Creativity Quote by Joe Shuster

Superman, in Joe Shuster's telling, starts as a guy who knows he looks ridiculous and enjoys it. That single choice - "a lark" - quietly rewires the character away from marble-statue heroism and back toward something closer to vaudeville: a strongman in bright tights, performing competence with a wink. Shuster isn't describing an invincible savior so much as an attitude, a posture toward power. The fun is the point.

The subtext is about authorship and origin myth. By emphasizing the "early drawings", Shuster plants a flag: before the brand calcified into solemn iconography, there was play. That's not nostalgia; it's a rebuttal to the later corporate Superman who can feel like public property, an emblem that must be treated reverently. Shuster's Superman isn't sanctified. He's a character who doesn't "take himself seriously", which doubles as a permission slip for the audience to relax. You can admire him without worshipping him.

Context matters because Shuster is speaking as a co-creator whose credit, compensation, and control were famously contested. Framing Superman as "enjoying himself" reads like a reclamation of the human scale behind an industrial-scale legend. It also hints at why the character worked in the first place: in a Depression-era culture hungry for escape and justice, a hero who smiles while bending steel isn't just fantasy - he's relief, delivered with showman's timing. The lark keeps the power from turning into menace.