The Bombshell Secret Behind Superman's Origin

Summary

Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman, was influenced by Philip Wylie's Gladiator when developing his iconic superhero.
Gladiator, a 1930 novel by Wylie, tells the story of a man named Hugo Danner who is born with extraordinary superhuman abilities.
Siegel was coy about acknowledging the influence of Wylie's influence while Wylie was still alive, but in an unpublished autobiography written after Wylie passed away, he confirmed the influence of Gladiator.

Welcome to the 911st installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, in our first legend, we look at the revelation of Jerry Siegel's influence by Philip Wylie's Gladiator in the creation of Superman.

The great Mark Evanier (who is currently doing a fundraiser to maintain his excellent blog, News From Me. I just donated, perhaps you'd like to, as well) once had a post that stuck with me (I can't find it to link to it, but if someone else has a link, let me know, and I'll edit it in there) about the concept of the "one phone call" problem. Namely, that there are some problems in life that are just permanent issues, but there are other problems that can be solved by one phone call, and it is important to keep those things into perspective. Being out of work suuuucks, but it's something that can be turned around with one phone call. In any event, I mention this both A. to plug Mark's awesome site, but also to B. note that when you're dealing with comic book history, there's very often going to be cases where "one phone call" (or the internet equivalent - "One e-mail") can change everything about a particular area of scholarship.

That was the case with the reveal that Jerry Siegel once stated that Philip Wylie's Gladiator WAS an influence on him before creating Superman with artist Joe Shuster.

What was Philip Wylie's Gladiator?

Gladiator was a 1930 novel by Wylie about Hugo Danner, a child whose father experimented on while still in utero, and the result was Danner being born with tremendous super-strength, speed and unbreakable skin. Danner hid his powers from the public as his parents believed he would be the target of witch hunts if people knew what he could do. He later would use his powers to become a standout football player, but quit after killing an opponent during a game. He fought in World War I, where his skills were particularly valuable. However, he continued to run up against roadblocks vis a vis the use of his powers, like when he is working at a bank, and he frees someone trapped in the vault with his super-strength, but of course, everyone wants to know HOW he got the vault door open, and they just won't leave him alone. In the end, he has a tragic ending, when he goes on to a mountaintop and asks God what he wants from him. He is then struck by lightning and killed. Dark stuff, right?

Danner was explained as having the proportionate strength of an ant and the leaping ability of the grasshopper. Both of those examples were exactly what Siegel used in Action Comics #1 eight years later...

Awfully big coincidence, right?

Here's the thing, one of the more controversial aspects of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation of Superman is the influence of other works on their creation. Siegel was a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, so he obviously was influenced by a number of works, but copyright laws were enforced differently back in the 1930s, so writers were a lot more afraid about being seen as basing their character on a character of another writer (DC Comics, after all, managed to be competitive in a copyright lawsuit over Captain Marvel, a suit they would never win nowadays). So Jerry Siegel was extremely coy for years about what influenced Superman, or even outright denying the influence of other works. Siegel was publicly quoted on the influence of seminal pulp fiction works like Doc Savage and John Carter of Mars, but never Gladiator.

What did Siegel say about Gladiator?

This led to a legend I featured years ago about a story that Siegel did a review of Gladiator in a fanzine, and thus people were able to prove that Siegel WAS aware of Gladiator before creating Superman. However, that turned out not to be true.

The issue with that, though, is that without that review, people have thought that there was NO evidence of Siegel specifically being aware of Wylie's Gladiator before creating Superman. And that has been mentioned many times over the years, that there was no direct evidence of Siegel knowing of Wylie's work before Superman came out. Wylie considered suing Siegel and Shuster in the 1940s (as, again, the copyright laws were so weird back then that he might have had a case even without proof of Siegel being aware of Gladiator), but ultimately chose not to. During Wylie's lifetime, it appears that Siegel did remain mum about Wylie and Gladiator, but as the always informative Tom Brevoort let me know years ago, Siegel actually wrote an autobiography in the late 1970s that was never published (Wylie died in 1971), and in it, Siegel specifically DOES acknowledge Wylie's influence in a section discussing all the various influences on Superman (including Popeye's super-strength), stating, "I had read and enjoyed Philip Wylie's 'The Gladiator.' It influenced me, too."

So yes, Jerry Siegel was not only aware of Wylie's Gladiator, but he specifically cited it as an influence on the creation of Superman. He just apparently wasn't willing to say so publicly while Wylie was still alive (of course, even there, it could easily have just been a coincidence that he didn't write about it until after Wylie passed away).

Thanks to Tom Brevoort for the fascinating piece of comic book history! It's like I said in the beginning, there are often things that can change dramatically just by one phone call (or, in this case, e-mail).