The final thread of the superhero’s prehistory began when Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch entered American consciousness in 1895 through Degeneration, the translation of Max Nordau’s Entartung, a denunciation of modernist art, literature, and culture. Nordau posited Nietzsche’s work as a prime example of modernist degeneration.
Actual translations of the German philosopher’s work arrived the next year, and Nietzsche’s ideas quickly became a topic of discussion and debate among American thinkers. Jack London, in works like The Sea Wolf (1904) and The Iron Heel (1908), expounded the idea of the superman and made a version of it more widely available to the reading public in a more accessible form.59 Edgar Rice Burroughs accessed that form and made use of London’s version of the Übermensch in Tarzan.60
Tarzan is first referred to as a superman in Tarzan of the Apes by Captain Dufranne, a French naval officer, after hearing Jane’s glowing description of the ape-man. A similar reference is made by Jane when she excuses Tarzan’s civilized cousin William Cecil Clayton for his failure to kill a charging lion: “It is no fault of yours that you are not a superman. There is only one other man I have ever
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back on Earth pursuing political and economic control of the planet based upon the technology he has stolen from Seaton. Seaton eventually achieves a god-like status; using a learning machine he builds a “sixth order projector” with which he can make his thoughts into reality. The Skylark series merely replicates the Western’s paradigms; its evil aliens are just bigger and bigger Indians.
By the late twenties the superman trope had become commonplace and emptied of philosophical content.62 Buck Rogers even claimed the mantle for the whole of the American populace.63 The Armageddon 2419 (1962) novelettes by Philip Francis Nowlan combine the Yellow Peril motif with the awakened sleeper and the future-war tropes. In 1927 Anthony Rogers, an engineer working for the American Radioactive Gas Corporation, is trapped in an abandoned coal mine. The cavein kills his assistants and the radioactive gas puts him to sleep for 492 years. He awakens to an America overrun by the Han Airlords, tributaries of the Mongolian World Empire, victors of the general conflagration that followed the Great War. While leading an ultimately successful rebellion against the Han, Rogers is captured and taken to Lo-Tan, the Han stronghold in the Rocky Mountains. The Han consider themselves to be a super- race, “destined to ‘elevate’ humanity to some sort of super-plane”
(137).64 Through forced primitivism, the Americans, still cherishing
“the spark of manhood, of honor, of independence,” have been hardened into a race of supermen, while the Han, comforted by their technological superiority, have degenerated “into a race of sleek, pampered beasts” (140). To San-Lan, the “Heaven Born” and ruler of the Han in America, Rogers is a personification of the American supermen. By this point the term “superman” has been emptied of its Nietzschean significance, serving merely as a means of elevating the hero and his companions but without the symbolic or philosophical weight with which Nietzsche endowed it.
The paradoxical emptiness and seeming specificity of the term
“superman” by the 1930s can be seen in its use on the two greatest pulp heroes, the Shadow and Doc Savage. Both these characters represent a shallow version of the Nietzschean ideal. Both heroes are presented as superior to other people physically, mentally, socially, and morally. Each has taken it upon himself to act as a guardian for existing society. Neither seeks to overturn social institutions and norms, but to ensure that the existing social structures continue superman of science fiction. The structure of The Insidious Dr. Fu-
Manchu (1913) parallels that of Dracula. In each novel, an intrepid group of Westerners fights a mysterious visitor to London who comes from the East with a plan to overturn the existing order of the world. Neither villain is often seen directly, and instead the heroes battle his agents, including sexually aggressive females. Dracula is the physical superman, possessed of powers and abilities beyond those of mortals. Fu Manchu is the pulp übermensch, “tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green” and “a superman of incredible genius,” master of both science and the occult arts (Rohmer 2000, chap. 2 and 27). Both gain their abilities from mysterious sources—Dracula from some weird relationship with the Devil, Fu Manchu from “an evil spirit of incredible age,” which could enter the body of a newborn infant under certain conditions according to a Chinese superstition (chap.
27). Dracula plots to replace the dominance of the living with that of the undead; Fu Manchu, “the yellow peril incarnate in one man,”
seeks the overthrow of the white race by the Orient (chap. 2). By paralleling the structure of Dracula, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu links the superman of nineteenth-century science fiction with the pulp übermensch of the twentieth. As Burroughs used the superman trope as part of his larger argument about race, so did Rohmer employ it in an ideological sense to heighten the threat of the “yellow peril.”
