The struggle behind Superman

This Week’s Winner

Dr. Wilfredo L. Liangco, 29, is currently an Internal Medicine resident at the PGH. Despite the demands of his work he still manages to find time to write all sorts of essays, stories, blog entries, and speeches for other people. He reads more novels and comic books than he reads his medical textbooks. He blogs on books, comic books, life as a medical trainee, and other stuff at specialagentfoxmulder.blogspot.com.

MANILA, Philippines - Back in the day, my father kept a room in our house that he affectionately called “The Batcave.” It was tiny, very comfortable, and had everything that an eight-year-old boy would want during a boring summer vacation in the 1980s. In various boxes were my father’s vintage ‘50s and ‘60s comic books, which were not particularly kept in good condition since, he would reason out, he had bought them on Avenida decades ago for 40 centavos each and had no plans of ever profiting from them. I would voraciously consume classic Batman, World’s Finest, and Superman in all their Silver Age goodness.

My dad once pointed out that there was something called “The Superman Curse,” that is, anyone who has ever worked on a Superman comic book was doomed in some way. This curse, according to him, was cast by the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were disgraced by their publishers. I didn’t care much about curses and stuff — I only cared about whether Ferro Lad was really killed by the Sun-Eater. And then over the years we heard that George Reeve committed suicide, Christopher Reeves was paralyzed, and Dean Cain spiraled down into early has-been-hood. I started to fear for whoever would don the cape.

Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book landed on my lap one hot day in medical internship. Comic-book fans are some of the most nostalgic lot ever, and over the years, upon reading new and more violent materials like The Dark Knight Returns or Infinite Crisis, which depict the values of superheroes in a more ambiguous light, we tend to curl up in a fetal position and reminisce over those “simpler times” — back when good triumphed over evil all the time and heroes were heroes through and through. We think in sepia, and we wonder why no one ever says “Gee whiz!” or “Holy high-tech devices!” anymore. Gerard Jones tells us in his extraordinary narrative that behind the one-note characters is a history of deception and avarice. That for all its nature as a “funny book,” comic books are still a profit-making endeavor.

Men of Tomorrow touches on a huge amount of comic-book history, but the most inspiring is the story of Siegel and Shuster, which resonates well with the modern-day struggles of hopeful creative writers, myself included. They say that the best books are the ones that can pull a reader into the vortex of its pages and transmogrify him into one of the characters, and for all its matter-of-fact, detached narrative, Men of Tomorrow has drawn me into the suffering of Siegel and Shuster more than any heart-wrenching novel ever could. We bear witness to a seemingly uncomplicated story of hopes and dreams as two impoverished Jewish boys create Superman from scratch and try to sell him to any publisher who would listen. Eventually someone buys the property, and the first issue of Superman sells over a million copies. By this time we should be cheering — and we would be if these things actually happened within a comic book panel. But Siegel and Shuster have underestimated the corporate workings behind their art, and upon realizing the unjust deal they have made devolved back into the impoverished artists that they were. Siegel plummeted into depression and wrote stories nobody would buy, and Shuster went blind. This is not what I have envisioned as I was reading Superman’s Great Delusion, The Nightwing and Flamebird of Krypton, or any other clean-cut, inspired, “simple” Superman story of the ‘60s. I have imagined everything to be peachy. And then my father pointed out one thing that I had missed in all those years of comic-book reading — Siegel and Shuster were never credited in any of those stories; in fact, no writer or artist ever was.

It took Siegel and Shuster 36 years to finally win recognition. After a series of legal battles that spanned decades, in 1975 it was made official that all Superman products should bear the logo “Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.” I was reading this book while uneventfully holding a clinic in a theme park, but I might as well have been in that room with Siegel and his fans as they celebrated while Walter Cronkite announced on television that “…finally truth, justice, and the American way have triumphed, and that’s the way it’s going to be, December 24, 1975.” All their supporters screamed and cried as they watched this during the victory party, and I myself got all misty too, something that has never happened to me with any other book before.

The struggles of a writer for recognition, respect, and profit are dramatically illustrated in the life of Siegel, but they might as well be the struggles of any creative writer in our society, an arena that has an ambivalent attitude to reading and writing — to write a comic book is juvenile, and to write a well-written prose is pretentious and unmarketable. And in the rare case that a writer should be esteemed for his work notions arise that he should not expect to profit from it, as if placing a price tag on one’s writing devalues it. Truly, writing is its own reward, but people tend to forget that the writer is a human being first and foremost.

When I was a kid I had the illusion that in a few years I would revolutionize the world with my literature, writing stories that would shatter boundaries, or even creating novels that would become cult classics. It was the opposite of being nostalgic, seeing oneself in the future, thinking that what is imagined can be achieved. But a publisher I submitted to perhaps sums the situation up in his succinct yet very true e-mail: “Literature is a hard sell. In our setting, people do not read.” In the end, creative writing becomes similar to any other job application and not unjustly so — you need experience to get experience, unless you have this really extraordinary idea that will straddle the barriers of literary merit and commercial viability. This is perhaps the challenge that the story of Siegel and Shuster might pose to hopeful writers: the world is already spilling with ideas, but there will always be that fresh, original concept, that man with a bright red “S” on his chest, and you need to bring it out.