LEGEND HAS IT THAT SUPERMAN was born under a fiery red sun on the futuristic planet of Krypton, in a crystal tower overlooking the Jewel Mountains and the Scarlet Jungle. But the legend has it wrong. In fact, Superman was born under a hazy yellow sun in a gritty Jewish precinct of Cleveland, two blocks from the Hebrew Orthodox Old Age Home and down the street from Glenville High. Just ask Jerry Siegel. He’s the one who brought him to life there in the throes of the Great Depression.
Jerry Siegel happened to have been born in a gritty Jewish precinct of Cleveland, too, in 1914. And being Jerry never was easy. His trouble began in first grade. The stubby six-year-old had proudly memorized the rules for asking to pee: You raised your hand, and the teacher acknowledged you and said it was okay to go to the bathroom. The boy behind him did it. A pigtailed girl followed. But there was no reply when Jerry raised his hand. Finally the teacher turned his way: “What do you want?” He told her. “No,” she said. Maybe she thought he was faking. Maybe it was that he was short, shy, wore glasses, and was the child not of refined German Jews but of unwashed immigrants from Eastern Europe. Whatever the reason, his bladder swelled and a puddle formed under his seat. With other children pointing, the teacher descended: “You are a bad, bad, bad, bad boy! Bad and disgusting! Leave the room, this very instant! Go home!” “At an early age,” Jerry recalled decades later, “I got a taste of how it feels to be victimized.”
That sensation became a pattern. On Valentine’s Day, classmates addressed cards to one another; the teacher handed them out as the students waited anxiously. The first year Jerry got just one, from his sympathetic teacher. The next year he secretly inscribed a card to himself. Jerome the Loner, he thought. Jerome the Pariah. Jerome the Outcast. Schoolwork was equally problematic. The semester started with smiles and anticipation. “Happiness,” he would say, “vibrated all over the place. But then, when the grim business of cramming knowledge into one’s skull got down to business, interest in arithmetic, geography, etc. just slid off my brain, and oozed into a crack in the floor, where it gradually evaporated.” He got used to Ds and Fs—and to summers repeating the failed subjects, which “was even more dismal. While other kids enjoyed summer vacation, I had my nose rubbed into education.”
Recess, too, was a trial and oftentimes a terror for him. Tormenters were everywhere. Some tripped him as he tried to escape, others punched. His very name became a source of ridicule. “Siegel, Seagull, bird of an Eagle!” they would chant. If only he really could fly away. If only the girls hadn’t heard. He was too bashful to say a word to pretty ones like Lois Amster, the girl he had a crush on, but even the homely ones showed zero interest. “I hadn’t asked for the face or physique I was born with,” he wrote. “I had not sculpted my nose, or fashioned my chin, or decided how broad my shoulders would be, or how tall I would become. I looked searchingly into the mirror for a clue. The mirror refused to commit itself.” Doubts like those are part of growing up. Most kids outrun or outgrow them. Jerry’s stuck like a mark of Cain from grammar school all the way through high school, where he would often turn up late, with his hair flying off in different directions and his pajamas just visible under his pant cuffs and over his shirt collar.
With the real world offering no solace, he created one built around fantasies. Mornings, he stood in the schoolyard until his classmates disappeared indoors, then he headed to the public library. Pulling his favorites from the tall stacks of books, he was transported into the dime-novel worlds of master detective Nick Carter, collegiate crime buster Frank Merriwell, and adventurers closer to his age and circumstance like the Rover Boys. Fred Rover and his cousins Jack, Andy, and Randy may have been in military school, but that never kept them from exploring wrecked submarines or prospecting for pirates’ gold. On weekends, Jerry went to matinees at the motion picture theater. Western megastar Tom Mix made 336 films and Jerry saw all that his allowance would allow. He also was an insatiable consumer of movies starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., as Zorro, Robin Hood, and the thief of Baghdad. And watching was not enough. Convinced he could replicate Mix’s and Fairbanks’s derring-do, Jerry darted in and out of traffic on the narrow roads of his Glenville neighborhood. “Those furious humans driving the cars, who yammered and glared insanely at me,” he said, “were mere mortals. But I … I was a leaping, twirling, gleeful phenomenon!” Back at home, with his hip healed after one of those glaring drivers sideswiped him, he climbed onto the roof of the garage holding an umbrella. “I opened the umbrella and leapt. Look out world, here I come!… I did this over and over again. Unexpectedly, the umbrella suddenly turned inside-out as I descended. I banged a knee, when I hit the ground. Just as I had abandoned berserkly dodging in and out between moving automobiles, I gave up jumping off the top of my garage.”
