Two-Month Festival Will Celebrate Superman's Cleveland Origins

A Superman exhibit at the Cleveland Public Library Credit: Tim Evanson/FlickrCC

For one of Cleveland’s most important native sons, there’s surprisingly little fanfare.

We’re talking about Superman, of course, born here in 1938 out of the minds of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Sure, there’s the second-floor exhibit, with Siegel’s desk and a few posters, at the Cleveland Public Library. There’s the triangular plaque and “S” sign in front of Siegel’s childhood home in Glenville. And, yes, there’s that little nook for the busy travelers exiting Cleveland Hopkins’ Baggage Claim.

All the more reason, some say, to create a bigger, more fitting homage to one of the largest, bestselling superheroes in history right here in Cleveland.

And this fall, that’s happening.

From September 6th to November 2nd, a consortium of comic book scholars and CPL librarians will be hosting a two-month celebration of the Man of Steel and his connection to the city where he was created.

In a wide span of locations all over Northeast Ohio, from Ursuline College in Pepper Pike to Bookhouse Brewing on West 25th to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Siegel and co-writer Joe Shuster’s most famous comic creation will be analyzed, deconstructed, and celebrated across 23 unique events. There will be screenings of 1981’s Superman II, a Superman as “cultural icon” talk at the CPL, a panel on October 28th with Lois Lane scholar Sarah Kuhn and Laura Siegel Larson, Jerry Siegel’s daughter.

To festival host Valentino Zullo, it’s the first big Superman conference in Cleveland in the past 35 years.

“The last major celebration was in 1988—that’s not a joke!” Zullo, an English professor at Ursuline College, told Scene. “It was Superman’s 50th anniversary, the last time there was a celebration.”

A lifelong admirer of comics, Zullo’s origin of interest in a Superman festival began in 2016, when he helped Kent State professor Vera Camden orchestrate a Wonder Woman Symposium during the Hillary Clinton-elect era of American politics.

Then, last year, Zullo applied for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to spearhead a Rust Belt Colloqium—an academic’s conference to honor Lower Midwest lore. It was, Zullo recalled, a regional success. Such geographic interest spiked his intrigue in tying it to—arguably—Northeast Ohio’s greatest superhero.

“We thought, ‘Oh, okay. Superman is turning 85. We did well with Wonder Woman—did we want to do something for him?'” Zullo recalled. With help from Ursuline colleague Katherine Trustel, Zullo compiled a growing list of sponsors: the Rock Hall, CPL, the Cleveland Museum of Art. “And a lot were telling us, ‘We could host something.’ And it just grew from there.”

As Zullo suggests, Cleveland has always seemed to botch any attempt at a world class homage to Siegel, Shuster and their brainchild.

In 1988, after Superman’s 50th anniversary conference, a company called Neverending Battle Inc. vowed to erect a 40-foot statue of the Man of Steel, along with a museum, somewhere near the lakefront. By year’s end, due to gross mismanagement, Neverending was $200,000 in debt. They disbanded. Nothing was built.

Days after Siegel died from a heart attack at 77, in February 1996, Cleveland Councilman William Patmon led a campaign to honor him, along with Shuster, who died four years earlier. (His house in Glenville was demolished around the same time.) The ideas ran aplenty: Name a street in their honor, build a memorial in the Cultural Gardens on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Something, Patmon said. Anything.

“It’s long, long overdue,” Tom Wilson, the creator of Ziggy, told a reporter for the Plain Dealer at the time, in 1996. “I can’t understand why Cleveland does not have a statue of Superman on a pedestal along Lake Erie, or flying off the top of Terminal Tower. This is the place where Superman was born. We should lay claim to that.”

Political cries ended in silence, at least until 2008, when a coalition of comic book artists raised $53,000 to fully restore Siegel’s childhood home at 10622 Kimberly Avenue.

Simultaneously, the city of Metropolis, Ill., was welcoming about roughly 120,000 annual visitors to its Super Museum. (Today, the so-called “Home of Superman” bills the museum as the “World’s Largest Collection of Superman” memorabilia—70,000 items.)

These days, the Siegel Shuster Society, run by Gary Kaplan, a relative of Siegel’s, seems to be the coalition leading the charge for Superman recognition by city officials. They’re currently working on petitioning City Hall to erect the statue, one could say, 35 years in the making. Recent plans for the North Coast could leave room for Clark Kent’s visage.

Vera Camden, a professor of English at Kent State and cohost of the Wonder Woman Symposium, said that the fall conference could have major socio-cultural implications for the city always seeking a balm for its inferiority complex.

The notion, one she’s elaborating on in a paper for the American Pyschoanalytic Association, relates to Superman’s own power-boosting effect on war-torn Americans in the 1940s, when such a sculpted, bulletproof hero—designed by teenage Jewish artists—lifted up morale in midst of Hitler’s reign.

The same, believe it or not, Camden suggested, could help boost Cleveland’s.

“It’s the reason it’s cool to bring that spirit here,” she told Scene in a phone call. “There’s that desire in Cleveland for a sense of local pride, the reoccurring endurance of the people.”

And, as far as that influencing City Hall to finally act?

“Put up a statue, capitalize on the water!” Camden said. “I mean, why aren’t we doing more of it? Think of the tourism potential.”

Camdem laughed. “What? What does Superman have to do? Fly over Lake Erie?”

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