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Putting the Man in Superman: Curt Swan

Curt Swan drew Superman in Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, and a few other places, until DC's editors and management decided to shake things up with some younger talent and showed him the door. When Swan drew his last "official" Superman story, his tenure had spanned thirty of the forty-eight years Superman had appeared in print.

The more secure comics market of the early Silver Age often provided enough work that talents inferior to Swan's might endure or even flourish, bouncing from title to title, completing stories where regular talent could not meet oncoming deadlines. This, however, does not explain Swan's unprecedented tenure with DC's principal property. No legend of the industry remained so long attached to a single concept, although occasional runs might last eight years or longer.

Breaking into DC

When Curt Swan returned from the Second World War in 1945, he took work in comics as a temporary profession, perhaps something he could do for a year or two. He took his first assignments with an unrealistic idea of what an $18 page rate meant, and soon overloaded himself with work, until he realized that he could develop a better arrangement by allowing inkers to complete his pages. Thus, working long days and long weeks, Swan managed to maintain a three-to-four page count daily for some time and made $10,000 his second year in cartooning.

Curt Swan's work evidently represented the development of a natural aptitude rather than the combination of aptitude and training that would characterize the lights of a later period (such as Neal Adams or Jim Steranko). Although he had demonstrated some talent with his art in school, he worked in comics for seven years before taking any formal training. This training occurred during two months in 1952 at the Pratt Institute.

Swan's early comics work had little to do with the Superman stable. Swan instead cut his DC eyeteeth on titles like Boy Commandos, Tommy Tomorrow, and Gangbusters, with an occasional Superboy cover added to this kind of work, but not representing any particular commitment of Swan's time to Superman-related titles. DC followed a position of maintaining a regular cover artist until the early seventies, and Swan eventually graduated to this role, just as would Neal Adams after him in the late sixties, and Nick Cardy afterwards.

Swan began occasional fill-ins for Wayne Boring, Superman's regular artist, when other obligations made such substitution necessary. He did not become a contender for future Superman artist until 1953, when DC decided to issue a 3-D Superman book in addition to its normal titles, and had him pencil one of the stories therein. He only landed the plum assignment within the Superman titles after artist Wayne Boring and editor Mort Weisinger had disputed over page rates and Weisinger had to replace Boring with Swan for a few months. Weisinger, whether impressed by Swan's style or wanting to sanction Boring, decided to reassign Swan as Superman's new regular artist, a role Swan would fulfill for the next thirty years.

What Swan Did for Superman

Mort Weisinger decided that Swan's advent provided an excellent opportunity to make some changes to Superman's looks. He therefore instructed Swan to do away with Superman's enormous Wayne Boring jaw, and rework the face in a more handsome version; he had Swan replace Superman's barrel chest with a leaner, more muscular look, creating a look more appropriate to the comics of the sixties (although Alex Ross would once again portray Superman with a barrel chest, and drown in adulation in the process).

Superman's revised works combined with Swan's more realistic, cleaner, and brighter style meant a very real change in the look of the Superman titles he worked on. While Boring handled some types of moodiness and melodrama well, his style possessed certain cartoonish characteristics that would have ill-befitted the medium when it began to take itself more seriously in the 1960s (a footnote: DC would terminate Boring altogether in the 1960s, and he ultimately left comics altogether to do work such as uniformed security guard assignments until his death in 1983).

Although Swan's early tenure included those years when writers made Superman so powerful that he would casually move worlds around with his bare hands, Swan's own work did much to pull the character back towards the "man" portion of "Superman." He increased Superman's emotional range, allowing both the more intellectual stories that Dennis O'Neil would later write for the title and the post-O'Neil treatments of the character that frequently placed Clark Kent rather than Superman in the starring role of many stories. In fact, if we consider Curt Swan the exemplary Superman artist, we should consider him even more the only artist to treat Clark Kent as almost a separate and independent character; Superman clearly took on a different personality, with changed priorities, when in civilian garb.

