This is Foggy Ruins of TIme, a feature that provides the cultural context behind certain comic book characters/behaviors. You know, the sort of then-topical references that have faded into the “foggy ruins of time.” To wit, twenty years from now, a college senior watching episodes of "Seinfeld" will likely miss a lot of the then-topical pop culture humor (like the very specific references in “The Understudy” to the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal).

Today, we look at the inspiration for the Clark Kent part of Superman's status quo.

Here's something that is often forgotten about the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 (by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) is that the Superman feature in Action Comics #1 was based on a rejected Superman comic strip that National Comics' editors just cut and paste into a story. As a result, the first Superman story sort of starts off abruptly. A year later, when the story was reprinted in Superman #1, Siegel and Shuster would produce new material to fit the Action Comics #1 material into a more cohesive narrative.

In any event, outside of the first page (which shows Clark Kent doing some super feats as part of the whole "demonstrating Superman's powers" routine), the first time that we ever see Clark Kent is when we see him looking to make sure that Superman's name has been kept out of the papers...

We learn that he has an easy way of doing so when we discover that Superman's alter ego of Clark Kent is a newspaper reporter, who has actually been specifically assigned to cover Superman, so he can make sure that he keeps himself out of the papers too much (just like Peter Parker and his whole "selling photos he took of himself, including the occasional faked photo, it shows that Clark doesn't exactly have the strictest journalistic ethics.

Anyhow, up until this point, Clark Kent seems like a pretty upstanding guy, right? We don't know anything really about him but he seems like he can handle himself. He's just a basic disguise for Superman.

However, we then see the first sign that the Clark Kent disguise is more than just a pair of glasses, but rather an entire fake personality that he affects to differentiate himself from Superman as much as he can...

Okay, so that's the comic book origin of the Superman/Clark Kent disguise. Now, what's the real life inspiration for the Clark Kent persona?

Read on to see how the films of Harold Lloyd were where Siegel and Shuster got the inspiration for Clark Kent...

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='The%20Glass%20Character%20Begins!']

In the early days of the silent film era, the most popular comedic film star was Charlie Chaplin, who had debuted his "Tramp" character in 1914's Kid Auto Races at Venice...

The way that films were done at the time, Chaplin's stardom almost directly coincided with the production of his films, as the films were produced very quickly. So the reaction to the work was practically instantaneous.

In any event, right around this same time, a young actor named Harold Lloyd was beginning to appear in films, with his first credited performance (after he spent 1913 as an extra) coming in 1914. Lloyd became friends with a young filmmaker named Hal Roach and in 1915, they debuted Lonesome Luke, their blatant ripoff of Chaplin's Tramp...

However, after a couple of years they decided to come up with something that was original to them and not just a knockoff of Chaplin. So Lloyd debuted a new character that was simply normal clothes, along with wearing horn-rimmed glasses. The "Glass" character (also known as "The Boy") debuted in 1917's Over the Fence...

Soon, Lloyd's "Glass" character was one of the most famous characters in films, rivaling even Chaplin!

Chaplin was still king, but Chaplin also took longer to make movies, so Lloyd actually made more money than Chaplin since he put out more content.

Lloyd described the effect of the glasses once, "When I adopted the glasses, it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being. He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them. They were natural and the romance could be believable."

Eventually, Lloyd (like Chaplin) began making feature-length films, as he evolved the Boy character and made him more complex. The most famous of these films was 1923's Safety Last, which has the iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from a clock tower...

Years later, for Superman's 50th Anniversary, Siegel and Shuster specifically cited Harold Lloyd's "Glass" character as the visual inspiration for Clark Kent. However, an interesting aspect of the introduction of the Glass character is one of the partial origins for the character. As the legend has it (normally, I'm all about finding out the actual truth of a legend, but when it comes to what was thought in popular culture at the time, then the legend is all that we need, as that's what would be transmitted to people like Siegel and Shuster), Roach decided that Lloyd was just too good looking and he wouldn't appeal to the audience without some sort of disguise. He didn't need to be "Lonesome Luke," but he needed to have SOME sort of disguise, and they came up with the glasses to disguise himself just enough so that he looked like a different person.

While it is more likely that Siegel and Shuster were only influenced by the VISUAL of Harold Lloyd for the creation of Clark Kent, it's fascinating to think about whether they were also inspired by the idea of Lloyd using the glasses to disguise himself. In any event, whether intentional or not, the effect is the same - Lloyd's glasses disguise directly inspired the introduction of Clark Kent's classes disguise, since Kent was based visually on Lloyd.

Okay, that's it for this installment! If anyone else has a suggestion for a future edition of Foggy Ruins of Time, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!