the public who treated deathly serious police investigations as sightseeing trips.
Bat-Man appeared on the third page, standing on the roof in the moonlight. His stance displayed confidence; his arms were folded, and he seemed unafraid, almost laconic. The crooks recognized him, cuing readers that this adventure was not the first night out for our hero. As with Superman, we arrived after the story had already begun, groping for our seats in the dark. Almost immediately, Batman erupted into violence against the men in a rapid sequence of action panels.
In his first outing, he broke up the bizarrely complex plot of a chemical syndicate involving several murders and some money. It’s not a great story, and no matter how often I read it, I’m still left slightly in the dark as to what it was about, but the striking appearance of the hero made it unforgettable. It also established an important trend in the early Batman stories. From the very beginning, Batman habitually found himself dealing with crimes involving chemicals and crazy people, and over the years he would take on innumerable villains armed with lethal Laughing Gas, mind-control lipstick, Fear Dust, toxic aerosols, and “artificial phobia” pills. Indeed, his career had barely begun before he was heroically inhaling countless bizarre chemical concoctions cooked up by mad blackmarket alchemists. Superman might have faced a few psychic attacks, but, even if it was against his will every time, Batman was hip to serious mind-bending drugs. Batman knew what it was like to trip balls without seriously losing his shit, and that savoir faire added another layer to his outlaw sexiness and alluring aura of decadence and wealth.
In July 1939’s Detective Comics no. 29, he faced another drug-dispensing no-gooder in “The Batman Meets Doctor Death.” Doctor Death was Karl Hellfern, a seriously disgruntled middle-aged chemist and obviously a devious bastard, as indicated by the presence of a monocle. Unable to rustle up even the simplest of hair-restoring formulas, he was seriously balding but sported a devilish goatee and pointed ears, which may or may not have been hereditary. In this adventure, Batman was shot and wounded, showing that, unlike Superman, he was as mortal as the rest of us, only much more tenacious.
The end
ing to the story found a new note of hysteria that would enliven the best Batman adventures: trapped in his laboratory, Doctor Death fought back by inadvertently setting the whole place alight. As he realized what he’d done and was consumed by flames, the doctor lost it completely, screaming, “HA! HA! OH—HA-HA-HA—YOU—YOU FOOL!” To which Batman, pausing a moment to watch the spreading inferno, replied grimly, “YOU ARE THE POOR FOOL! HE HAS GONE MAD! DEATH … TO DOCTOR DEATH!”
The introduction of the secret identity, given away so generously as just one more brilliant idea halfway through the first Superman story, was saved for the twist ending of the third Batman story, which kept it in line with the mystery and detective aspects of the Batman strip. The last two panels showed a door, creaking open from its curious position ajar until the “Bat-Man” stood revealed in full costume. There’s something genuinely strange about this dreamlike conclusion to the story, this weird emergence from the closet into the half-light. It seemed a miracle that Wayne, our chain-smoking pipe abuser, could wheeze his way out of the cupboard and down the hall, let alone spring and glide across the rooftops of Gotham, but the distinctive visual of Batman was so arresting, so visceral, he caught on with the reading public as rapidly as Superman had.
Where Superman strove for modernity in everything from the image of its hero to the kinetic editing of its torn-from-the-headlines narrative, the Batman strip reveled in the trashy aesthetic of the mystery pulps and the penny dreadfuls. Crime, madness, and the supernatural defined Batman’s theater of operations and allowed him to mine a rich seam of blood and thunder sensationalism stretching back a couple of centuries to the Gothic horror novels of Horace Walpole and “Monk” Lewis. Indeed, the eerie and atmospheric story of one of Batman’s earliest supernatural opponents, the vampire Monk, seemed to directly reference the Gothic classics, with evocations of “The Lost Mountains of Cathala by the Turbulent River Dess” sounding like the copy in a Rough Guide to Gothic Romania guidebook. The cover showed a vast, hunched Batman figure looming across the horizon to overlook a castle cresting a Romantic peak sampled from a Caspar David Friedrich painting. It was Batman as Dracula, the vampire as hero, preying on the even more unwholesome creatures of the night.