As freeing as it felt to mimic his idols, better still was concocting narratives starring Jerry Siegel—not the shunned, tongue-tied adolescent the kids in the schoolyard saw, but the real Jerry, fearless and stalwart. The setting, too, was of his own making, leaving behind Glenville’s twenty-five Orthodox shuls and row after row of faded up-and-down duplexes. Crawling into bed at night with pencil and paper, he imagined faraway galaxies full of mad scientists and defiant champions. He loved parody, too, inventing characters like Goober the Mighty, a broken-down knockoff of Tarzan. He went on daydreaming in the classroom, and his writing found its way into the high school newspaper, the Glenville Torch, and onto the pages of his own Cosmic Stories, America’s first science fiction magazine produced by and for fans.
Jerry wasn’t popular, he wasn’t strong, but one thing he knew: He was inventive. Pointing to an empty Coke bottle, he told his cousin, “I could make up a story about that.” He even tried an autobiographical novel but flushed it down the toilet after a friend suggested that perhaps not all his experiences were worthy of the label “ecstasy.” No theme stuck for long, he confessed in a later-life autobiography. And he still couldn’t decide whether good guys or bad made better protagonists.
Clarity came on the wings of his own tragedy. It happened on an overcast evening in June 1932, just after eight o’clock, in a downtrodden strip of Cleveland’s black ghetto known as Cedar-Central. Michel Siegel was ready to head home to his family when three men whom police would describe as “colored” entered his secondhand clothing store, one of the few Jewish businesses left in a neighborhood populated by barber shops, billiard parlors, and greasy spoons. One man asked to see a suit, then walked out with it without paying; another blocked the owner’s path. Michel, a slight man whose heart muscle was weaker than even he knew, fell to the floor. A month shy of his sixtieth birthday, he stopped breathing before medics could get him to the hospital. His wife, Sarah, was a widow now, on her own with three girls, three boys, and next to no savings. Jerry, her youngest, took the loss of his father the hardest. The boy who had been bullied was bereft. Sitting on his dad’s knee and being rocked up and down had been one of Jerry’s few safe havens. “Bliss,” he called it later. “Supreme rapture.” Now his father was gone.
The world of make-believe seemed more alluring than ever to Jerry, who was not quite eighteen. What had been a series of disparate characters with no focus or purpose now merged into a single figure who became a preoccupation. He called him “The Super-Man.” Jerry’s first story, written shortly after his father’s death, envisioned the figure as endowed with exceptional strength, telescopic vision, the capacity to read minds, and a resolve to rule the universe. Over the months that followed, this character would drop “the” and the hyphen, along with his evil inclinations, becoming simply Superman—a bulletproof avenger who beat back bullies, won the hearts of girls, and used his superpowers to help those most in need. And who, in the only artwork that survives from that first imagining, soars to the rescue of a middle-aged man being held up by a robber.
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SUPERMAN MAY HAVE BEEN A product of the 1930s and Jerry Siegel’s teenage imagination, but his DNA traces back twenty-five hundred years to the age of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. The evidence is there in the Book of Judges and the parable of its last and most exalted jurist, Samson. With the Israelites desperate to free themselves from forty years of enslavement by the Philistines, God offered up a strongman who killed a lion with his bare hands and then, using nothing more than the jawbone of an ass, slew a thousand enemy soldiers. The Philistines managed to capture this extraordinary being, gouging out his eyes and bringing him to their shrine in shackles to dance before them, humiliated. But in an act of self-sacrifice and backbone that would set a yardstick for every super-being who came after, Samson brought the enemy’s temple crashing down around them as he proclaimed, “Let me die with the Philistines!”
Masterful as the Hebrews were at fashioning powerful and noble warriors, no one outdid the Hellenists. The very word “hero” comes from the Greek heros, meaning “protector” or “defender.” The Greek pantheon of demigods began with Perseus, famous for slaying monsters from the sea and the land. There was Jason, who led the heroic Argonauts on a quest for the golden fleece; Euphemus, who could walk on water; Caeneus, who was invulnerable to swords, spears, or any weapon known in his day; and Hermes, speediest and cagiest of the gods. The ultimate exemplar of the Greek ideal of heroism was Herakles, the defender against evil and tamer of beasts, whom the Romans would adopt and rebrand as Hercules. Like Superman, Herakles signaled his special powers in infancy, grabbing by their necks a pair of deadly serpents that had crawled into his cradle and squeezing the life from them. And like Superman, Herakles devoted his days to rescuing ladies in distress, battling a shifting cast of villains, and searing a place in the public imagination as an embodiment of virtue.
