What came first: the chicken or the egg? For bodybuilders the question is an irrelevant one: they’re happy to eat both – separately, together, and probably three or four times a day.
A conundrum muscle-heads may give a little more consideration to pertains to the age-old relationship between bodybuilding and superheroes. Along with the capes and tight costumes, the muscular physique has been synonymous with superheroes since the 1930s when Superman was conceived somewhere in an Ohio bedroom by students Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.
Dreamed up for the purpose of attracting girls at their high school, it’s no surprise that the fictional superhero was blessed with capped deltoids, a hanging chest and bulging biceps. Muscles are a symbol of hard work, strength and dominance, and, traditionally at least, go some way to triggering primal emotions of submissiveness in women. The artificial, super-powered embodiment of perfection that two geeky teenagers were going to live their fantasies through was never going to be a skinny guy in a T-shirt and shorts.
Physiques like Superman’s, however, do not magically appear without a reference point. And so the question here then is who was the world’s most famous superhero’s buff physique modeled on?
Thirty-seven years prior to the release of the first Superman comic in June 1938, Prussian circus performer Eugen Sandow – now regarded as ‘the pioneer of modern bodybuilding’ – was busy organising the world’s first major bodybuilding competition in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller on April 2nd, 1867, the son of a German father and a Russian mother adopted ‘Eugen Sandow’ as his stage name while performing as a circus athlete and strongman.
Eugen Sandow: ‘the pioneer of modern bodybuilding’
It was in the mid-1880s when Sandow visited the gym of fellow strongman Ludwig Durlacher in Brussels that his career began to take off. Recognising the young Prussian’s potential, Durlacher, also known as ‘Professor Atilla’, took him under his wing and in 1889 encouraged him to travel to London to compete in a strongman event. After defeating the reigning champion with ease, Sandow was flooded with requests from all over Britain for performances.
Fascinated by Sandow’s strength, American Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. wanted to display his talents at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Keeping a close eye on Sandow’s performance, Ziegfeld found that the audience were more interested in the way his muscle’s popped than the amount of weight he was lifting, and in that moment the idea of ‘muscular display performances’ was born, essentially marking the birth of the bodybuilding show. Sandow had such a profound influence on the sport that the trophy awarded to winners of bodybuilding’s most famous competition ‘Mr.Olympia’ was named the ‘Sandow Trophy’.
A look at the first appearance of Superman on the cover of Action Comics in 1938 and it’s entirely plausible to suggest Siegel and Schuster took inspiration from Sandow’s physique.
Cover of Action Comics, June 1938. (Art: Joe Schuster)
The image below allows for a more detailed comparison between the two. Both have thick, muscular, but not particularly conditioned physiques. While the shoulders, chest, arms and thighs swell, the abdominal muscles are less pronounced and both have an estimated body fat percentage of around 10 to 12%.
The bottom left image shows a portrait illustration of Superman. The physique is dominated by large shoulder, chest, arm and thigh muscles.
Superheroes have followed bodybuilding’s lead ever since. Described by popular fitness magazine Muscular Development as ‘crucial decades in the history and evolution of bodybuilding’, the 1950s and 60s produced a bigger, more chiseled look. In 1950 the National Amateur Body-Builder’s Association was formed and they launched their ‘Mr.Universe’ competition which would be staged annually in London. The inaugural winner of that competition was Steve Reeves, who fought off Reg Park for the title. Measuring at 6′ 1″ and weighing in at 210lbs, Reeves was a much larger specimen than the 5′ 9″ 202 pound Sandow. Bodybuilding was literally getting bigger.
And so was Superman. A 1949 cover of DC comic book series ‘Superboy’ features a taller, more shredded version of the superhero with deep separation lines in the deltoids, chest, quadriceps and abdominals. Superman had definitely not been skipping cardio.
Mr.Universe inaugural winner Steve Reeves
Cover of Superboy #1, March-April 1949. (Illustrator: Wayne Boring)
And so Superman grew and grew, eventually arriving at a significantly more unnatural look worn by the bodybuilders of the 1970s. It was in this period that bodybuilders began to truly experiment with anabolic steroids. According to steroidal.com, literally thousands of different anabolic steroid analogues of Testosterone, Nandrolone and Dihydrotestosterone were created by the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1976 that the International Olympic Committee, growing more and more concerned by the use of steroids by Olympic athletes, placed anabolics on the list of banned substances and introduced drug testing during competition season. Fortunately for bodybuilders like Mike Mentzer, Sergio Oliva and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the newly formed International Federation of BodyBuilding and Fitness (IFBB) turned a blind eye to it, allowing their athletes to develop the extraordinary frames many of today’s aspiring bodybuilders wish to recreate.
The muscles had acquired more density: they’d become boulder-like and vascular with road maps running along them, but there was still a beautiful flow to the physique and a bigger focus than ever on maintaining a small waist. It became known as the ‘Golden Era’ of bodybuilding, and Superman looked great.
Mike Mentzer was lauded for the amount of muscle he was able to pack into his small frame.
A 1970s illustration of Superman by American comic book artist Curt Swan. Superman at his biggest and most conditioned.
The 1990s: When the Superheroes began to take over.