Swan changed the character, somehow melding the concept of an impossibly powerful being whose powers effectively allowed him to ignore the constraints of physics to an avuncular character who seemed on familiar terms with the reader, often smirking (albeit good-naturedly) through the fourth wall about the foibles of his fellows. Swan said that his portrayal included something he thought the character lacked: an innate likeability that would make the reader want Superman on his side.

Swan's vision would provide its finest fruition when, in 1971, DC made its first serious attempt to redefine its vision of the Superman character. Previous changes had involved (relatively) unimportant cosmetic considerations, such as the visual makeover following Boring's departure from his seat as the primary Superman artist; and an abortive plan to rework the character in 1968, which stopped with placing the talented Ross Andru on Action Comics and giving Lois Lane a more period haircut. In 1971, however, DC took the matter more seriously. It saw (and ultimately abandoned) the opportunities provided by Jack Kirby's defection from the comics company he had helped build, and brought in Dennis O'Neil, one of the young lions of the era, to handle the writing chores on Superman titles.

O'Neil recognized that the concept suffered from the "super" overwhelming the "man" since the early days of the concept. Superman began powerful, but continued to acquire more power. He gained the ability to fly. The ability to deflect bullets became the ability to deflect mortar shells, then the ability to deflect blockbusters, atomic bombs, and ultimately exploding suns. Superman gained X-ray eyes, "heat vision," super-hearing, "freeze-breath," increasingly incredible speed, and enough strength to move up from throwing cars to shoving around planets. Such a superhero would find very little to challenge him, except, perhaps, another just like him, but gone bad (hence the perpetually-escaping Kryptonian villains from the Phantom Zone). Stories therefore attempted to create chinks in his armor; Superman developed a vulneribility to magic, and an allergy to various glowing rocks from Krypton. When writers tired of escaped Phantom-Zone criminals, stray Kryptonite, dangerous magics, or such cliches, they sometimes turned to the endangerment of Superman's friends and charges; the exposure of his secret identity; or simple moral quandaries about Superman crippling himself by an ill-considered promise he would not break.

Dennis O'Neil, the head of a troika that also included Swan and inker Murphy Anderson, began a series of stories that reduced Superman's powers until some things actually threatened him again (a constraint which evoked no controversy in rival Marvel's characters). In this series, Superman fought with limitations created by these new-found physical restraints and moral quandaries presented when he faced problems that a properly-flung fist could not resolve.

The stories from this period, the O'Neil/Swan/Anderson era, remain substantial and thoughtful works, even if DC did abort this revision early in the process and return Superman to his planet-pushing levels of power. Swan, while somewhat isolated from general developments in the medium since 1961, nonetheless honed his work to its cleanest and most subtle, and would craft an enduring image of the Superman character that would remain in the minds of readers even after DC Comics moved on to other interpretations of the Superman character.

Swan's Limitations

Swan brought a great deal to the Superman character, including the blending of a sometimes Quaker-like ethos with powers that would guarantee a supervillain global domination in the time it took for world leaders to make a few important phone calls on his behalf. However, Swan's talent did not encompass everything. The weaker points of Swan's style would affect what work DC chose to assign him even as they retained him in his prestigious position of the official artist for the primary superhero of the DC universe.

For instance, Swan's realistic and often subtle approach sometimes precluded the very dynamism that had brought Marvel some years of indisputable success in the superhero comics field. Swan, for a time, had acted as DC's resident cover artist, creating the outer art for a variety of titles. His editors, however, realized that these covers indeed lacked something; a typical Swan piece might include the hero, in a cage, while a gloating villain laughed at his prisoner and the immanent success of whatever Evil Master Plan must follow. Such covers seem tame and corny today, and did not compare well with the dynamic sort of cover art one found coming from the pencils of Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, or Steve Ditko for titles published by the competition.

