Clark Kent, Man of Cash

Larry Tye

is the author of "Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero," now out in paperback (Random House)

The comics had never beheld a golden goose like him. By the end of World War II, Superman was the marquee attraction in four separate comic books and shared top billing with Batman in a fifth.

Each magazine brought in just 10 cents, but a 1940s dime is today's dollar, and 3.2 million dimes were rung up every month. True Man of Tomorrow addicts could get a daily dose in the funny pages. They were the newspaper's most fought-over feature, especially Sunday's four-color splash, and every Sunday's "Superman" strip was delivered to 25 million homes, each of which swelled his royalties.

Ka-Ching.

The cash value of stardom was even easier to measure outside the comics. The radio Adventures of Superman was a runaway hit, with every "Atom Man" or "Clan of the Fiery Cross" adventure bringing a fat check from sponsors like the snap, crackle, and pop makers of Battle Creek. Superman cartoons and serials were selling out - at 40 cents a ticket for a weekend matinee - at theaters from Bethlehem and Bayonne to Barcelona, where moviegoers cheered "El Hombre Supre."

Even department stores were mining the gold. Starting in 1942, they bought up and gave away millions of Superman-Tim booklets with cutout puzzles, heroic stories of Superman and his young pal Tim, and a reminder from everyone's favorite strongman not to "Be a Whoo-Shoo! He's the Boy Who Gets This Magazine Every Month, But Never Buys Any of His Clothes at the Superman-Tim store! Gee!"

Ka-Ching.

Then there were the synergies, a newly minted term for the way publishers Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz were turning Superman into a product line. Their approach was so successful that it still resonates today, when Superman is celebrating his 75th birthday and Warner Bros. is using techniques strikingly similar to Harry and Jack's to market its new Man of Steel movie.

As early as 1941, buttons designating them as paid-up members of the Supermen of America Club were proudly worn by hundreds of thousands of youthful fans, including Mickey Rooney, Our Gang's Spanky and Farina, and half a dozen middies at the Naval Academy.

Kids across America lathered peanut butter and jelly onto super-flavored Superman bread and, if they ate all the crust, might get treated to a Superman lollipop or Superman chocolate bar. Their Superman suspenders held up Superman dungarees. They stored their money in Superman billfolds until they had enough to buy Superman bubblegum, squirt guns, lunch boxes, underpants, jammies, moccasins, horseshoes, and a Krypto-Raygun complete with bulb, battery, lenses, and seven strips of film that let them flash onto a wall images of their idol in 28 action-packed poses.

Ka-Ching.

By 1949 the cash registers were ringing nonstop at Harry and Jack's offices on Lexington Avenue. National Comics Publications, the new name for Detective Comics, had a bullpen of heroes from Batman and Wonder Woman to Hawkman, Flash, and the Green Arrow. None could match Superman as a box-office headliner or newsstand heavyweight. Nobody was consulted as faithfully by kids across America before they got dressed, decided which game to play, or picked a cereal for breakfast. It was on the Metropolis Marvel's muscled shoulders that Harry and Jack were constructing their empire in the 1940s and would withstand the comic-book scare of the 1950s. Ka-Ching had become the soundtrack for Superman Inc., much the way "Up, up, and away" was for Superman himself.

There were pitfalls, however, ones that Warner Bros. and its Man of Steel marketing partners would do well to recall. Push too cavalierly to commercialize your hero and you could threaten his integrity and his moneymaking potential, much the way Aesop's greedy cottagers killed their golden goose. That almost happened with Superman's movie serials, which lacked the radio show's creative scripting and technical wizardry. Thankfully, kids laughed with Superman's cartoonish bid to fly even as the critics laughed at it.

Managing Superman across media posed its own challenges - of seeing Superman merely leaping on paper when he was flying across the airwaves, or giving him a super-fueled adolescence in one comic book that contradicted his adult-onset power-up in another.

There was a risk with the placement of products, too. It seemed visionary when cellphones, holograms, and even biological weapons turned up in the comics decades before they did in the real world. But what about when writers came up with a three-part series on why Superman needed a super-mobile, to promote a toy car the licensing people had dreamed up?

Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had fantasized from the first about Superman's merchandising potential, with everything from box-tops and T-shirts to billboards. It was an obvious way to extend his fame and inflate their incomes. But they were torn: Wouldn't commercializing their hero diminish him?

They had sounded that alarm just five months after Superman's debut, in the November 1938 issue of Action Comics. A fictional con man named Nick Williams claimed to be Superman's personal manager, and used his "client" to sell movies and breakfast cereals, gasoline and physical-fitness programs. All were items that Harry and Jack had Superman selling or would soon. And so it was with glee that Jerry and Joe took a shot at the avarice of their bosses by not just exposing Williams and his henchman, but tossing them in a cartoon jail.