Having been given the foundations by the likes of Sandow, Reeves and Mentzer, illustrators and animators began to take their characters to new levels. Superheroes were packing on muscle at an astronomical rate. The shoulders and biceps had inflated like balloons while still retaining their hardness, and suddenly the otherworldly physiques of Dragon Ball Z’s Goku and The Incredible Hulk became the benchmark for bodybuilders. Having followed bodybuilding’s lead for over 50 years, it was time for bodybuilding to follow the superheroes.
The release of Japanese anime television series Dragon Ball Z slapped a new kind of physique onto the screens of young children in 1996, one that prioritised huge muscles but also minimal body fat. Comedian and self-confessed ‘bad-boy of comic books’ Paul Savage puts forward one reason for the shift, insisting that ‘it’s easier to see stuff happening with exaggerated muscle movement’ and explaining that ‘bulging, vein popping biceps are an easy way to draw effort’.
But perhaps more important to illustrators and animators was the idea of male body fantasy. For years superheroes like Superman and He-Man had captured the imagination of teenagers with the power of flight and supreme strength, but their physiques had still never outgrown those of regular human bodybuilders. As Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. found out in 1893, the primary fascination was not with strength but with the muscular anatomy, and in blowing his characters’ proportions up to crazy, inhuman levels, Dragon Ball Z illustrator Tadayoshi Yamamuro had created something that had escaped the boundaries of even the most genetically gifted humans.
An illustration of Dragon Ball Z protagonist Goku in ‘Super Saiyan’ mode.
Rob Liefeld, a prominent illustrator in the 1990s, had crossed the line even further. Liefeld is regarded as one of the most controversial figured in the comic industry, partly for drawing figures with overly-exaggerated muscular anatomy. Liefeld’s illustrations were characterised by gigantic muscles and skin-tight costumes, with figures often sporting biceps and forearms twice the size of the human head.
In a 1996 interview writer and illustrator Barry Windsor-Smith smashed Liefeld, stating: ‘Liefeld has nothing to offer. It’s as plain as bacon on your plate. He has nothing to offer. He cannot draw. He cannot write. He is a young boy almost, I would expect, whose culture is bubble gum wrappers, Saturday morning cartoons, Marvel Comics.’
Perhaps a more considered review of Liefeld’s work comes from Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman who defends The New Mutants artist, saying: ‘Every figure that Rob draws has a certain energy to it, a certain excitement. Every character Rob drew had seven knives and six guns and shoulder pads and pouches and belts and straps and ammunition. It was an aesthetic that as a kid absolutely blew me away. I idolized the guy…Everything he draws is interesting, whether it’s accurate or not. A lot of people look at the way Rob draws the human body and they say, ‘That’s wrong in my eyes.’ I would say that these people have no joy in their souls. It’s not like Rob doesn’t know what a human body looks like, I think Rob looks at a human body and goes: ‘That’s boring. I can do better.’
An X Force poster, for which Rob Liefeld provided the illustrations.
And it is the final sentence in Kirkman’s defence that may hit home with the bodybuilders of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Taking inspiration from Liefeld’s drawings, it’s possible that the likes of Ronnie Coleman and Phil Heath looked at their predecessors and said: ‘I can do better’.
Today, it is common to hear bodybuilders reference superheroes when talking about what inspired them to pursue a career in the sport. In an interview with Generation Iron, bodybuilder Jojo Ntiforo claimed his main inspiration was the over-exaggerated muscular physiques and strength of superheroes. Search through the archives of fitness magazine Muscle and Fitness and you’ll find articles on ‘How to Build a Superhero Physique in 6 Weeks’. Once an apprentice of Eugen Sandow, superhero illustrations have well and truly succeeded their master.
The real cost of the Marvel physique.
The relationship between bodybuilding and superheroes is certainly fascinating, but at times it can also be an unhealthy one. Achieving a 1938 Superman physique requires dedication, around five meals per day and a lot of money, while attaining the crazier, more inflated muscular anatomies of 1990s Goku forces many gym-goers into a dangeroues toss up between their health and their looks.
In truth, physiques like Goku’s cannot possibly be achieved without the use of anabolic steroids. Let’s say Goku’s a real human for a minute: he’d be around 6ft tall, 220lbs and have a body fat percentage of around 4%. The percentage of essential fat in men is 2-5%, though anything lower than 8% is considered to be dangerous. Low body fat levels can lead to low testosterone, dehydration and even cardiac arrest. Goku certainly wouldn’t have the energy to be going around fighting crime if he didn’t have supernatural powers.
Andreas Münzer was an Austrian professional bodybuilder who became obsessed with lowering his body fat levels. He died at the age of 31 with a body fat percentage of almost 0%.
Although it may seem easy as an adult to separate fact from fiction, the jaw-dropping physiques of superheroes can become ingrained in our heads as children and supply budding bodybuilders with unrealistic goals that never go away. In 2015, a BBC report noted that around 10% of men in the gym have muscle dysmorphia, a disorder whereby gym-goers who appear to look muscular to the ordinary eye obsess about being small and undeveloped.
For as long as people train in gyms, there will always be an infatuation with superheroes and the way their muscles flex and pop, despite them seeming to do very little work in the gym. It is important, however, to understand that the illustrations of Rob Liefeld and Tadayoshi Yamamuro are just illustrations, not attainable physiques that people concerned with their health should dedicate their lives to attaining.
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