Each era that followed produced its own mythic figures that reflected its peculiar dreams and dreads. In 1752, Voltaire anticipated the genre of science fiction and poked fun at contemporary dogmas in his tale of Micromegas, a 120,000-foot-tall super-genius who traveled here from a far-distant planet. Micromegas rendered his verdict on Earth: It’s not nearly as special as its inhabitants think. Half a century on, nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley gave us Victor Frankenstein, who tapped his collection of dead body parts to build an eight-foot monster with yellowing skin. More even than Voltaire, Shelley reflected the tremendous leap from Hebrew and Greek legends built on superstition to a more modern reliance on science as the wellspring for fantastic literature. Likewise, her monster foreshadowed Jerry Siegel’s early vacillation between Super-Man and Superman. Should his standard-bearer be a contemptible villain, an unwavering hero, or something more ambiguous like Dr. Frankenstein?
History’s most infamously ambiguous blueprint for the hero was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which translates literally as “overman” and colloquially as “superman.” With God dead, Nietzsche argued, man would be tempted to look for salvation in an afterlife or from a society that was naively egalitarian. The real place to look, he said, was among mankind’s talented few—its Caesars and Napoleons—who were ready to rule decisively and efficiently. “What is the ape to man?” Nietzsche asked in 1883. “A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman.” Some interpreted Nietzsche’s answer as a Buddha-like call for humans to reach for an enlightened state; others saw a clearheaded if cold assessment of the unequal allocation of human talents. Adolf Hitler used Nietzsche’s argument to bolster not just his theory of a master race of Aryan supermen, but also his obsession with rooting out Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others he saw as subhuman. Whether Hitler appropriated Nietzsche’s message or perverted it, the lesson for all hero-framers who followed was clear: Be careful. Whatever your intent, madmen can fuse their nightmares onto your dreams. Fairly or not, history will hold you accountable.
That prehistory was especially resonant in 1932, the year Michel Siegel died and The Super-Man was conceived. America’s flirtation with science fiction had, by then, mushroomed into a craze. The only medium that mattered was the written one, with AM radio still in its chaotic early era, FM a year away, and network television but a gleam in its designers’ eyes. Action and adventure were still essential, but better still was a story that drew on pseudoscience and a hero endowed with superpowers. Popeye the Sailor Man had both, which let him chase Bluto and Sea Hag all over the planet, popping open a can of spinach whenever he needed to recharge his muscles or fend off bullets or aliens. Buck Rogers’s oyster was outer space, where his swashbuckling was such a hit that he spawned an interplanetary imitator: Flash Gordon. Alley Oop started out in the Stone Age, in the kingdom of Moo, and ended up in a time-traveling machine. And when it came to brainwashing there were no rivals: Ask any teenager in the 1930s, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” and they answered as one: “The Shadow knows.”
The Shadow, an avenger with the power to cloud men’s minds so they couldn’t see him, was born on the radio and would catch fire everywhere, from magazines, cartoon strips, and comic books to TV, film, and graphic novels. A more typical launching pad was the funny pages, where tens of millions of readers followed Popeye, Tarzan, and their chums every day in black-and-white, and on Sunday in full color. The adventure strip was taking off in 1932, which was just the right moment given what readers were seeing in the rest of the newspaper.
Who wouldn’t want to escape his circumstances, if not his planet, with the world economy in free fall? One in four Americans had no job. The British had just tossed into jail the conscience of the world, Mahatma Gandhi. Millions of Soviets were starving to death. Almost as unsettling was the human-scale drama of a twenty-month-old toddler: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., son of America’s beloved aviator-inventor, was discovered missing from his crib the evening of March 1. The “crime of the century” riveted the nation, as a note from kidnappers told the Lindberghs to “have $50,000 redy” and assured them that “the child is in gut care.” Gangster Al Capone promised that if he was let out of jail he would crack the case, while President Herbert Hoover vowed to “move Heaven and Earth” to find the infant. It was truck driver William Allen who actually did, two months after the abduction. Stopping to relieve himself in a grove of trees five miles from the Lindbergh home, he discovered the remains of a baby. The skull was fractured. The left leg was gone, along with both hands, and the torso had been gnawed on by animals. But the overlapping toes of the right foot and a shirt stitched by his nursemaid identified the body as the Lindbergh boy.