The action within the comics often fared little better. Even in his most active scenes, Swan's Superman did not blaze through the sky as he would in the hands of later artists John Byrne, Dan Jurgens, Jon Bogdonove, Jackson Guice, or Alex Ross. The lessons Jack Kirby had taught by his reinvention of comics vitality in the sixties never seemed to permeate Swan's style, partially because Swan may have remained aloof from the industry, and partially because Swan's dedication to realism precluded much of the experimentation and distortion that made comics leap from the page.

These limitations, however, fit well with Swan's view of the character, since he viewed him as a middle American character and the sort of all-around good guy that only an evil person could dislike. The jumping, shouting, angry, spitting, sweating Marvel model of a hero approached the superheroic concept differently, demonstrating heroism by doing and seldom by being.

Byrne and the End

If one consider's DC's forty-seven years of publishing superhero titles (in some cases, without interruption), one may see how many corners into which the company might paint itself during such a span. This became important as one element of the Stan Lee editorial model redefined comics: The shared universe / continuity model meant every story "happened" and anything that happened within the "shared universe" could, theoretically, affect anyone who resided therein. The editors of DC had only slowly learned what Lee could teach in the early sixties, and therefore did not question the wisdom of continuity or its long-term consequences.

DC had patched its continuity in the sixties by creating the parallel world "Earth-2" onto which it could dispose of the Golden Age characters who had not survived into the Silver Age. Several more times, DC would create these pocket planets to explain away the separateness of comics companies whose characters DC acquired through purchase or lawsuit. By the eighties, DC had too many alternate worlds; too much continuity; and suffering sales. Therefore, the company had Marv Wolfman write a story disposing of what DC considered chaff and creating a new continuity in which, presumably, artists and writers could create without the burden of a backlog of old, often poor, stories.

Circumstances seemed so dire back then (when the mainstream comic sold at least five times as many units as its equivalent in 1999 would) that DC finally gritted its teeth and resolved to do something about Superman, as it had planned to in 1968 and 1971. Several times before, DC had attempted to become more current by using talent that had left Marvel Comics. Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Roy Thomas all enjoyed brief vogues where DC hyped them as the architects of a new and better DC comics.

Marv Wolfman and other DC editors believed that John Byrne held the answers for revitalizing the Superman concept, and dismissed Curt Swan to make way for the revised Superman to follow. After thirty years drawing a single character, Swan found no great market existed for his talents; the occasional fill-in project such as his work on Teen Titans or Action Comics Weekly never served to replace regular work.

Swan in Exile

If this story had a happy ending, I would provide it. I feel tempted to contrive one, but perhaps Swan's memory deserves at least the truth. After 1986, Swan suffered increasingly from problems with money that cascaded into other problems. His marriage of over forty years came to an end in these circumstances, and Swan seems to have had some difficulty coping with this (as we would expect the best man among us to). Nonetheless, he seems to have tried to project optimism even to the last; he evidently avoided the easy thrill of denouncing those who fired him and who succeeded him; and, unlike the next generations of talent, did not blame his decline on the failings of fans. Here we can see, perhaps, the prototypical man Swan sought to project onto Superman and Clark Kent. Swan's occasional self-portraiture where he would draw himself as Kent tends to support this.

The loyalty of fans probably provided Swan with most of the happiness he enjoyed in his last years. Swan had, over a long, long career, built a body of fans who loved him and whom he loved, but by the nineties he no longer possessed a vehicle through which to communicate to them; and, even though he contributed work to DC into the nineties (and his seventies), the strain of underemployment aggravated the problems inherent in poor planning for a retirement Swan never got to enjoy.

His last two years saw Swan officially retire from the business and occasionally travel the convention circuit, where he maintained some contact with his loyalists. In 1996, Curt Swan, born in 1920, passed on, survived by an ex-wife and children. Superman survives, too, in spite of exaggerated rumors about his death; and, in spite of Swan's banishment from his titles, still bears frequent resemblance to the character Curt Swan shaped for thirty years.