Gene Luen Yang was surprised when he found out that “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” the now legendary 1940’s Superman radio serial that helped defeat the Ku Klux Klan, was never adapted to comic books.
What resulted was Superman Smashes the Klan, the story by Yang and artistic pair Gurihiru that modernizes the story for today’s audiences.
Next week, DC is releasing a collection of the story, which collects the original three issues released last year. And Yang says he was always writing the story with a collected edition in mind — and was hoping to reach middle-grade and young-adult audiences.
Yang is well known to DC fans for writing various Superman books, although he’s got a varied bibliography full of graphic novels for all ages. Newsarama talked to Yang about Superman Smashes the Klan to find out more.
Newsarama: Gene, let’s go back to the genesis of the story. Where did the idea come from?
Gene Luen Yang: I first heard about the original radio show from the book Freakonomics. There’s a chapter in it about the “Clan of the Fiery Cross” storyline. The authors use it to illustrate the power of story, about how this fictional story about a guy in a cape ends up taking down a real-world organization, at least affecting their membership.
And I read in that book that, at the center of all the action, was this Chinese-American family. So it’s always been in the back of my mind.
I ended up getting, there’s a great book called Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers, which is all about it. It’s a young adult book, and I read it with my kid when he was in, like, fifth grade.
Then a couple years ago, I had a lunch meeting with Marie Javins, who ended up being the editor on the book. And we were batting around ideas, and this one came up.
The thing about this story — the original radio show story — is it’s one of the most famous Superman stories out there, but it’s never been presented in comics. You know, I looked around for it and I was kind of surprised. It’s such an important story.
I feel really lucky that DC said yes, and Gurihuru and I were able to do it.
Nrama: So in this story, you changed things a little to modernize it — the family gets a little more attention, right?
Yang: In the original radio show, the Chinese-American family had pretty prominent roles in the first few episodes, and then eventually, they kind of drifted away and they fell into the background. So they were part of the instigating incident, but their active role kind of diminished as the episodes went on.
In the family, there are four members. There’s a father, a mother, a brother and a sister. In the original radio show, only the father and brother are given names and speaking roles. We only know about the mother and sister because they’re mentioned in a single line of dialogue.
So when we were talking about adapting this to comics for a more modern audience, we talked about maybe re-centering it so that different voices can be heard.
One of the blank spots in the original radio show was that sister. We don’t know anything about her. We just know that she exists — we don’t know her name or anything.
So ultimately, we decided to use her as one of the POV characters, as one of the main characters.
I think what I was trying to do with that is … one of the things that I really love about Superman is he fits in between two cultures. He’s between, like, this American culture — he’s kind of an American icon — but he’s also a foreigner. He’s not just from another culture, but another planet. He has to juggle these two things.
My favorite Superman stories do have hints of that, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it explored really deeply. And I thought that having Superman play against this kid would be a great way of doing that.
Nrama: The story still takes place in the time period of the radio show, right?
Yang: Yeah, yeah. I’m so thankful that DC let us keep that time period. The original radio show came out in 1946 and we were able to keep that time. I’m thinking of this from a very Chinese perspective. Within Chinese culture, sometimes current events are so painful to talk about that it’s easiest to do it through either fictional stories or stories from the past. It seemed like a good strategy for today, to use a story from the 1940s to talk about current events.
Nrama: The incident that sets off the story is the same as that original radio show?
Yang: Yeah, that part is the same. In the original, Tommy — the son in the Chinese-American family — joins a baseball team at a local community center. He has a run-in with this other kid who ends up being the nephew of one of the Klan leaders. And then the Klan burns a cross on the Chinese-American family’s lawn.
Nrama: What was your collaboration with Gurihuru like for this project?
Yang: It was great. Gurihuru are two of my favorite artists working in comics today. They go by one name, but they’re actually two women based out of Japan. We worked together on Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse and Nickelodeon. And I knew, just from that experience, that they were world class artists.
If you look at the actual pages, we talked pretty early on how we wanted this book to look like a cross between those classic Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons and modern manga. And I just think they totally nailed it. They’re so good.
I kind of feel like they’re underrated. They have legions of fans. I still think they’re underrated, just for how good they are.
The book was also lettered by Janice Chang. She has been around the industry for awhile now. She’s kind of a legend in the lettering world. She lettered the daily Spider-Man strip with Stan Lee for a really long time. And we worked together on another project called The Shadow Hero, which is set around the same era. I was thrilled. I was thrilled to get her on board as well.
Nrama: Now that this story is being collected, are there any extras in the book?
Yang: Yes, there is an essay that is finally assembled together. The essay was broken into three for the individual issues, but now it’s all together.
And in that essay, we have photos that accompany it. One of the photos shows a Chinese-American soldier from World War II. He’s actually the grandfather of one of my friends. And then another one shows an African-American soldier who is the stepfather of one of my old teaching colleagues. And they have just amazing stories.
That time period — the 1930s and ‘40s when superheroes were born — America was just full of these really intense stories.
Nrama: When the story was first released, were you thinking about the collected edition and how it would be something to read together with young people, like you described before?
Yang: Yes, yes. I do consider myself more of a graphic novel writer than a comic book writer. I really love working on serial comics, but I do think that — I’m probably better known for my graphic novels. So this is the first true Superman graphic novel I’ve gotten to work on.
I primarily thought of that middle grade and YA audience. Before this I did another middle grade series called Secret Coders. I got to do all the school visits for it. And I got to hang out with these middle grade students — like third, fourth, fifth graders. It was awesome. So I thought about them as I was writing this.