Escape indeed. Some kids chose dance marathons—known as “corn and callus carnivals”—to blot out the news and test whether they could keep fox-trotting or waltzing for twelve, twenty-four, or even thirty hours. An easier way to take flight during that decade of despair was through science fiction, and especially through a new trio of mythmakers. Each understood that while Herakles suited the needs of ancient Greece, and Frankenstein was monster enough for the 1800s, the twentieth century’s expanding horizons of technology, medicine, and cognition required a paladin who was more expansive, more imaginative, more today. Each saw his hero not as a gift from God but as a triumph of fantastic science. All three could claim to be Superman’s patron saint if not his progenitor.
First on the scene was Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. His protagonist, John Carter of Mars, was actually from Earth, and more precisely Virginia. Carter had served in the Confederate Army and then struck gold in Arizona, but before he could spend it he was killed by Apaches. Instead of in heaven, however, he ended up on the red planet, or rather on its fantastic double that Burroughs dubbed Barsoom, where he stayed forever young and strong enough to defend his new planet from beastly villains. Burroughs introduced Carter to the world in the 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, which foreshadowed Superman in ways substantial and small. John Carter traveled in space and was invulnerable. His strength on Mars came from the planet’s having less gravity than Earth, the flip side of what would happen to Superman when he reached Earth from Krypton. And the name Krypton came from the same line of the periodic table of the elements from which Burroughs plucked the name Helium, one of the empires on Barsoom.
In 1930, two years after Burroughs came out with his sixth Mars-Barsoom novel, Philip Wylie published a book called Gladiator with a hero named Hugo Danner. Danner’s father, biology professor Abednego Danner, concocted a serum so effective in turning tame animals into ogres that he could not resist trying it on humans. The easiest subject at hand was his pregnant wife. It worked, and she delivered a son with the strength of Samson, the speed of Hermes, and skin, like Caeneus’s, that was impervious to injury—a package similar to the one Siegel would unwrap eight years later. Hugo’s powers were hinted at in the crib, as Superman’s would be; both were cautioned by their fathers to use their gifts judiciously; and the two authors settled on the same superlative to describe their creations: “superhuman” for Wylie, “superman” for Siegel.
The last in the triumvirate of early-twentieth-century science fiction exemplars was Clark Savage, Jr., known to the world as “Doc.” His first tale hit the newsstands in February 1933, just as the Depression was reaching its nadir, President Franklin Roosevelt was about to declare a holiday that would close every bank in America, and Jerry Siegel was putting the finishing touches on a superhero he would nickname the Man of Steel. It helped to have as a model Doc Savage, a.k.a. the Man of Bronze. Savage’s name rightfully suggested brute strength, but he also was endowed with the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes, the tree-swinging grace of Tarzan, the scientific-sleuthing acumen of Dick Tracy, and the morals of Abraham Lincoln. Doc crafted a hero’s code of conduct that would offer a prototype for Superman and his crime-fighting cohorts: Do not kill your enemy if you can help it. Do not get entangled with women. Do find a remote getaway—he and Superman both picked the Arctic, and both called their getaways the Fortress of Solitude—where you can take a break from saving the world.
On the eve of his birth, then, Superman’s world was awash in heroes. So keen was the ferment and the determination to be noticed that the word the Greeks had given us no longer was enough. Now authors and publishers were beating the drums for their champions by inflating their adjectives—thrilling, marvelous, amazing, and soon, the most singular and separating descriptive of them all: super, short for superlative. This new breed of hero started out with the models of strength and courage from the past, then added twists—interplanetary adventure, space-age gadgets, time travel—to spark the imaginations of readers reared in a world of automobiles, airplanes, and skyscrapers. Most had followings measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. None—not the buff Doc Savage or the brooding Hugo Danner, the soaring John Carter or the elusive Shadow—had whatever alchemy was needed to separate them from the crowd. As saturated as the market seemed, America was readier than it knew for a hero sized to the age of the metropolis.
