My writing Superman, or writing comics of any kind, would hardly have seemed a likely career path for me when I started out. I had no connection with the field and certainly no interest in it. Yet through a number of unexpected turns in the road, I somehow achieved what still strikes me as a kind of accidental celebrity through my supposedly significant role in helping create what historians of the medium call the Golden Age of Comics. That's a period that reaches back to the beginning of the '40s – actually a little earlier to allow room for that milestone in comic history, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman, which first appeared in DC's Action Comics in 1938. Accidental arrivals often disguise deeper currents and vital synchronicities, so it is, as I have now discovered, important to look closely at the paths that lead to them.
It began like that in a small way. After my third Batman script, the editors really began to like my work. And I went on to write everything they threw at me. And then one day they asked me to do Superman. At first I demurred, thinking the character somehow dull. When you're dealing with superpowers, I thought, what challenges can there be to make the character really interesting?
I remember that morning especially well, particularly what it was like as I left the office at Grand Central Palace – 480 – Lexington Avenue. That old address is fresh in my mind after more than fifty years as was the feeling of spring even in the sludgy canyons of Lexington Avenue as I crossed the street to the little Chock Full o' Nuts sandwich shop, where I sat for an hour mulling over whether I should add Superman to all the other stuff to which I was committed. Odd how at such moments our perceptions can become sharpened and then shift to what at first appear to be details extraneous to the problem at hand. I noticed this very bland-looking, neatly dressed young man sitting at the counter directly across from me. I kept looking at him without quite understanding at first what intrigued me about him. He was probably one of the most ordinary-looking people I had ever seen. He was as vapid as the thin cheese-and-nut sandwich he was almost daintily munching on.
The alter ego connection
Sometimes we're thinking furiously and don't realize we're doing it. And then, abruptly, we become aware of ourselves, as I did at that particular moment when I suddenly made the connection with Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent. The thought came to me that there was something about Clark Kent's blandness – that it represented something universal, as though in the ordinariness of each of us there had to be a place of rest, of relief. I didn't yet grasp all the implications of this, except that Superman seemed to highlight that common condition because in him the extremes were so much greater – the ultra-powerful Man of Steel alongside the ultra-ordinary Clark Kent. The contrast between the self as non-entity and the self as all-powerful seemed to suggest a secret, private, but universal experience.
I found myself fascinated by the complexities that seemed to lie hidden within the ordinariness of each of us. And that led me to recall some of the inexplicable gifts and capacities I had found in so many outwardly ordinary people. I remembered a musician who heard extraordinary Mozartian flashes of music in her head that she mostly never troubled to write down; a housewife who always knew when anyone in her large extended family was in trouble, no matter how far away the family member lived; one young man who worked at our local post office who could predict the weather several days in advance with virtual infallibility; a certain German refugee who had been too brutalized by the Nazis to hold a job any more but who could walk into a betting parlour, make a modest wager, and never fail to walk away with enough to get him through a few days. Then there was Warden Day, a master lithographer who saw people's auras so that she always seemed to know their state of health and even their mood of the moment. Each of these 'ordinary' people revealed greater of lesser kinds of 'super' powers.
The ordinary and the extraordinary
These long shards of memory kept stabbing at me as I sat at that Chock Full o' Nuts counter. And what had they to do with whether or not I should agree to write Superman? Precisely this: that there really had to be some sort of deeper hidden self of which our outward Clark Kent personality was but the dim reflection. I didn't understand all of it yet. But it was clear to me that if I tried to write Superman, if they let me do the stories my own way, if they let me explore more fully that division between the ordinary and the extraordinary so clearly manifested in 'the Man of Steel,' it would mean something more than just another comic strip with superpowered monsters punching each other out. On that basis, then, I made up my mind, when back upstairs to the office, and told my editor I was ready to take on Superman.
Years later, long after I had stopped writing Superman comics, I discovered the real meaning of Superman in my life: he is the archetypal embodiment of the highest point of individual consciousness. He's totally fixed on a single point. His one defining act – his rescue mission. That's what he does. He's a being that converges totally, with all his mind and strength and energy, on a single demand arising out of a single moment. He's specialized, you might say, to live entirely in the now. You know how adrenaline pulls the whole body together so that all its energy is centred on combating danger? Superman is like that. He's us – when we're truly impermeable, indestructible – totally concentrated. In fact, that's his archetypal reality. It's that very one-pointedness that makes him a kind of cult figure. Because everything big and heroic we ever do is done that way – in the now. Speech is always an afterthought. It has to do with reflection, looking back or looking ahead. The now involves sheer doing. It has nothing to say. That's why you can't have a Superman without a Clark Kent – because no-one can live all the time at that level of experience. There has to be a retreat into ordinariness, to self-recollection, to talk and planning and remembering. I think I always knew that, and that's why I wrote my stories the way I did.
From An Unlikely Prophet, © 2006 by Alvin Schwartz, published by Destiny Books.
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Inspirational features 
