'He was a violent socialist': How Superman started out as a radical rebel

Returning to cinemas next week, the superhero may be known as the ultimate all-American Mr Nice Guy – but, back in the 1930s, he didn't begin that way.

James Gunn's new Superman film will be flying into cinemas next week, but ever since the first trailers were released, superhero fans have been having online debates about whether the Man of Steel played by David Corenswet is true to the one in the comics. Is he too gloomy? Is he too woke? Should he still be wearing red swimming trunks over his blue tights? Underlying these debates is an agreement that a few details are non-negotiable: Superman should be faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive. He should come from the planet Krypton and live in a city called Metropolis. And he should be in love with Lois Lane. Beyond that, he should also be noble and wholesome – and perhaps a bit of a bore. While the likes of Batman and Wolverine are popular because they break the rules, Superman has to be a law-abiding, upstanding all-American Mr Nice Guy.

But that hasn't always been the case. The first Superman strips were written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, and published in Action Comics magazine in 1938 by DC (or National Allied, as the company was then called). And in those, he was a far more unruly, and in some ways far more modern character. He was "a head-bashing Superman who took no prisoners, who made his own law and enforced it with his fists, who gleefully intimidated his foes with a wicked grin and a baleful glare", says Mark Waid, a comics writer and historian, in his introduction to a volume of classic Action Comics reprints. "He was no super-cop. He was a super-anarchist." If this rowdy and rebellious Superman were introduced today, he'd be hailed as one of the most subversive superheroes around.

"I had no idea the character was like that until I started writing my book," says Paul S Hirsch, author of Pulp Empire: A Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. "But it blew my mind when I saw it. He's essentially a violent socialist." The earliest issues of Action Comics bear out this assessment. When there are wrongs to be righted, Superman knocks down doors and dangles suspects from fifth-storey windows, and he makes hearty jokes while he's doing so: "See how easily I crush your watch in my palm? I'll give your neck the same treatment!"

Some of the people who are roughed up by this boisterous outlaw are pistol-packing racketeers, but usually they are a less glamorous brand of villain – a domestic abuser, an orphanage superintendent who is cruel to children – and the majority are so wealthy that they don't need to rob banks: there is the mine owner who skimps on safety measures, the construction magnate who sabotages a competitor's buildings, the politician who buys a newspaper in order to turn it into a propaganda sheet. Rather than being a typical costumed crime-fighter, then, the Superman of 1938 was a left-wing revolutionary.

"I absolutely love those old issues," Matthew K Manning, the writer of Superman: The Ultimate Guide and John Carpenter's Tales of Science Fiction, tells the BBC. "They're clearly the work of young people frustrated with the injustices of the world, and rightfully so. Keep in mind, these were two Jewish men reaching adulthood just before the start of World War Two. There was plenty to be angry about. And suddenly they had this character who could give a voice to their concerns and hold the corrupt accountable."

Siegel and Shuster were schoolmates from Cleveland, Ohio. Having grown up during the Great Depression, they defined Superman in the first issue of Action Comics as a "champion of the oppressed… sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need". "We were young kids and if we wanted to see a movie we had to sell milk bottles, so we had the feeling that we were right there at the bottom and we could empathise with people," Siegel is quoted as saying in Superman: The Complete History by Les Daniels. "Superman grew out of our feelings about life. And that's why, when we saw so many similar strips coming out, we felt that they were perhaps imitating the format of Superman, but something wasn't there, which was this tremendous feeling of compassion that Joe and I had for the downtrodden."

Not that Siegel and Shuster were the only comics professionals with such liberal views. "The comic-book industry was founded largely by people barred from work in more legitimate fields," Hirsch explains to the BBC, "because they were Jewish, they were immigrants, they were people of colour, they were women. It was a creative ghetto where a lot of very talented people ended up because they weren't able to get a Madison Avenue advertising job, and they couldn't write for Life Magazine. A lot of those people were radical – or at least not mainstream – and DC was founded by men who very much fit that mould: men who were recent immigrants, men who had leftist sympathies from growing up in New York City at that time."

All the same, few comic characters were as militant as Superman. In one early issue, he demolishes a row of slum homes in order to force the authorities to build better housing (a risky strategy, that one). In another, he takes on the city's gambling industry because it is bankrupting addicts. And in another, he declares war on everyone he sees as being responsible for traffic-related deaths. He terrifies reckless drivers, he abducts the mayor who hasn't enforced traffic laws, he smashes up the stock of a second-hand car dealer, and he wrecks a factory where faulty cars are assembled. "It's because you use inferior metals and parts so as to make higher profits at the cost of human lives," he informs the owner. Were Superman's direct-action protest campaigns strictly legal? No, but they were riotous, boldly political fun – and almost 90 years on, they stand as a fascinating street-level account of US urban life in the 1930s.

All too soon, however, Superman turned his attention to mad scientists and giant monsters, and away from Metropolis's under-privileged masses. After a handful of issues, his "opponents were all larger than life, and while that made for exciting comics, his days of social crusading were becoming a thing of the past", writes Waid.

What was the Kryptonite that sapped Superman's social conscience? Hirsch argues that it was a compound of two elements. One was the "blandification" that occurs when the sales of any commercial property go up, up and away. "Superman is unbelievably popular from the moment they get the sales numbers for the first issue," he says. "So they suddenly realise what they have on their hands, and they don't want to jeopardise it. Jack Liebowitz, the president of DC, sees that they can sell Superman pillowcases and pyjamas – but if Superman's running around throwing people out of windows and threatening to wrap iron bars around their necks, it isn't going to work."

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Alongside that familiar story of a big star selling out, "the ultimate thing that ends Superman's radical streak is the beginning of the war", says Hirsch. "All of the immigrant and non-white people who were working in this industry, they wanted to be seen as patriotic. And it makes sense. That's what you had to do to fit in. And even more nuts-and-bolts, that's what you had to do to get your paper ration [for printing magazines]. If you were doing things that bothered the government in 1941, maybe you wouldn't get your wood pulp."

Another, more personal factor was that Siegel and Shuster lost control of their creation. Shuster's deteriorating eyesight forced him to let other artists take over the drawing, and Siegel's conscription into the army in 1943 cut down the time he had to work on scripts. But there was worse to come. Having sold the rights to Superman for $130 in 1938, both men were treated by DC as hired hands, rather than revered innovators, and in 1947 they tried and failed to win back those rights in court. In retrospect, there is a grim irony to those rollicking early yarns about exploitative fat cats getting their comeuppance. Siegel and Shuster could have done with having a champion of the oppressed by their side.

Still, after World War Two, Superman wasn't the type of superhero who would take on a conniving publisher. "Superman constantly evolves with the times, and that hasn't always been for the better," says Manning. "During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when parents were actively burning comic books and Congress was blaming comics for juvenile delinquency, publishers were forced to self-regulate their content under the label of the Comics Code Authority. This seal would appear on the cover of every approved comic, marking it "safe" for children. While he'd already mellowed a bit, Superman became more of a father figure during this period, no longer interested in real-world villains. Instead, he mostly set his sights on aliens, other-dimensional beings, and foiling Lois Lane's latest attempt at discovering his secret identity."

Superman's evolution didn't stop there, though. In some eras he is a politely conservative pillar of virtue, mocked by his fellow DC superheroes as "the big blue Boy Scout", while in others, notes Manning, he has "some of his original edge back… as a vigilante with an eye for social justice". And in the new film? We don't know yet which Superman we'll be getting, so corrupt politicians and construction magnates should keep their eyes on the sky. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Super-Anarchist!

Superman is released in UK and US cinemas on 11 July.

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