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JEROME THE LONER GOT IT. He may not have been much of a student at Glenville High, where it took him five years to graduate, but Jerry Siegel was a scholar of science fiction and pop culture. He saw the lightning in the air and was determined to bottle it. Being in Cleveland put him far enough away from Oz that the only place to realize his dreams was in his imagination and his writings. Being a loner, with few friends and no girlfriend, let him be single-minded in those pursuits. Being a kid gave him just the right vantage point.
As early as junior high he was poring over the pulps, the ten-cent magazines that were the successors to Britain’s aptly titled penny dreadfuls and forerunners to the comic book. Pulps took their name from the coarse paper they were printed on, and they took stories from just about anyone. A few were long-lived gems like The Maltese Falcon and The Shadow, which ran the length of a novel and had heroic narratives; more were trashy tales of sex and mayhem. The earliest pulps had appeared in the 1890s, and by the 1920s some were selling a million copies an issue to working stiffs anxious to escape their vanilla lives or kids with an extra dime and an appetite for wars and westerns. Jerry brought his everywhere, including study hall, which earned him a visit to the principal and a warning to “never, never, never again transgress in this unspeakable manner … or else.” But the message he was getting from trade magazines was more persuasive, with announcements that authors nearly as young as he were being published in the pulps, while Reader’s Digest trumpeted the big money that comic strip writers were making.
High school was the ideal testing ground for Jerry’s fevered imagination. The Torch dubbed him the “master of deduction” and ran stories by him that aped his favorite writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He sent handwritten features and letters to the Sunday Buffalo Times and at least one was published, a piece titled “Monsters of the Moon.” He corresponded with other wannabe writers. Over time he got bolder, launching The Fantastic Fiction Publishing Company, naming himself president, and putting out a typewritten journal called Cosmic Stories. He had but one writer, himself, although in what would become a pattern he took on a pen name, Charles McEvoy. Jerry’s explanation for this: “Jerome Siegel did not seem very literary to me.” A more likely explanation: A boy who saw himself as a pariah wanted to shield himself from brickbats, and perhaps from anti-Semitism.
Guests of the Earth was his next publication. He printed it after hours on the high school mimeograph machine and published it under an equally Waspy pseudonym: Hugh Langley. When an English teacher saw it, she demanded, “Jerome, why do you write these kinds of stories, when there are so many more worthwhile things you could write about?” His science teacher didn’t bother to ask, dismissing Jerry’s pamphlets as “junk” and “foolishness.” His parents loved their last-born but were equally unimpressed with his scribbling. Michel merely shrugged. Sarah considered Jerry’s dream of becoming a writer “a wild, erratic notion and that nothing would really come of it,” Jerry remembered later. “She told me that of all her children, she worried the most about me.”
No matter. Like his fellow science fiction aficionados, Jerry was not writing for his parents or their peers. His audience was youngsters like himself. So he wrote what he dreamed about—messages from the planet Mars, bullied boys who got even, an ape-man named Goober who was raised by lions. Neither the characters nor the writing was especially persuasive, not with lines like these: “ ‘Goober!’ he shouted, ‘Don’t you recognize your old pal? It’s me—Izzy the Ape! I’ve changed my name, that’s all. Nobody knew the difference in Cleveland, I look so much like the people there.’ ” But the school paper published it for just that reason: It was not overthought. The language and plots were precisely right for kids like Jerry, kids with outsize imaginations and visions of a world beyond Cleveland, and who had peed in their pants or worried they might.
What did matter to Jerry was money. His dad, a tailor from Lithuania, had squeezed out a living selling and altering suits and other secondhand clothes. Sarah helped out behind the counter. At its best the shop’s revenues were barely enough to sustain a family of eight, and during the Depression sales and profits were even lower. After Michel died, the Siegels were destitute. Harry, Jerry’s oldest brother, kept them housed and fed with money he earned as a mailman. Others kicked in what they could, even Jerome, Sarah’s baby and pet. That meant working after school as a delivery boy for a print shop, where he earned the royal rate of four dollars a week and dreamed of hitting the jackpot with his writing. It also meant sharing a bed with his brother Leo.
Most of the stories he wrote were mailed back by publishers or were gone forever, so Jerry decided to try his hand once more at publishing. His new magazine had a title worthy of his lofty hopes: Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. He was not the only writer this time; fellow Glenville High students chipped in. Jerry was, however, still the sole executive, holding the titles of owner, editor, secretary, treasurer, and office boy. He continued to rely on the school mimeograph machine, but he vowed that would change when ads he placed in more established science fiction publications swelled his magazine’s circulation. His rates—fifteen cents a copy, or $1.50 a year—were no bargain, not when thick pulps could be had for a thin dime. And he continued to sign with a name not his own: Herbert S. Fine, which blended the name of his cousin Herbert Schwartz with his mother’s maiden name, Fine. Looking back, there are two names that stand out even more in Science Fiction: its primary illustrator, Joe Shuster, and the main character in a story in its third issue, Super-Man.
Jerry’s and Joe’s names would become as conjoined and revered in the world of comics as those of Rodgers and Hammerstein in song and Tracy and Hepburn in cinema. Jerry and Joe met through Jerry’s cousin Jerry Fine, who lived in another part of Cleveland. Fine wrote a column in junior high called “Jerry the Journalist,” which Shuster illustrated. When Joe was about to enter ninth grade his family moved to Glenville, and Fine suggested he look up Jerry Siegel. The boys looked almost like brothers even though Jerry was four inches taller and forty pounds heavier, and they seemed fated to become a twosome. Both wore glasses, were petrified of girls, and preferred to stay indoors reading when everyone else their age was in the park playing ball, which made them two-for-one targets for schoolyard toughs. Both were the children of Jewish refugees, and Joe’s dad, Julius, was a tailor like Michel Siegel. Both grew up poor, although the Shusters’ cramped apartment made the Siegels’ two-story home ten blocks away look like a mansion.
Julius Shuster was brilliant with a needle and thread but not with a ledger. He had sunk his meager inheritance into a tailor shop in Toronto’s garment district, but the shop failed when he charged too little for clothes that took too long to stitch. His family was accustomed to changing apartments on rent day, but this time they moved all the way to Cleveland, for the promise of a job manufacturing men’s suits. Joe had always helped pay the family’s bills with the meager wages he could get by peddling newspapers, hawking ice cream cones, and apprenticing with a sign painter. Still, there were winter days and sometimes entire seasons when the Shusters went without coal for the furnace or enough food for three meals. Liabilities like those were not disabling back then, not during the Depression and certainly not to children like Jerry and Joe, whose parents were needy immigrants. The firmest basis for their bond had always been the passion they shared for fantastic stories, which is the way each saw himself getting even with his bulliers and getting out of Glenville. The very day they met, after Joe introduced himself to Jerry at the library, they dashed off to Joe’s apartment and got to work on their first project.
Joe Shuster had loved the comics since he was a toddler back in Canada, when his dad would boost him onto his knee and read aloud strips like The Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, and Joe’s favorite, Little Nemo in Slumberland. He also loved drawing, and he used to go on sketching even when the house was so cold he had to wrap up in a pair of sweaters and gloves. Lacking money for a drawing board, he improvised: the wooden slab his mother used to knead her Sabbath challah worked almost as well. Instead of a sketch pad he made do with butcher paper, discarded wallpaper, and the barren walls of their rented apartment. A scholarship let him study at the Cleveland School of Art and he bought himself more instruction, for ten cents a class, at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute. His artwork was inspired but never visionary. The simple lines and expressive faces got across his message the same way Jerry’s craftsmanlike words did—with joy, without flair. They were a well-matched pair.
Joe’s limits were a matter of optics as well as talent. Even as a boy he had major eye troubles. “He was in a sight-seeing class,” remembers his junior high classmate Jerry Fine. “They had sight-seeing classes for those kids who couldn’t see well. Joe was very, very nearsighted. His drawing had to be two to three inches from his face.” Rosie Shuster, Joe’s niece, describes his eyes as “rheumy and soft-focused. He had Coke-bottle glasses. His family didn’t want him to draw in the first place.”
Eyesight was only the most obvious way in which Jerry and Joe, for all they shared, were different. Next to most of his peers Jerry seemed reticent, but Joe was so sheepish and sweet he made Jerry look fiery and bossy. Jerry did most of the talking, then and later; Joe trusted that Jerry would represent his interests. Crazy Joey, as one adoring cousin called him, had a broader, deeper inner life than Jerry, with fewer bridges to the real world. That made it easier both to like Joe and to take advantage of him. Joe gave Jerry the two things he most wanted: images to bring his words to life, and the clear understanding that Jerry was in charge.
Their first big collaboration was an illustrated short story called “The Reign of the Super-Man,” a twist on the Frankenstein fable that they completed in 1932 and published the next January. The protagonist was Professor Ernest Smalley, a megalomaniacal scientist who tested a mind-bending chemical on a homeless man named Bill Dunn. The experiment yielded a monster with the power not just to read people’s thoughts but to control them. Before Smalley could put that power to use, Dunn killed him, then hatched his own plan to manipulate stocks, clean up at racetracks, and generate enough wealth to dominate the planet. At the last instant Dunn lost his powers, returning to the breadline from which Smalley had plucked him. As he did, he had a bout of conscience: “I see, now, how wrong I was. If I had worked for the good of humanity, my name would have gone down in history with a blessing—instead of a curse.”
Phew. The world was saved from a monster and Jerry was saved from what he would soon realize was a bad idea. A planet as troubled as his needed a hero, not another villain. At the time, he and Joe were glad to have a full-blown science fiction story, one that filled nine pages of Science Fiction. And certain of its themes would stick: an outer-space origin for Smalley’s chemicals and Dunn’s powers, a newspaper writer as the Super-Man’s sidekick, and a sense of whimsy that was pure Jerry. The young writer named his reporter Forrest Ackerman, after the young science fiction fan who would later invent the term sci-fi. The Super-Man visited a library where his deskmate was reading Science Fiction. He also misbehaved there in much the way Jerry had, with the same result: a reprimand from the librarian. Yet the most striking element in this first take on Superman was its indecision—not just about big matters like whether the central character should be good or evil, but over whether to spell his name with a hyphen (as in the title), as “Superman” (the way it was in the text of the story), or as SUPERMAN (as he contemplated here and switched to in his next rendering). “The Reign of the Super-Man,” Jerry explained later, was composed when he was very young, and while the central character was callow, he also “was a giant step forward on: The Road to Superman.”
Soon Jerry noticed on newsstands a publication called Detective Dan, a forerunner of the modern comic book that lasted only that single issue but made a mark on at least one of its young readers. He started imagining a comic book that featured him, or rather his Superman. The version he was drafting would again begin with a wild scientist empowering a normal human against his will, but this time the powers would be even more fantastic, and rather than becoming a criminal, the super-being would fight crime “with the fury of an outraged avenger.” Jerry and Joe worked up the copy and drawings, scraping together their nickels to pay for the paper, the ink, and the postage to mail everything to the owners of Detective Dan. Although the first response was encouraging, the second made it clear that the comic book was so unprofitable that its publishers put on hold any future stories.
Jerry had thought highly enough of Joe’s talents in those early years that he gave him the title of art director at Science Fiction and enlisted him as a partner on his cherished Superman project. But now, with that project going nowhere, he had his doubts about their prospects. At first he thought the problem was that since they were just teenagers potential employers might presume their work was just a quick bit of patchwork, so he had Joe re-letter the cover of their mock comic book, backdating its origin from 1933 to 1928 to look as if it had been years in the making. Then he dropped Joe and tried to enlist an older, more established artist.
Hal Foster, who drew the Sunday Tarzan strip, said he was too busy. Another Tarzan illustrator, J. Allen St. John, expressed interest in working with Jerry on a comic strip that Jerry called “Rex Carson of the Ether Patrol,” but the strip and the collaboration both died. Next on the list was Leo O’Mealia, who drew the Fu Manchu comic and soon found in his mailbox Jerry’s more fully developed script for Superman. This one was set in a future where the Earth was about to explode. Minutes before the blast, a super-powered scientist-adventurer used a time machine to transport himself to the present, where he became a crime-fighter. His character didn’t have a Clark Kent secret identity yet, although Jerry later recalled that there probably was a Lois Lane–like character. And he didn’t have a publisher, although O’Mealia and the Bell Syndicate, which published Fu Manchu, both showed a brief interest in the sketchy story.
The one measurable result of Jerry’s efforts to enlist the help of O’Mealia came from the mild-mannered Joe Shuster. “When I told Joe of this, he unhappily destroyed the drawn-up pages of “THE SUPERMAN,” burning them in the furnace of his apartment building,” Jerry recalled. “At my request, he gave me as a gift the torn cover.” The story of Joe setting fire to the artwork is part of comic book lore, and most tellings say he did it in frustration after publishers rejected “The Superman.” In his memoir, Jerry set the record straight: Shuster was angry and depressed not just because publishers weren’t interested in their idea but because his partner had been disloyal to him.
