ABSTRACT
The initial success of the Superman franchise owes much to DC’s marketing campaign, which embedded the character within the American technological sublime. David Nye notes that US industrialization facilitated the development of a distinctly technological sublime that “reinvest[s] the landscape and the works of men with transcendent significance” (Nye 1994: xiii). The extended origin story printed in Superman (summer 1939) captures this intermixing of the everyday with the technological sublime. In the introductory panel, a streamlined rocket ship blasts away from an exploding Krypton; the intergalactic exodus is juxtaposed, in the next panel, with an elderly couple, the Kents, discovering the infant Superman. The second page features a dazzling sequence in which Superman discovers his unique abilities as he grows up. The top left and right panels show him learning to leap across the cityscape, his trajectory diagrammatically indicated by a curve of broken lines over a cross-section of a grid-like city. His superhuman strength and speed are signied in relation to icons of industrial modernity: he lifts an automobile, runs “faster than a streamlined train.” Finally, the Man of Steel’s invulnerability is demonstrated by a doctor’s inability to break his flesh with a needle – “nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin.”
