Action Comics #6: Superman's Phony Manager

 This is part of an ongoing series where I review Golden Age Superman, weekly, issue by issue, starting from the very beginning. 

Superman’s Phony Manager delves into Siegel and Shuster’s anxieties surrounding capitalism and consumer culture, particularly as a metatext for their own relationship with DC. In this story, a man claiming to be Superman's manager begins selling branded merchandise and using a fake Superman to back up his claim. The superhero is by nature anonymous, unable to work within legal structures like copyright to control the reproduction of their own image. Superheroes as intellectual property are owned not by their creators, but by the publisher. Royalties and creative control for long-running characters like these has been a hotly contested issue, which Siegel and Shuster would take DC to court over several times after the war particularly surrounding the film and television adaptations of their work, and their rejected Superboy pitch which DC eventually used without credit. The rise of alternate publishing houses like Image in the 1990s were heavily driven by artists’ desire to have greater control over their characters. More recently, the estates of several 1960s Marvel artists sued for the rights to the Avengers characters, now billion-dollar properties based off their work. 

 

Superman in comics? That'll never catch on...

Since when was Jimmy Olsen a blonde?

    The excessive merchandising portrayed here is all stuff that would come to pass later on, even predicting the radio serial that would begin airing in 1940. The story is deeply cynical about the whole thing, presenting the entire process as a copy of a copy- the manager hires an actor who doesn’t even have the same hair colour as Superman, and is willing to kill to protect his brand. Lois immediately sees through the scheme, but otherwise the general public seem to take it at face value, with the market being flooded by tacky, soulless objects with Superman’s name stamped on them, and Superman himself gets nothing from this. It’s a premise that would be taken even further in Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, where an unauthorized, in-universe Spider-Man movie is made with footage of Spider-Man himself, and later the Kingpin purchases the merchandising rights, such that one of Spider-Man’s villains is directly profiting off of his efforts. Yet here it feels more raw, to have all seen this coming without having already lived through so many superhero merchandising crazes. At the end of this story, the manager profiteering off of Superman's work is the one who has his comeuppance. It's a nice fantasy. Marvel, DC, WB, Disney… they all need artists for their business to succeed, and yet they treat them as disposable, food for the gaping maw of branded content. Our artists deserve better. 

Ultimate Spider-Man #109, by Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley