"Now listen to me, Clark! This great strength of yours--you've got to hide it from people or they'll be scared of you!"--Jonathan Kent, Superman #1.

"You're not an ordinary human being. When people find that out, they'll---they'll----"

"They'll hate me?"

"Because they fear you. So you see, you've got to be good and kind and considerate---to justify all that strength. Some day you'll find a use for it---a big, noble use---and then you can make it work and be proud of it. Until that day, you have to be humble like the rest of us. You mustn't show off or do cheap tricks. Then you'd just be a clown. Wait your time, son, and you'll be glad of it. And---another thing---train your temper. You must never lose it. You can see what would happen if you did? Understand?"

"I guess I do. It's hard work--doin' all that."

"The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you. And you're the strongest of them all, Hugo."---Abednego Danner to his son, Hugo Danner, GLADIATOR, Philip Wylie.

Adapting the first four chapters of GLADIATOR in light of the theory that Clark Kent and Hugo Danner are one and the same...

After Krypton blew up, Kal-El's rocket continued on its way to Earth...its cargo, "the sole survivor of a once mighty civilization". In its light-years-long trip to Earth, it narrowly missed "a great jagged meteor". The "gravity of a giant sun almost draws the vessel to a molten death"---both details from Superman's newspaper strip, although I have no idea how Siegel knew those details. In a very early sixties' Superman story by Siegel, it was revealed that Superman's rocket nearly collided with an alien vessel, which with its incomprehensible science made an "energy duplicate" of the rocket and the child within. This second rocket had a slightly different trajectory, and the energy-being---in all respects an exact duplicate of Superman in powers and outward appearance...was raised by a couple of criminals, and became the maurauder known as Super-Menace. (He fought Superman once, and almost won, since he had no vulnerability to kryptonite---yet a confrontation with his unloving foster-parents led to their death and the energy-being's suicide.)

Unfortunately, the rocket caught fire in the friction, and though it made a safe landing, "hungry flames creep greedily for the tiny sleeping passenger"...

Then a "passing motorist", an "elderly couple, the Kents" rescued the sleeping babe from the burning space ship.

"Good Heavens! Look, Martha! It's a child!"

"The poor thing! It's been abandoned!"

Despite popular impression, Johnathan and Martha Kent---as I will call them, although the story in Superman #1 has Jonathan call her "Mary"--were not driving a model T Ford. Instead, they were driving a car from before the days of mass production, those automobiles which were more objects curiosity than anything else. Either a Benz Carriage, first made in 1885, a pioneer gas-powered vehicle, or a new Duryea, a pioneer American gas-powered car. That came out in 1893-1894...and Kal-El landed on Earth no later than 1894, if my supposition that "Hugo Danner" and "Clark Kent" are the same person. (I'll be citing evidence from GLADIATOR over the next few articles to support my position.)

We know that Kal-El was months old when he came to earth, since Jor-El labored "month after month" to solve the mysteries of interstellar travel. How old he was we're not sure. Let's look at the description of young Hugo Danner in GLADIATOR, though.

"He was as fleshy as most healthy infants, but the flesh was more than normally firm. He was inordinately active. His eyes had been gray but, already, they gave promise of the inkiness they afterwards exhibited. He was born with a quantity of black hair---hair so dark as to be nearly blue."(Italics mine. Superman was often drawn with dark hair with bluish highlights. His change in eye color from inky black to blue may have been the precursor to his getting x-ray vision in the thirties'.)

"The infant was turned over to an orphan asylum, where it astounded the attendents with its feats of strength." Young Clark is shown lifting a chest o'drawers with two hands, a large plush chair with one hand.

The Kents returned soon afterwards. Jonathan said, "We---we couldn't get that sweet child out of our mind."

Martha said, "We've come to adopt him if you'll permit us."

The orphan asylum was secretely glad to get rid of Clark. This unnaturally strong child could have wrecked the asylum.

Now, in GLADIATOR, Abednego Danner was a professor of biology in a small college in the town of Indian Creek, Colorado, a thin wisp of a man. In the Superman stories, Jonathan Kent is a fairly healthy but "elderly" farmer and possibly later a shopkeeper. In GLADIATOR, Matilda Danner was a domineering, religiously fanatical woman who could easily overpower her husband, both physically and in a relationship. In the Superman stories, Martha was a kind farmwife.

Why the discrepency?

When Philip Wylie wrote GLADIATOR, from details he got from "Prof. Daniel Hardin", he suspected that Clark/Hugo had not died so---conveniently. So he gave him a different origin and changed details of his parents enough where most people would not connect the two. He wasn't worried about being sued---given Clark/Hugo's propensity for taking the law into his own hands, he was worried about his life. He couldn't resist chronicling such an important and amazing story, but he made sure that no one would casually connect fact and fiction. That "Hardin" told him the full story is indicated by WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, which was Wylie's tale of a doomed Earth and a rocket escape to another planet---inspired by Jor-El's race against doom.

Yet no real professor of biology would have said things like,

"Look at the insects--the ants. Strength a hundred times our own. An ant can carry a large spider---yet an ant is tissue and fiber, just like a man. If a man could be given the same sinews---he could walk off with his own house."

Or...

"Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a grasshopper---and he'll be able to leap over a church. I tell you, there is something that determines the quality of every muscle and nerve. Find it--transplant it---and you have the solution."

Any professor of biology, especially a brillant one like Danner is supposed to be, would know that the strength of the insects relative to the strength of men is a function of the cube-square law. That strength only increases with the square of the size---that muscles fibers, since they pull along a two-dimensional plane, only increase four times as much if they get twice as big---where as the weight, since it's a three-dimensional function, gets eight times as large. A grasshopper the size of a man would snap under its spindly legs, as would an ant.

Nor is it conceivable that a professor who developed a serum that enabled tadpoles to swim right through plate glass would be able to have mammals---whether cats like Samson or infants like Hugo---who as fetuses would not kill their mothers during the last trimester, with their kicking. As Larry Niven pointed out in "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", the kicking would pierce the mother, killing both mother and baby.

Superman's extraterrestrial origins actually bring up much fewer problems, if we can accept an extraterrestrial who resembles humanity in so many respects. (I solve that in my Hall of Worlds by having the Kryptonians as genetically-altered offshoots of the human race, taken to another planet by true aliens.)

Both Abednego Danner and Matilda Danner reflect Wylie's own theories of female dominance and "momism", as reflected by his novel, GENERATION OF VIPERS. Yet there is a kernel of truth in such portrayals. Jonathan was a bit more scientific-minded, though a farmer, than Martha. It was he who insisted on the automobile, an oddity among people in the late nineties. Martha was more religious, though by no means the bigoted fanatic "Matilda Danner" was. Jonathan was a tad less robust than most farmers, Martha a tad more robust than many farmwives.

In these series of articles I will call Clark's foster-father Jonathan Abednego Kent. His foster-mother will be Martha Matilda Kent.

Jonathan made an iron playpen for young Clark, after he easily escaped or smashed the old one, and went from a second story window to the ground fifteen feet below without a scratch. At the age of six months, the minister, puzzled, came by to visit the Kents, wondering why little Clark hadn't been brought to be baptized, and why Martha had stopped coming regularly. Martha insisted on a home baptism, and when the minister mentioned Clark should be punished when he took apart a crib, she bid him good-day.

Clark "was a good-natured,usually sober, and very sensitive child." When he could walk,he was forbidden to jump---his jumps, even for a two and a half year old, were shocking to behold. "He was carefully instructed on his behavior out of doors. No move of his was to indicate his difference from an ordinary child."

"He was taught kindess and respect for people and property. His every destructive impulse was carefully curbed. That training was possible only because he was sensitive and naturally susceptible to advice. Punishment had no physical terror for him, because he could not feel it. But disfavour, anger, vexation, or disapointment in another person reflected itself in him at once."

At four and a half, he was sent to Sunday School, his first social setting. On his third Sunday, someone said,

"Here comes the strong boy."

Clark denied it, struggling with two hymn books. "I can't even lift these books." He lied, of course, assuming a weakness even moreso than of his fellows....just as he would years later as "meek, mild" Clark Kent. "He hated to be different---and he was beginning to realize he was different.

"From his earliest days that longing oiccupied him. He sought to hide his strength."

Martha had a bigger role in his upbringing than Wylie indicated. But even Wylie said, "his mother, ever zealous to direct her son in the path of righteousness, talked to him often about his strength and how great it would become and what great and good deeds he could do with it."

In Superman #1, when Jonathan talks about Clark hiding his strength, it is Martha who says,

"But when the proper time comes, you must use it to assist humanity."

Whether Martha ever made the young Clark carry a keg called "temptation" as Wylie said I've not been able to determine whether that's true, or a fictionalization to emphasize her fanatic side.

When Clark was five, Jonathan taught him to read. It took an entire winter, but when it was done, Clark emerged with a new world open to him, a world where no one bothered him. Rumors of his strength kept other children from playing with him, so he found solace in books.

The fall he was six, he had to enter school. "His sensitiveness and fear of ridicule made him a voracious student. He liked books. He liked to know things and to read them." That spring, though, a lanky farmer's son tried to bully him. After Clark knocked the chip off his shoulder, the farmer's son (older than the other first graders, evidently held back) hit Clark and kicked Clark in the shin. "The farmer's boy fell on his face as if by an invisible agency. Then his body was lifted in the air." They had a brief glimpse of Clark holding the bully's form over his head. "Then he flung it aside, over the circle that surrounded him, and the body fell with a thud." The bully was badly injured, "his arm was broken and his sides were purpling where 'Hugo' had seized him." The teacher came and sent Clark to the blacksmith to be whipped, a punishment usually reserved for high schoolers.

(In the Superman comic strip, there was one panel that showed a six or seven-year-old Clark threatening a high school bully he was holding up with one hand, who had caused another kid to cry, saying, "This will teach you not to pick on anyone smaller than you!" The bully replies, "STOPIT! STOPIT! I didn't mean ta hurt him!" If that really happened, somehow Clark kept the teachers or his parents finding out about it.)

A year later, when a man was trapped by a two-ton heavy wagon, six men couldn't lift it---but when the seven-year-old boy helped, suddenly the wagon lifted easily, and they rescued the man. Thinking he would be thanked, instead he was told to "beat it"...they hadn't realized it had been he, and only he, who had really lifted the wagon.

At ten, they had forgotten that Clark was different. "He was popular in school. He fostered the unexpressed theory that his strength had been a phenomenon of his childhood---one that diminished as he got older."

He read Poe, the Bible, Thackeray, Swift, and Defoe. "At ten he was a stalwart and handsome lad. His brow was high and surmounted by his peculiarly black hair. His eyes were wide apart, inky, unfathomable. He carried himself with the grace of an athelete. He studied hard and he worked hard for his parents, taking care of a cow and chickens, of a stable and a large lawn, of flowers and a vegetable garden." He certainly sounds more like a farmer's son than the son of a college professor, even in a decade where many people lived semi-rural lives. It's noteworthy that "Hugo Danner", in Wylie's novel, several times gets jobs on farm, and mentions he "grew up in farming country". There is no hint that he was comfortable in a laboratory...and one would think Abednego Danner would have had his son learn the ins and outs of a biological lab....if he was truly a college biology professor.)

Then one day he went by himself for a walk in the mountains. (Many have placed "Smallville" in Kansas. I myself believe "Smallville/Indian Creek" to have been in Colorado, as Wylie indicated. Of course, Colorado borders Kansas, so it may have been near the Kansas border. But the mentions of mountains suggests Colorado, not flat Kansas. Colorado Springs would be an obvious choice, but it seems too large for the mostly rural small town Wylie described. Win Eckert, a distinguished scholar on the Wold Newton family and a Colorado native, suggested a small town called Manitou Springs, nestled in the foothills at the base of Pike's Peak, not far from Colorado Springs. It's impossible to verify that educated guess, but it's one to keep in mind. Another suggestion is Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, near the Kansas border.)

"'I wonder,' he thought,'how fast I can run, how far I can jump." He was startled to find that the turns of the trail were too frequent to see the course, and realized he was running at an abnormal pace. He did a broadjump, and then was startled to see himself vaulting above the green covering of the trail. He came down heavily, and whispered to himself,

"Nobody can do that, not even an acrobat."

Then he tried jumping straight up. He rose fully forty feet in the air.

"Good Jesus!"

"There in the forest, beyond the eye of man, he learned that he was superhuman. It was a rapturous discovery. He knew at that hour that his strength was not a curse. He had inklings of his invulnerability."

That night, after dinner, Clark said to Jonathan Kent:

"Dad, let's you and me take a walk."

They walked along the leafy street, talking about his work at school. Then Jonathan said,

"Well, son, what is it?"

"Well--I kind of thought I ought to tell you. You see--this afternoon---well---you know I've always been a sort of strong kid--"

"I know--"

"And you haven't said that much about it to me. Except to be gentle--"

"That's so. You must remember it."

"Well--I don't have to be gentle with myself, do I? When I'm alone---like in the woods, that is?"

"You mean--you like to---ah---let yourself out---when you're alone?"

"That's what I mean. You see, Dad, I---well--I went walkin' today--and I--I kind of tried myself out."

"And?"

"Well--I'm not just a strong kid, Dad. I don't know what's the matter with me. It seems I'm not like other kids at all. I guess it's been gettin' worse all these years since I was a baby."

"Worse?"

"I mean---I been gettin' stronger. An' now it seems like I'm about--well--I don't like to boast--but it seems like I'm about the strongest man in the world. When I try it, it seems like there isn't any stopping me. I can go on--far as I like. Runnin'. Jumpin'. I can do things, Dad. It kind of scares me. I can jump higher'n a house. I can run faster'n a train. I can pull up big trees an' push 'em over."

"I see. Suppose you show me."

Clark looked up and down the street, saw there was no one else. "Look out then. I'm gonna jump."

Jonathan saw his son crouch, but then he seemed to vanish. Four seconds later, he landed where he had stood.

"See, Dad?"

"Do it again."

On the second trial the farmer's eye followed the soaring form.

"Did you see me?"

"I saw you, son."

"Kind of funny, isn't it?"

"Let's talk some more. Do you realize, son, that no one else on earth can do what you just did?"

"Yeah. I guess not."

"It's a glorious thing. And dangerous."

Then, contrary to what Wylie wrote, his father did not tell him of a scientific experiment, of injecting his mother with a serum. Jonathan took Clark to the field where he had buried what was left of the rocket that had brought him to Earth. He explained that it was he and Martha who had found him and left him with the orphanage. Clark had known he was adopted, but his extrastellar origins were totally unknown to him.

How he was a gift from the stars. How if he was not as other men---it was his heritage. That scientists would want to examine him---perhaps even dissect him--if they knew. Which was another reason to hide the truth, for now.

So Jonathan explained to Clark that in many ways, he wasn't--coudn't be expected to be--- like other men.

"Sure. I'm like a man made of iron instead of meat."

Then Jonathan Abednego Kent gave Clark the speech quoted at the top of this article, the one Wylie had Abednego Danner give to Hugo Danner, the "good and kind and considerate" speech. It was the soundest counsel Clark would receive.

For his own amusement, the young boy made his own fort out of an abandoned mine. He had days and days of fun with it, playing by himself, stretching his abilities to the full. Then, two professors, Whitaker and Smith, came across it, and finding Clark there, thought he had disturbed an old ruin, that he couldn't possibly have built it. They patronized him, treated him with contempt, accused him of being a liar.

He drove them off, and then said,

"Hey! I'm not a liar!"

...and casually tossed a stone over a hundred pounds and Professors Whitaker and Smith "escaped death by a scant margin". He destroyed his own fort, seeing the men would not leave it alone. Then he chased after the retreating professors, appearing suddenly before them.

"Don't tell any one about that or about me. If you do--I'll break down your house just like I broke mine. Don't even tell my family. They know it, anyhow."

They kept silent about it. They knew they wouldn't be believed, in any case.

This was Clark's early childhood....his first ten years on Earth.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

GLADIATOR, Philip Wylie.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.