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Answer by Elliot S. Maggin, principal writer of the comic book series, 1971–86:
Most of the latter-day Superman writers, and several of my own contemporaries, come down on the side of the notion that Clark is the real person and Superman is just what he can do. I don’t agree with that at all, and here’s why:
The hero must be the character’s best self. When Odysseus appeared at home disguised as a beggar, the big resolution was that he was “really” Odysseus. When young Arthur yanked the sword from the stone what that revealed, even to himself, was that he was the king and always had been. When the prince of Egypt, for just his own sense of rage and righteousness, killed a taskmaster and was banished for taking the side of the slaves, only then did his real origin become clear to those around him. In every classical setting the hero first arrives in disguise, and Superman is, at the very least, our own age’s quintessential classical hero.
Superman is, among many other things, an artist. When the rest of us create a character, that character is as well-defined as we can make him. The comic-book medium gave birth to our own classical hero because only in a medium that crude, whose end product is that apparently unfinished, can a creator so effectively suggest a concept of such endless potency. Clark is a complete creation of Superman, so complete that he’s effectively real. Clark is a natural-born citizen. He votes. He has jealousies and shortcomings. He has opinions, real ones that occasionally diverge from those of Superman. They have altogether different spiritual beliefs, for example. Clark has appropriately nerdy hobbies. He scrapbooks, for heaven’s sake. He collects his favorite classic TV commercials on DVD. His favorite is the one for the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce where the old man skips out of the retirement home to meet his grandson in the parking lot (“Hey, Boo-boo”) and rides off for a weekend of gambling and debauchery.
Superman can’t do the stuff Clark can do. Not that he wouldn’t if he didn’t have a sacred duty to perform, but he can’t. So not only is Clark a construct for the purposes of guarding what measure of privacy he requires for his own emotional self-preservation, but Clark is the outlet that allows Superman to do the things that Superman can’t do in public. Clark can, and that makes him Superman’s saving grace. Clark, the character, doesn’t need Superman, but Superman, the real deal, absolutely needs Clark. That’s why Superman created Clark and not the other way around. He created Clark and re-creates him every day.
Every day the president of the United States wakes up and puts on the raiment once worn by Lincoln, and who he really is during the period of his presidency is the president of he United States. And you call him “Mr. President” for the rest of his life.
When he gets up in the morning, the heavyweight champion of the world, whoever he was when he was born, embodies the mantle once carried by Ali and Louis, and from the moment someone says, “Good morning,” that’s who he is, really. I once lost an arm-wrestling contest with Jack Dempsey on the sidewalk outside the 21 Club. He was 76, and I was 22, and do you think the old man would let the swaggering kid win and impress the girl he’s with? He couldn’t possibly. What he did was damn near break my arm and then said, “Winner gets the redhead, OK?” He was so profoundly “the Champ” that not even his closest friends thought of him as just Jack.
I once created a thing called Lexcorp. It was just a throwaway word in a story I wrote. But I thought about it for a long time and I was very happy when I came up with the name. It’s my name, and every time someone uses it I take a measure of pride in its use. I get to be the guy who first said that eventually Luthor evolves from a super-villain in a prison jump suit with a collection of wacky gizmos in a hidden basement somewhere into a big badass industrialist. Obviously other people have done more with the concept than I ever did. Lexcorp has evolved into a major institution in Superman’s continuity and that was through no doing of my own. But I do insist that whenever someone, somewhere mentions the “creation” of Lexcorp, I get the credit, as properly in the continuity Martha and Jonathan Kent certainly get the credit for first creating the concept of Clark Kent. But it is others who refined and continue to build Lexcorp. And every day that he gets up in the morning and goes to work, Superman goes far beyond the Kents’ original germ of an idea to build Clark.
Clark is real. That’s the whole brilliance of the concept. But the concept is even more “real” within the context of the storytelling than the storytelling can represent. That’s why the character is and thinks of himself as Superman.
Does Clark Kent put on a costume to become Superman, or does Superman put on a costume to become Clark Kent? originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:
