Los orígenes del Súper-Héroe

Foro dedicado a temas de Superman

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Shelby
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Los orígenes del Súper-Héroe

Mensaje por Shelby »

He encontrado un artículo sobre Supermán, en el que cuentan cómo está inspirado en una persona real, y me ha parecido muy interesante el ponerlo. Está en inglés, pero cuando pueda lo traduzco...

¡O si la wela quiere...! :smt002 :smt003
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. For more than 70 years, Superman has been the king of superheroes.

Whether fighting injustice, defeating evil-doers or saving the world in comic books, on TV or on the big screen, the Man of Steel has proved himself both indestructibly popular and unassailably virtuous.

Yet, having spent all those years fighting for truth and justice, it now seems that Superman has been keeping a deep, dark secret about his true origins (and no, it is not his secret identity as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent).

Far from being born on the pages of Action Comics back in 1938 - as is generally acknowledged to be the case - it seems that the Man of Steel actually came into being six years earlier, on the night of June 2, 1932, when an elderly Jewish immigrant from Lithuania died during a robbery at his second-hand clothing store.

Only now can the tragic story of the birth of Superman be told for the first time.

To understand its poignancy, we must go back to mid-town America - Cleveland, Ohio to be precise - and the brutal killing of immigrant Mitchell Siegel at the hands of a gang who robbed his clothes shop.

It was Siegel's teenage son, Jerry, who, along with his friend Joe Shuster, would go on to create the character of Superman.

Faced with the brutal death of his father at the hands of a bunch of thugs, the young man's sadness and anger inspired him to create a superhuman crimefighter who was impervious to bullets and who had himself lost his father.

'Think about it,' says thriller writer Brad Meltzer. 'Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero.'

The story of that tragic night has remained unknown outside the Siegel family until now, and Jerry never once mentioned the crime in the hundreds of interviews he conducted before his death in 1996.

Perhaps he feared that people would make a link between the tragedy and the creation of Superman, and the aura of proud invincibility that surrounded the Man of Steel would be pierced.


Whatever the true reasons for the secrecy surrounding the loss of his father, there is little doubt that it had a stunningly profound effect on 17-year-old Jerry Siegel.

It was just after 8pm, as Mitchell Siegel was closing up his clothing store, that three men entered the shop.

Siegel, a hardworking 60-year-old who had emigrated from Lithuania a number of years previously, and who also worked as a sign-writer to make ends meet, asked if he could help the men.

One of them asked to see a suit, and when Mitchell handed it over, the man began to walk out without paying.

What happened next is unclear, as the police report is incomplete. Even so, a struggle ensued and either Mitchell was shot in the chest and killed, or collapsed from the shock and suffered a fatal heart attack.

The effect of Mitchell's death on his wife and six children was severe, but Jerry, who was the youngest and still at school, was devastated.

Obsessed with comic books and science fiction magazines, Jerry was a geeky, unprepossessing teenager who was both unpopular and awkward.

After the death of his father, he poured himself into the writing and creation of science fiction stories and fantastic characters, and in 1933, he and his friend Joe Shuster first began to talk about a new sort of comic book hero.

After a series of false starts, they finally came up with an invincible crime-fighting superbeing who came dressed in a very distinctive outfit.

'We said: "Let's create a kind of costume and let's give him a big S on his chest, and a cape, make him as colourful as we can, and as distinctive as we can," ' said Siegel.

In the oldest surviving unpublished artwork, Superman is described as 'the most astounding fiction character of all time', and is seen flying to the rescue of a man being held-up at gunpoint by an armed robber.

The link with Siegel's father seems painfully clear.

For the next five years, Siegel and Shuster shopped Superman around to countless comic book companies and newspapers - but with little success.

Having decided to focus on other characters, they were just about to give up on Superman altogether when National Allied Publishing bought the character for $130 and made him the cover star of Action Comics No.1 (a near-mint condition copy of which is now worth more than £750,000).

For this meagre sum, Siegel and Shuster signed over the rights of their creation 'forever' - a move that they would both spend lifetimes regretting.

Superman rapidly grew in popularity, and when he wasn't combating criminals and injustice in America, he could be seen fighting a new menace: the Nazis.

In the years before America entered the war, Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels was outraged by Superman's battles with the 'master race' (and their popularity with the American public) that he used to scream in meetings 'Superman is Jewish!'


Goebbels even went so far as to place a propaganda piece in a German newspaper that accused Jerry Siegel of being 'intellectually and physically circumcised. . . a beetle'.

Through the Forties and Fifties, Superman quickly became an American icon and influenced a whole range of successful superheroes, including Wonder Woman and Captain America.

Created by Bob Kane, Batman appeared for the first time in Detective Comics a year after Superman and it was a hit, too.

Although it is unclear how well Bob Kane knew Jerry Siegel, Batman's back-story also bears an uncanny resemblance to the tragic events of Siegel's life: the fictional character who transforms into him, Bruce Wayne, decides to put on his bat suit only after his parents are killed in a robbery.

At the top of the superhero pile, however, was Superman. Apart from his starring role in the comic books, he could also be found as the star of his own radio serial, in cartoons and in movies, as toys, on cereal packets and even lunchboxes.

Yet, neither Siegel nor Shuster received a penny of the millions being made from their creation.

The pair went to court on a number of occasions over the years to try to recover their creation for themselves, and although they won small settlements, they seemed unable to win back the rights to Superman.

Although Siegel continued to write for a number of comics as a writer-for-hire, by the Seventies he was living in near-penury and working as a mail-clerk earning $7,000 a year.

After hearing that Warner Brothers had paid $3million for the rights to make Superman the Movie with Christopher Reeve in the lead role in 1978, the pair decided to try once more in court.

This time they were successful, and DC Comics finally agreed to pay the pair $20,000 a year each for life.

They were also given a credit on all future publications and movies.

For Jerry Siegel, it was a happy ending to what had started as a tragic, but very simple tale.

'We did not get Superman from our greatest legends, but because a boy lost his father,' Brad Meltzer said.

'Superman came not out of our strength but out of our vulnerability.'


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¡¡¡¡AY, OMÁ QUÉ CALORES!!!! ¡Gracias por tu regalo, Nitta!

smallet
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Mensaje por smallet »

Hola Shelby no se si tiene que ver o no con lo que decís, ya que no he visto la entrevista, pero estuve viendo por ahí que la S de superman en el pecho no es otra cosa que la figura del sagrado corazón de Jesus, si se fijan hay un parecido y tiene que ver con muchas cosas. En primer lugar con el contexto en que se dió la aparición del personaje y la relación con la teoría del superhombre de Nietsztche etc....
saludos !! :smt006
Espero tu traducción ya que soy un tanto chapucera con el ingles.


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