Customer Reviews

Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Icons of America)

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The writers, artists, editors, and actors who populate Tom De Haven's new book orbit the idea of Superman, reflecting how the tides of fashion affect the character and illuminating how the Man of Steel weathers the years as a resilient but ultimately unchanging pop culture icon.

De Haven, author of an excellent Superman novel published in 2005, takes us on a fascinating tour not so much of Superman's history as of the men who shaped it. Jerry Siegel (always his own worst enemy) and Joe Shuster, the character's co-creators, may have envisioned him as a Depression-era social crusader against crooked politicians and businessmen, but kids and servicemen loved it. After the war, television came along with George Reeves' hardboiled, no-nonsense Clark Kent, while comic book editor Mort Weisinger was responsible for expanding the science fiction universe of the Superman titles, giving us, among other things, Krypton as Paradise Lost (though De Haven reads the Krypton story as a variation on both Moses and Chicken Little).

Superman and Clark Kent are a Rorschach blot for writers and actors: which is the real guy, and which is the assumed identity? (Christopher Reeve played it one way, Tom Welling another.) Would Superman be Superman without Lex Luthor? (Well, yeah -- but not without Lois Lane.) Is Superman "relevant" to us in the twenty-first century? (This one's tough to answer: as the self-invented Superman of 1938, De Haven inclines to a "yes," but as the Kansas farm boy instilled with heartland virtues by his foster parents, not so much.)

The subtitle of this book is "Superman on Earth," and it's really about how Superman looks to us, the natives of his adopted homeworld. What we admire about him, overlooking the silly but iconic red-and-blue suit. How, if at all, he inspires us to do more than we thought we could.

Tom De Haven is qualified as an "expert" on Superman on the basis of his writing a novel about The Man of Tomorrow. Here, he has written a 200 page essay about The Man of Steel. It is a good read, going over the history of Superman, while giving his opinions on the "meaning" of The Metropolis Marvel. However, being a Superman "expert" myself, I did notice a few factual errors, particularly in citing the wrong issue numbers of some of the comic books. For example, he cites Action Comics #261 as the first appearance of The Fortress of Solitude when it was actually in Action #241. But that's just poor proofreading, and doesn't really detract from the quality of the book.

An enjoyable read, but I was hoping for greater insight into the cultural context and iconography of Superman over the changing American decades and mediums. Much of the book is spent chronicling the stories of the men who wrote or published the comics rather than the character himself.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's the red-yellow-and-blue rocket fuel that has driven most of the Top-20 grossing movies of all time to global success! Of course, I'm talking here about comic-book superheroes collectively. And, specifically the American archetype is Superman.

The visitor from Krypton is the focus of the latest volume in Yale University Press' "Icons of America" series. If you haven't discovered this rich collection of books, then you're in for hours of cool reading! Previous volumes invite readers to think in fresh ways about: Fred Astaire, the American hamburger, the Empire State Building, "Gone with the Wind" and one-room schoolhouses, among the dozen earlier titles. To get your toes wet in this series, I can particularly recommend: Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited (Icons of America) and Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (Icons of America)

Tom DeHaven, whose alter ego is as an English professor by day, wrote this book-length meditation on Superman. DeHaven is a perfect choice after writing an earlier novel about the early Superman, It's Superman!: A Novel, as well as other comic-related books. As he points out in this new book, DeHaven was all over the news media a few years ago when "Superman Returns" was released in movie theaters--as a go-to guy to answer journalists' questions about Superman.

If you're reading this review, you may very well be a true fan of comics and graphic novels--and, trust me if you're in that camp of readers, this guy's the real deal. Yes, DeHaven has logged his time, over the years, standing outside of comic stories in the early morning waiting for the doors to open and certain key issues to be released.

This book, like others in this Yale series, invites us to read along and "think through" this caped superhero's enduring role in our culture. A cool experience, indeed!