Thanks to comic books, television shows, animated series, and big-budget movies, everyone today knows the origin story of sent to Earth by his parents Jor-El and Lara moments before Krypton exploded. Once on Earth, Kal-El was adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, renamed Clark, and learned that Earth’s lighter gravity and the yellow sun gave him fantastic powers he would eventually use as Superman, the world’s greatest superhero. Only… this wasn’t always the way the story went.
Like many great tales, the Superman story went through many evolutions before arriving at the version everyone knows today. One of the strangest actually established that Superman wasn’t actually an alien from another planet but a human being from Earth’s distant future!
In the early 1930s, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster were collaborating on a unique creation – Superman. Although their story was always about a man with remarkable abilities, their first attempt actually cast “Superman” as a villain. This Superman was a human being, a vagrant named Bill Dunn who fell in with a mad scientist who experimented on Dunn with a chemical that granted him telepathic powers. Dunn attempted to use these powers to take over the world but later realized the power would fade, leaving him an ordinary man once more.
This version of Superman appeared in a short story entitled “The Reign of the Super-Man.” Shortly after, Siegel and Shuster reimagined the character as a heroic figure and produced a black-and-white comic book entitled “The Superman” which they submitted to Consolidated Book Publishers of Chicago. Unfortunately, the company stopped publishing comic books and Shuster later destroyed all the artwork except for the cover. At this point, the Superman project went in a radically different direction. Feeling he might have a better chance of selling the comic if he collaborated with a better-known artist, Siegel began ing multiple artists who were known for drawing popular newspaper strips like Tarzan and Fu Manchu. One of the artists was Russell Keaton, who worked on the Buck Rogers cartoon strip.
Siegel and Keaton actually produced some sample Superman comic strips that were very close to the classic Superman tale with one crucial difference — once again, Superman was a human being, only this time he was from Earth’s distant future. In Siegel’s early correspondence with the artists, this Superman was a scientist who realized the Earth was doomed and decided to travel back to the past in a time machine. In the version Keaton and Siegel worked on, however, the scientist sent his young son back in time instead of himself.
The sample newspaper comic strips depict a Superman origin simultaneously familiar yet radically different. Once more, the young Superman is found by the Kents —but instead of Jonathan and Martha, they’re named Sam and Molly. The child is also not an infant but a three-year-old toddler whom the Kents take to an orphanage. Once there, however, the boy shows he’s no ordinary child by leaping over the grownups’ heads. The boy isn’t invulnerable though – after hitting his head against a cabinet, he knocks himself unconscious.
Scared, the orphanage’s cruel matron puts the boy inside a steel cage — only for the boy to bend the bars with his bare hands (apparently being born in the future gives you great strength in the past). When the Kents return and ask to adopt the child, the frightened orphanage workers are only too happy to oblige. The Kents also retain the child’s time machine and discover a note hidden inside of it, although it’s written in a language they can’t decipher.
Since the boy is already three years old, he’s able to talk — but in a future language that no one can understand. Eventually, the Kent family rename the boy “Clark” and let him play with other kids — but when Clark showcases his incredible strength, the entire neighborhood starts to get scared of him. Clark, meanwhile apparently re his parents from the future and is seen crying next to his time machine, although he is still unable to tell his adoptive parents about his history.
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Although Keaton and Siegel did produce a series of comic strips together, they dissolved their partnership before the strips could be published, and Siegel eventually went back to Shuster to produce the version of Superman everyone knows today. Nevertheless, the sample comic strips are a fascinating look at a version of Superman that might have been.
This Superman would have been a literal “Man of Tomorrow” who would have had a much different relationship with his home planet. Where the Kryptonian Superman became very protective of the Earth since he didn’t want it to suffer the same fate as Krypton, this “Future Superman” might have been apprehensive about the direction the Earth was moving toward since he knew how catastrophic the future could be. Most interesting, since this “Clark Kent” was older and could more of his childhood, Siegel could have explored the dilemma refugee children have in adapting to a foreign world while learning the language and culture.
Interestingly, aspects of this lost Superman origin actually did make it into DC Comics. In the popular Superman: Red Son Elseworlds miniseries, Superman’s ship lands in the Soviet Union, not the United States. As a result, he is raised by the state and becomes a proponent of Communism, putting him in conflict with the American scientist Lex Luthor. Although Luthor shows great animosity toward this Superman, by the end of the story, readers learn that Superman is actually Luthor’s distant descendant, sent back in time from a future where the Earth is ready to end. It’s a weird ending (and one that wasn’t used in the animated version of Red Son), but now readers know that it actually harkens back to an aspect of Superman’s obscure history.
