January 27, 2010
Dispatch from Smallville part 1
Over the past several months, I’ve been doing a lot of research on the recent Superman copyright lawsuit. This is partly as an assistant for a Boston author who’s writing a book on the subject and partly in the hopes that it might provide me with a topic for the law review article I have to write this spring. In case you’ve let lapse your subscription to Superhero Intellectual Property Weekly, the case I’ve been following is the latest chapter in a bitter, long-standing grievance by the Man of Steel’s creators against his corporate owners. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were famously shafted in 1938 when they sold the rights to Superman “to have and to hold forever” to Detective Comics for 130 bucks (and, it’s too seldom noted, the privilege of having their creation, who had been rejected by multiple publishers, finally see the light of day). As the character blossomed gradually into a multi-billion-dollar global asset, the two Jewish boys from Cleveland, whose modest means bordered periodically on poverty, understandably nurtured a simmering resentment that occasionally flared into litigation. Until last year, the pair had to content themselves with whatever alms DC was willing to toss them to avoid bad publicity. Just last August, however, a California district judge awarded Siegel’s widow and daughter the reins to his half of Superman (for legal reasons too tedious to get into here, DC keeps Shuster’s half at least until 2013) based on a provision of the 1976 Copyright Act allowing artists to terminate the transfer of their copyrights after 56 years.
One of the interesting aspects of this project has been that it’s forced me to take another look at a character that, even during my most intense superhero phase, never much appealed to me. In fact, the most cynical side of me is tempted to evaluate the controversy like this: yes, Detective snagged Superman from Siegel and Shuster dirt cheap, but the property was bound to be a windfall to one party or the other, since who could have predicted that such a dumb idea would prove so popular? I’ve got genuine fondness for the American myth of the Superhero. But what I like about it is the way it’s been re-imagined and re-contextualized over and over again over the course of several generations. The seed that spawned it all—a seed that undeniably sprang from the teenaged brains of Joe and Jerry—has always struck me as pretty silly.
Wanting to see how much Siegel and Shuster’s original Superman has in common with the entertainment behemoth whose fundamental characteristics are now a part of the world’s collective unconscious, I picked up from the Los Angeles Library a bound volume of the original Superman newspaper strips. These strips began appearing as daily features in American newspapers shortly after the release of Action Comics #1, and, because they were conceived before Siegel and Shuster became regular employees of Detective, are a major part of the Siegel termination suit. Over the next two weeks, I’ll be posting some reflections on the cartoon panels that are apparently worth billions of dollars and inspire a devotion that baffles me.
I’ll be posting a few abridged versions of Superman’s alternately ludicrous and mundane early adventures. I call this first episode “More Important Things Than Meat Sauce.”