Just as Burroughs created the interplanetary romance by transferring the frontier struggle to Barsoom, so did E. E. “Doc”
Smith transfer that same frontier struggle to the cosmos, thus creating space opera. Smith began writing his Skylark series in 1917, although it did not see print until 1928. Richard Seaton, American scientist, discovers “X,” the unknown anti-gravity metal, in a meteor. He uses “X” to power the Skylark, a massive interplanetary ship. He is opposed throughout the series by Blackie DuQuesne, his doppleganger. Both men fit into the pulp übermensch category, being physically and mentally superior to their fellows. Seaton presents a picture of pristine American masculinity: strong, confident, moral, but able to joke around and speak in slang. DuQuesne is his opposite, similarly strong and able, but distinctly amoral. Seaton ventures out into the universe to take sides in a series of cosmic conflict between good humanoid and evil monstrous aliens, while DuQuesne stays
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The meaning of superman in the pulps is clear: a physically and mentally superior individual who acts according to his own will without regard for the legal strictures that represent the morality of society. The difference between the Black Master and the Shadow, and this difference represents the key to the approved pulp superman, is that the proper will serves to protect and reinforce the very rules of society it breaks.
Doc Savage offers a parallel vision of the Shadow’s dark mission.
Like one of Plato’s guardians of the Republic, Doc Savage was raised by scientists to the peak of physical and mental perfection in order to carry out his father’s mission of “helping those in need, punishing those who deserved it” (Robeson, Man of Bronze 1964, 4). His mission, like the Shadow’s, seeks to maintain the given order and to merely ameliorate particular instances of suffering without overturning the systems that allow the suffering to continue. He is referred to as a superman repeatedly, particularly in the early issues of his pulp run.
All three streams of the Antediluvian Age—the SF superman, the dual-identity crime-fighting avenger-vigilante, and the pulp übermensch—come together in Doc Savage and the Shadow, the two figures most immediately influential on Superman and Batman.
Unlike most of the physical and evolutionary supermen of science fiction, the übermenschen of the pulps generally serve society. Where the science-fiction superman typically ends tragically and futilely, either wholly alienated from society or killed by the authorities, the pulp übermensch does not. Instead he serves as a selfless redeemer, saving the helpless from the overwhelming forces that have incapacitated the ordinary authorities. It is in pulp übermenschen that the shift towards heroism in the SF superman, that according to Thomas Andrae originates in Superman, actually comes from.
Superman arose from both traditions, joining the physical powers of the SF superman with the prosocial agenda of the pulp übermensch.
Batman emerged primarily from the dual-identity crime fighting avenger-vigilante tradition, although the Shadow’s influence means that the pulp übermensch was not wholly absent from Batman’s creation. The pulp übermensch bridges the two traditions in the figures of Doc Savage (SF superman/pulp übermensch) and the Shadow (dual-identity avenger-vigilante/pulp übermensch). In all three streams, the figure began as part of an ideological or philosophical and are purified of criminal or corrupt elements. Thus instead of
marking an end to the bourgeois domination of society, as Nietzsche foresaw, the superman serves to protect that domination through myth-narratives. The villains of the pulps come from the opposite ends of the economic spectrum, upper-class masterminds employing lower-class thugs. These “symbolic socialists and communists” seek to overthrow the status quo, a fictional version of the Depression, the “‘real life’ enactment of the Apocalypse” (Hoppenstand, “Pulp”
1983, 144, 146). Thus the pulp übermensch is the defender of the middle class.
The Shadow is referred to as a superman in The Black Master.
The Black Master, a sort of anti-Shadow, has dropped the dark avenger through a trap door and released knockout gas to incapacitate him. The narrator says, “Superman though he was, no escape was possible” (Grant 1932, 151). The vision of the superman offered here can probably be found in the Black Master’s description of himself and his opponent. The Black Master merely knocks the Shadow out instead of killing him in order to give the enemy of crime an opportunity to join his operation. He says, “You are the only man in the world who is like myself. Why should we care for human life? To me, human beings are stupid, useless creatures, with which the earth is overburdened” (155). Both he and his foe, in the Black Master’s view, are pitiless and seek justice in their own ways without consulting the law. The Black Master considers the Shadow
“the only being that in my estimation is worthy of living” and offers him “companionship—all the power that I possess, with equality”
(156). The Shadow refuses, asserting that he is only pitiless with those who deserve no pity and that according to his own reasoning, the Black Master deserves destruction. The Black Master can be seen as a caricature of the Nietzschean Übermensch. He considers himself to be above the morality of ordinary folk. He is “tall and dignified, white-haired and keen-eyed. His whole bearing [is]
impressive” (21). He leads and acts while others merely serve him as tools of his will, driven by greed or fear. His will to power brings about the deaths of his enemies and makes him the master of others.
The Shadow operates a parallel opposing syndicate of agents who like those of the Black Master do not know his identity and merely follow his orders.
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