“Oh no, they created him. But Jerry was never a fool. He knew the story of the young seventeen-year-old whiz kids was too good to pass up. So what they never told anyone was that Action Comics Number 1—the first appearance of Superman—was actually their third attempt.” Reading the confusion on all our faces, the curator explains, “In late 1932, Jerry Siegel wrote a short sci-fi story called The Reign of the Super-Man. It also had a few drawings by Joe Shuster—but what’s important is in this story, the so-called Superman was actually the bad guy—an out-of-control villain who couldn’t be stopped. That was their first try.”
“What was the other?” Naomi asks, clearly starting to see the value of pulling apart the past.
“Mmm . . .” The curator nods. “The other attempt was simply called The Superman. But when it got rejected by all the comic publishers, Jerry or Joe—depends who you ask—got so upset, he destroyed all the pages. Ripped them up, never to be seen again.”
“Then how does anyone even know it existed?”
“Jerry spoke about it in later interviews. Then sometime in the 1940s or 50s, a copy of the cover showed up. . . . Wait, I should—” He crosses back to his desk, rifles through a small volcano of files, and pulls out— “Here . . .
“They found this—just this cover—in some publisher’s desk,” Gareth explains. “To this day, it’s the only finished page that exists. One inked page. And that’s where the search began.”
He says the words as if it all makes sense. But from the silence in the room, we’re all still lost.
“You have ten seconds to relate this to my case,” Naomi threatens.
“Don’t you see?” the curator asks. “Think of the timing: Prior to 1932, young Jerry Siegel spends his time writing silly comic strips for his high school newspaper. Then magically, in 1932, he comes up with three different versions for a so-called Superman. Think for a second: What else happened in the summer of 1932?”
“His father died,” my dad whispers, holding his wound from the same gun.
“Mmm . . . you see it now, don’t you?” the curator asks with a grin. His eyes are no longer blinking. “On June second, 1932, Jerry’s father, Mitchell Siegel, was found facedown in the back of his small haberdashery as a puddle of blood seeped toward the door. There were two bullets in his chest, and all the money was gone from his cash register. Now think of the impact on his youngest son, Jerry. It’s plain as day—just look at the cover,” he insists, his voice picking up speed. “When Superman first appeared, he didn’t have X-ray vision or all the neat superpowers. In fact, he couldn’t even fly. But y’know what power he did have? He was bulletproof. Unable to be shot. And that’s why Superman was created: He’s not some American Messiah or some modern version of Moses or Jesus or whoever else historians like to trot out—Superman is the result of a meek little Clark Kent named Jerry Siegel wishing and praying and aching for his murdered father to be bulletproof so he doesn’t have to be alone.”
As he says the words, I close my eyes. When my mom first died, I used to have a recurring dream of squirrels running into my mouth and stealing my teeth. My CASA caseworker at the time whipped up this spectacularly maudlin theory that the dream represented my own powerlessness in preventing my mom’s death. I hate neat responses like that. But that doesn’t mean they’re not right.
Blinking back to reality, I stare down at the table. All I see is . . .
“You see it, don’t you? In the picture,” the curator adds. “His dad died in a robbery at gunpoint. That’s the moment that stayed with Jerry forever.”
I try to pretend I don’t understand . . . that I’ve never replayed my parents’ fight in the kitchen . . . when I walked in and . . . God, if I hadn’t walked in . . . if my mom hadn’t turned my way . . . I still see her—those angry eyes—staring right at me as she fell toward the open drawer. I’ve pictured all the ways to save her . . .
. . . and on the worst days, on birthdays, I’ve talked to her out loud, and asked her questions, and cried and laughed and sobbed at her imagined responses, especially the ones where she hints that she forgives me. Jerry Siegel had it right. We all live best in our own imaginations.
“Cal, you wanna sit?” my dad asks. “You look green.”
“I’m great,” I insist, realizing I’m now leaning against the filing cabinet. I go to stand up straight. No. Leaning’s just fine. And I’m not the only one.
Across from me, Naomi looks exhausted as she hooks her armpit over the top of a cubicle like a crutch. I was so lost in my own pity parade, I almost forgot. Her son. Her son the orphan. The moment she sees me watching, she stands up straight. I offer a nod of understanding. She turns away, kicking herself for giving even that tiniest piece of her puzzle.
“So this stuff with Jerry’s dad’s murder—you were saying there was some kinda search?” Naomi asks.
“Yup-yup . . . that’s where the weird gets weirder,” the curator says. “In the weeks after Mitchell Siegel’s shooting, there was no police report filed, no investigation opened, no search for any suspects. Even worse, despite the two bullets in the dad’s chest, the story that’s told throughout the Siegel family is that Mitchell died of a heart attack. Even today, Jerry’s widow and daughter say that Jerry told them his dad had a heart attack from the robbery. And even worse than all that, in the fifty years since that day . . . in the thousands—literally thousands—of interviews where they asked Jerry where he got the idea for his bulletproof Superman, he never—never once—says it was from his dad. Never even mentions his dad in a single interview!”
“Maybe Jerry just wanted his privacy.”
“I agree,” the curator says. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t need someplace to deal with it. Just look at the original stories: The first character Jerry created after his dad’s death wasn’t Superman. Instead, Jerry was obsessed with the bad guys, focusing his entire tale around a villain. It was the same in Action Comics,” he adds, waving his hand over the pristine comic book. “Have you even read it? Superman doesn’t fight aliens and monsters in here. He goes to Washington, D.C., and fights corruption in government and foreign spies. In fact, when you look at the Cleveland newspaper the day after his dad is killed—if you want to see what Jerry was looking at the day after he lost his father—there’s an op-ed saying that we don’t need vigilantes anymore, and it’s written by a man named Luther, spelled er instead of or.”
“Okay, so wait,” Naomi challenges. “Now we’re supposed to believe all the bad guys in comic books are real?”
“No, you’re missing it,” the curator says, waving the single photocopy of Jerry Siegel’s early Superman endeavor. “All the bad guys aren’t real. But in Jerry’s case, one of them might be.”
49
Okay, let me be as nice as I can about this,” Naomi begins. “Um . . . did you make all this crap up?”
“This isn’t theory. This is history,” the curator insists. “And it’s a search for one of the greatest lost books in the world—a story that eventually gave birth to one of society’s most recognized heroes.”
“And also involves kryptonite as a major plot element,” Naomi chides. “No offense, but I’ve got bigger worries than solving an eighty-year-old murder.”
“I’m not the only one who believes it. Now I don’t know if they hid it in the art or just in the story—but there’s a reason those original Superman pages are still missing. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what Jerry put in there.”