I am about to do a similar bit of "scholarship"....concerning the protagonist of the 1930 novel GLADIATOR by Philip Wylie...and Siegel and Shuster's Superman character.

GLADIATOR, to those of you who might not have had the chance to read this excellent story, concerns a young man, Hugo Danner, whose mother had been injected by a serum by his biochemist father. He grew up able to leap tremendous distances, run at immense speeds, and was bulletproof.

He was also profoundly unhappy, never finding an adequate outlet for his abilities. Born circa 1894, he went to college in 1912, concealing his abilities...yet killing a man in college football, by accident. When World War I rolled around, he enlisted, and became a legend among the French troops he fought with, finally using his powers to its full extent. Nevertheless, no matter how many Germans died, more would come, so he finally decided to go to Berlin and end the Kaiser and his advisors. As he was about to do so, word came that the Armistice was signed.

He tried to stop corruption in government, was disgusted when a friend's father invested his money in munitions and made him a millionaire---his war activities had made him a pacifist--and finally went on an expedition to Yucatan. He revealed his secret to a scientist in the expedition, but later was overcome with self-doubts (he had a moodiness, a melancholia that went through the entire novel) and was struck by lightning at the end of the novel, and died.

A lousy deus ex machina ending to an otherwise terrific book, and one that everyone admits influenced Siegel and Shuster and the creation of Superman. Yet...

His origins---as given by Phillip Wylie---cannot be right. First off, no biochemist, as Danner's father did, would cite anything but the cube-square law as the source of the ant's ability to lift many times its own weight. An ant that was the size of a man would be unable to move.

Even more telling was the fact that the scientist father injected his wife with the serum, giving super-strength to the fetus. As Larry Niven pointed out, there are serious--indeed, insurmountable--- difficulties in a human woman carrying a super-strong child. If the child starts to kick, internal hemorrhaging would take place, killing the mother, and thus, the baby.

So we conclude that the origins of Danner, as given by Wylie, are fiction. Yet why would Wylie lie?

Only if he suspected that Danner was still alive.

No one was near Danner when he cursed the sky and was struck by lightning, so all that dialogue had to be made up, anyway. A large Indian struck by lightning, after the charring caused by the lightning, could have been mistaken for Danner.

Danner also had an uncomfortable habit of taking the law into his own hands. Despite his general aversion to war, he was not at all averse to killing evil men who he felt deserved killing. He might include in that category anyone who could reveal his secrets...so Wylie fictionalized several parts of the story, changing the origins and the parents, so that no one would be able to identify "Danner". Wylie didn't want to take any chances...

Now, we might wonder if someone as remarkable as Hugo Danner was ever heard of from anybody else. Well, interestingly enough, from 1934 on, two young Cleveland high school students tried to sell the story of a being who could leap buildings, run faster than an express train, who was bulletproof. Who, like Hugo Danner, was dark-haired, and well-built but not massively built. (Once, Hugo got a job as a strongman in a circus. He wore tights then, but padded muscles had to be built into them to make him more look the part. He was not as well-muscled as say, Arnold Schwartzenegger at his peak.) Who was also sexually attractive to members of the opposite sex (Hugo was rather notorious for his many affairs) and known for his desire to---unconventionally--help others.

Who had his abilities since he was a child, and who came from a small town. Whose first chronicled adventure involved him going after a war profiteer and munitions manufacturer---who (the protagonist, not the profiteer) was at heart a pacifist. Who, despite his pacifism, often took the law into his own hands (he once destroyed an entire newspaper printing press because it was blackmailing a politician) and would sometimes kill those who really deserved killing. (In his second adventure, he killed someone who was torturing military prisoners.)

In dozens of ways, the resemblence between Hugo Danner and the being who Siegel and Shuster called Superman was remarkable.

Is it any wonder that Hugo Danner's increasing melancholia finally caused a mild splitting of his personality? Where he could enjoy his abilities as Superman, and put them to good use, and pretend to be normal... as Clark Kent? Those were both things that Danner had wished desperately for, and the only way to realize both of them was to split his identity...

I suspect that the extraterrestrial origin of Superman is the true one, rather than the serum, for the reasons I mentioned above. There is no reason why a Kryptonian humanoid should age at the same rate as a human being, so in 1938...or even, perhaps, in 2000---he would look as young as ever.

