Max McCoy
July 13, 2025 3:33 am
A facsimile edition of a 1955 issue of “Action Comics” used to promote the new Superman movie, directed by James Gunn, that was released last week. The comic is on a counter, placed over another Superman publication, at Prairie Dog Comics in Wichita. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
I walked into Prairie Dog Comics in Wichita looking for a hero.
Not just any hero, but the quintessential American superhero, the Man of Steel himself, an extraterrestrial refugee from the planet Krypton who made his debut in 1938, single-handedly shaped the comic book as we know it and spawned an $8 billion franchise. In various iterations he represented the New Deal, fought Nazis, celebrated Reagan-era patriotism, died and was resurrected, and broke the fourth wall of the comics panel after Sept. 11 to lament to readers that he was only a fictional character and could not help in real life.
For most of his stories — and there are many, in comics and radio and television and movies, some with complicated and competing timelines — the infant Superman is taken in by a kindly farm couple named Kent and raised at Smallville, a fictional town in Kansas. This week a major Superman movie is rebooting the myth for a new generation, and I’d come to the comics shop on Maple Street in west Wichita looking for clues to what makes Superman perennially popular.
I’ll admit up front that I have never much liked Superman except when I was a small child, because he could fly. The 1978 movie with Christopher Reeve seemed a bit silly to me, but I was 20 at the time, deep into Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and beyond all that kid stuff. My comics tastes ran more to “Heavy Metal” magazine and, later, “Watchmen” writer Alan Moore.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Superman franchise in years, but in the last few weeks I’ve been pondering the nature of heroes and myth and just why things seem so hopeless in America. What would the new Superman movie have to say to us?
But Wednesdays are release day in the comics world and Prairie Dog Comics is doing such a steady business that I have to time my questions between customers. The shop is unassuming at first glance, with tired carpet and decor that looks as if it might be 20 or even 40 years old, but the place is crammed full of boxes and shelves and display racks of stock. You soon come to realize the shop takes its comics as seriously as anybody who took “Big Two-Hearted River” as a lesson not just in writing but in life.
Adam Rittel, the man behind the counter ringing up all those first-day releases of Spiderman and Flash, is a self-described “slinger of comics.” He says he doesn’t know much about Superman but then betrays an impressive grasp of the various universes the Man of Steel inhabits. He rattles off half a dozen story arcs. I’m unable to keep up.
Then he shows me a new movie tie-in facsimile edition of Action Comics No. 210 from 1955, featuring the first appearance of Krypto the superdog. It’s sealed in a polybag. Slipped into two copies of the comic is a “Golden Biscuit” that confers the right to attend the world premiere of the new movie in Los Angeles with its writer and director, James Gunn. He is probably most widely known for a 2014 superhero film, “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Has the new movie spurred interest in Superman?
“Yes and no,” Rittel says. “There’s always the push when there’s a promotion.”
Has he read any reviews of the new movie?
Rittel doesn’t read reviews.
If I really want to know about Superman, he suggests, I should talk to his brother, John.
I give Rittel my cell number and he agrees to relay a message.
Meanwhile, I buy the facsimile edition of Action Comics No. 210. Once freed from its polybag, I discover I am not, in fact, a winner of the Golden Biscuit. I’ll have to see the new Superman movie without its director.
I’ve soured on the glut of recent superhero movies, except perhaps for Iron Man, because they all seem the same: all CGI spectacle and little story. But I’m hoping the new Superman movie will be different. It stars David Corenswet as you-know-who and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. It is being promoted not only as a reboot of the Superman film franchise, but as a reimagining of the DC Universe.
It’s also being knocked by some as being too political.
Dean Cain, who played Superman on television in the 1990s, said Gunn’s version was too “woke.” Superman as an immigrant was being pushed too hard. Right-wing commentators, including Kellyanne Conway, have said the movie is too ideological, but Gunn and some of the cast shrugged off criticism and said the movie was about kindness.
The film is from DC Studios, a division of Warner Bros. Discovery that creates live action and animated content based on characters from the DC Comics, including the Joker, Batman and Wonder Woman.
But the star of the DC Universe, back to 1938, has always been Superman.
The Man of Steel debuted in Action Comics No. 1, in June 1938, but Superman didn’t even get the full issue — although he did get the now iconic cover of hoisting a car over his head. Action Comics was an anthology with 11 separate features, but now the only story you’ll likely recognize in it is Superman’s. Published by “Detective Comics” — later known as DC — It was the first comic to feature a superhero. It went for 10 cents in 1938. Last year, an original copy sold at auction for $6 million.
“Superheroes are a typological category and a cultural truth,” writes Hillary Chute in her 2017 book, “Why Comics?”
“Perhaps the enduring appeal can be traced to the origin story of superheroes themselves,” Chute argues, “which itself feels like an archetypal superhero storyline. The world’s inaugural superhero is Superman, also known as Clark Kent (birth name: Kal-El, likewise the name actor Nicolas Cage gave his son), and as a character he had modest beginnings. Superman was the brainchild of two shy, bespectacled, lower-middle-class Jewish teenagers from Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, whose first incarnation of the character appeared in their own self-published magazine (or “zine”) in the 1930s.”
Siegel was the writer and Shuster was the artist.
Detective Comics bought all rights from Siegel and Shuster for $130.
“Superman was immediately hugely popular,” Chute notes, “selling out the print run of ‘Action Comics.’ Siegel and Shuster cast him as a ‘champion of the oppressed’ — he has been called a junior New Dealer. In his first storyline, for instance, Superman saves a falsely accused prisoner from a lynch mob, produces evidence that frees an innocent woman from death row, and defends a woman about to be abused by her husband.”
There were Sunday funnies heroes before — Doc Savage, for example, and Dick Tracy — but with Superman came superpowers. The transcending of the limitations of human ability likely had something to do with the economic pressures of the Great Depression and war jitters caused by worsening situations in Europe and East Asia.
Art Spiegelman, best-known for “Maus,” the graphic novel depicting his family’s suffering during the Holocaust but with the characters cast as mice and the Nazis as cats, argued in a 2019 piece in The Guardian that the golden age of comics superheroes was shaped by the rise of fascism.
“The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic — almost god-like — secular saviours to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the great depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war,” Spiegelman wrote. “Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy by projecting themselves on to invulnerable heroes. Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large.”
The Superman origin story also keys into what Joseph Campbell called “the monomyth,” the hero’s journey told in every culture around the world. It features a protagonist born of mysterious circumstances, in possession of special powers or skills, who is raised by surrogate parents and eventually brings some boon to mankind. Not coincidentally, the hero’s journey is often a cornerstone of religious or cultural narratives, including the stories of Moses and King Arthur, Jesus and Luke Skywalker.
While Superman was associated from nearly the start with Smallville, where lived a kindly farm couple who found and raised him, it wasn’t until the 1978 Superman movie that Smallville identified as being in Kansas, something that is now canon. Every June, Hutchinson in south-central Kansas “changes” its name to Smallville and has a festival weekend that includes a comic con at the state fairgrounds. The Smallville Wiki lists its zip code as 67524, in real life the postal coordinate for Chase, a town in Rice County.
Directed by Richard Donner, the 1978 film featured Marlon Brando as Superman’s real father and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane. It was notable for its special effects, the now-iconic John Williams score, and Gene Hackman’s over-the-top performance as Lex Luthor. In a 1978 interview in the Edmonton Journal, Donner said his movie was true to the “legend and myth” of Superman’s origin story, including his upbringing in Kansas.
In the 1990s, there was the television series “Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman,” and “Smallville” ran from 2001 to 2011. Despite differences in interpretation, the essentials of the story remained the same: Kansas, the Clark Kent/Superman duality, Clark and Lois as reporters, and Luthor as nemesis.
Siegel, the comics writer who created Superman, died in 1996, age 81. He had married Joanne Carter, the teenage model who first posed for Lois Lane in 1935 after answering a classified ad by Shuster, the artist co-creator.
Shuster died in 1992. He was 78. Even though DC bought all rights to their superhero in 1938, the publishing company gave each man an annuity of $20,000 after the 1978 movie was released, according to the New York Times.
What makes the Superman story so enduring?
“It’s a sense of right and wrong,” John Rittel, Adam’s brother, told me on the phone. “There’s a deep morality. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s about power and responsibility. Using power responsibly is something we should all be able to agree upon. It’s a symbol of hope, something you can gather around.”
John, a 42-year-old Wichita resident who says he has 31,000 comic books stored in his basement, said he’s been a fan of Superman since watching “Lois and Clark” as a kid.
“I’ve never seen an iteration (of Superman) I didn’t like,” he said. “Every one that comes out is someone’s first. And you always remember the first one you saw. … And James Gunn? In my eyes, he’s never failed. He’s always put out good stuff.”
John had not yet seen the new movie but planned to go with friends the next day.
How did he feel about the controversy over immigration?
“There’s got to be an element of truth,” he said, and it has to be relevant to the times in which it’s made. “People on one side or the other will think it’s too political, but if it opens people’s eyes …”
Can an 87-year-old fictional extraterrestrial migrant superhero raised in Kansas still be relevant?
My wife, Kim, and I saw “Superman” Thursday night. The movie opens 30 years after Kal-El comes to earth as a child — and yes, he is still adopted by a Kansas farm couple — and takes off from there. Most of the furniture from previous iterations is there, from the Daily Planet to the Fortress of Solitude, although updated a bit for the early 21st Century. Superman is battling a new version of Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, a high tech arms-dealing billionaire who mostly rails about “the alien,” Superman.
The first 30 minutes of the film were full of character development, with Brosnahan doing the best Lois Lane of the franchise. She convincingly plays a reporter, doesn’t need saving, and seems conflicted in a realistic way about her relationship with Clark/Kal El.
Corenswet is so trusting as Superman that it’s a plot point. I liked him as Superman fine. He had the same naive charm that Reeve did.
There was a noisy 13 hours (or so it seemed) of Superman and his friends participating in a series of CGI battles, with many twists but few surprises. These kinds of digital sequences bore me because when you can do anything with 1s and 0s, without advancing the plot, nothing really matters. Give me old-fashioned practical effects every time.
But the real star of the movie is Superman’s dog, Krypto.
Kim pointed out to me that Krypto is like Toto in the “Wizard of Oz,” another movie spectacle, made (in color!) in 1939. In both cases, it’s the heroes’ love for their dogs that makes us root for them. Those dogs also engage us by making us feel discomfort when they’re in danger and joy when they’re happy.
This “Superman” is as formulaic as the ones that preceded it. Any resemblance to current events is just window dressing, so there’s not much to object to, no matter what side of the theater aisle you’re on. But I suspect the ultimate success of the Superman franchise depends on its predictability. You know that ultimately, good will prevail. It’s just that this time, it takes a little help from an extraterrestrial dog.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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