Instead of passing by in a Model T, as implied by Shuster's picture in SUPERMAN #1, the Kents drove one of the earlier automobiles that were as much a curiosity and a toy as a mode of transportation in the late nineteenth century. Jonathan Abednego Kent, though a humble farmer, still had an interest in science, and that suggested to Wylie that he recast and fictionalize him as a biochemist. Martha Kent's piety was exagerrated into the burlesque that became Hugo's mother, Mathilda Danner, in the novel.

That Wylie heard the true story from the scientist of the Yucatan expedition, Prof. Daniel Hardin, is suggested by the fact that Wylie also wrote two other novels, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and AFTER WORLDS COLLIDE, in which Earth was doomed---and a small group escaped in a rocket ship. As if he were transposing Jor-El's plight on doomed Krypton to Earth, inspired by what happened to Krypton...

The true name of Hugo Danner/Clark Kent was doubtless something along the lines of Clark Hugo Kenner.

In the decade between the end of GLADIATOR and the beginning of the adventures that happened in the comic strip/book (which actually began about 1933 or 1934, since it's axiomatic that an adventure happened before it was written about, and we know Siegel and Shuster were peddling the costumed, dual-identitied Superman by then---which is one reason Lois Lane couldn't just hear about the new Superman character and figure out who her mild-mannered co-worker....those adventures weren't to be published until four years in the future)--Clark/Hugo finished college (evidently journalism school) and decided for a safe outlet for his powers.

If he did use the costume, and that was not an exageration by Siegel and Shuster, he did it for functional reasons, perhaps suggested by his stint as a circus strongman around 1913, where he wore functional tights. In an early Superman story, he was making one of his huge leaps, and then noticed people gathering where he was about to land. He used his cape to angle his fall, like a sail, so he could glide and landed somewhere else.

It's also worth noting that Siegel tended to have Superman fight, not super-menaces, but political grafters, wife-beaters, munitions manufacturers, corruption in many places---real-life menaces. Only in 1942 did he fight a costumed menace, and that was a simple blackmailer/assassin called the Archer. It made for some one-sided battles...but it would be perfectly understandable if a real-life character encountered, for the most part, real-life menaces.

I might note that in the early comics, people were constantly surprised that Superman was not a myth or a legend, that few believed in his existence until they ran into him---or acted as if they were totally ignorant of who they were facing. Again, that gets more and more understandable...Clark Kent, in his reporter job, probably did much to ridicule or downplay any reports of a super-strong crusader that hit the newsdesk, as today some reporters downplay UFO reports.

Siegel and Shuster gradually lost control over their own character, being replaced by hacks who didn't understand the protagonist, and constantly gave Superman greater and greater feats to do....so that eventually, Siegel and Shuster sued DC Comics to regain control over their character...and lost. By the late fifties, Superman in the comics could move planets and fly or speed faster than light, in a soon out-of-control series of exaggerations, similar to what we see in Paul Bunyan stories.

Siegel returned to the character in the late fifties through about 1965, but the character had almost changed out of recognition. Some of the details he introduced then might have had a basis in fact, but they are much more suspect, after over a decade of distortions...

The real Hugo Danner/Clark Kent doubtless didn't care...he might even have welcomed the obvious contraditions and childishness of the comic book, the better to deceive others into thinking he didn't exist...until it was too late.

There seem to be little differences between Hugo Danner and Clark Kent that could not be explained as a matter of years passing....with one exception:

Hugo had dark, almost black eyes. Clark had blue eyes. Yet we know some other changes were happening in Clark's eyes in his early adventures...

Superman originally had no x-ray vision. He resorted to various means to eavesdrop when needed, but didn't develop x-ray vision until nearly a year after his first appearance.

Could x-ray vision and super-hearing (which showed up a little earlier than x-ray vision, but not much) be the sign of a mature Kryptonian? Are those abilities that Kryptonians gain when they are older, say, forty years old in Earth years? And given the great changes taking place in his eyes, would a change in eye color, from dark, almost black---to blue---be totally out of place or unbelievable? It might have been a by-product of those changes.

Otherwise the similarities between Hugo Danner and Clark Kent/Superman are overwhelming.

It is difficult to resist, then, identifying the dark-haired, well muscled, leaper-over-tall-buildings in GLADIATOR as a much more famous character...

Clark Kent.

PS. No, of course I don't believe any of this. This is just having literary fun. Yet I assure you the theory's merits will be debated in several forums. To many of us---this is a great game.

Think of it as a study in what fascinates me, and how essentially childish I am.

Man-of-Steel crazy...after all these years.