Jerry was unbowed by Joe’s reaction. His next target for collaboration was Russell Keaton, who drew and wrote the Skyroads strip. They exchanged a series of letters during the summer of 1934, with Keaton going as far as submitting what Jerry thought was inspired artwork for a Superman comic strip. Jerry, meanwhile, was fleshing out his thinking on his hero. He would not just be a man of adventure but would offer “great possibilities for humor,” a device that Jerry felt could disarm readers. Superman’s backstory also was shifting to what is now familiar ground. The last man on Earth had catapulted his baby rather than himself back in a time machine. The infant was found by passing motorists Sam and Molly Kent, who first turned him over to an orphanage, then adopted him and named him Clark. At the end of the second week of Jerry’s scripts, Sam said to his wife, “We’ve been blind, Molly. The lad’s strength is a God-send! I see now that he’s destined for wonderful things.” The story resonated more this way, and Keaton helped bring it alive with his drawings. The artist was interested enough to set up a meeting with a publisher late in 1934, but then, for reasons Jerry never understood, Keaton told him that “the book is closed.” Maybe the publisher wasn’t interested. Maybe Keaton was shocked to discover how young and inexperienced Jerry was. Maybe Jerry was simply a pest. Keaton is no longer around to ask, but Denis Kitchen, a comics publisher who represents Keaton’s estate, says the illustrator was “a professional in his mid-twenties communicating with a teenager with a wacky idea about a guy with superpowers.… I think Keaton was very surprised by Superman’s eventual success, since he didn’t have any faith in it.”
He may have been betrayed, but Joe Shuster did have faith, still, in Superman and in Jerry Siegel. And while Jerry had no scruples about going back to his abandoned partner, first he needed to retool his superhero. That happened on what he said was a hot summer night of divine-like inspiration whose timing and circumstances swelled slightly each time he revisited them. His most considered version came in his unpublished memoir—a hundred-page document whose exuberance and visual prose give it the feel of a comic book—where he recalled all the telling details of what he had done and thought a half century earlier. Jerry decided his only hope lay in crafting a hero so super that no publisher could resist, one whose story was just unbelievable enough to be credible. He vowed to stay up as late as it took. His newest incarnation of Superman would come from a dying planet called Krypton, not a dying Earth. Clark Kent, the superhero’s alter ego, would be a reporter, just the occupation to snoop around for trouble. Lois Lane was here, too—a Lois who “was ga-ga over super-powered Superman” and “had an antipathy toward meek, mild Clark.” The premise was easy: His character would have everything Jerry wanted for himself—he would be able to run faster than a train, leap over skyscrapers, and be noticed by a pretty girl. What teenage boy wouldn’t love to be able to do all that?
The spine of the story was done late that night before Jerry climbed into his and Leo’s bed, leaving paper and pencil nearby. His sleep was fitful. Every time he woke he slipped into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and filled in another piece of the tale. “This went on until the wee hours of the morning,” he wrote in his late-life reminiscence. “At dawn, I enthusiastically raced about a dozen blocks to Joe’s apartment. I showed Joe the script and asked him if he would be interested in collaborating with me on this newest version of my Superman syndicate[d] comic strip project. He enthusiastically agreed, and got to work at once.”
The loyal Joe, hunched barely an inch above the paper as he strained to see, started drawing. Jerry hovered over him. They stopped only to gulp down sandwiches. The reunited partners now saw Superman as their joint property, although they would later disagree on who originated what. “I conceived the character in my mind’s eye to have a very, very colorful costume of a cape and, you know, very, very colorful tights and boots and the letter ‘S’ on his chest,” Joe recounted. Jerry begged to differ: it was he who dressed the hero in bold colors and an athlete’s tights, and he who came up with the S, along with a cape that “would whip around when the character was in action.” They agreed that Superman had to be everything they were not: strapping and dashing, fearless yet composed. As for the superhero’s second self—Clark Kent—wasn’t it obvious? Like Jerry, Clark wore glasses, wilted at the sight of blood or a pretty girl, and spent his days penning articles for the newspaper. Both lost their fathers and had their childhoods interrupted. When Joe was unsure how Clark should look, Jerry would pose for him. When it came to Superman, Joe often posed himself, in front of a mirror—contorting his face to look enraged, beaming with self-satisfaction, and, most convincingly, making his hero look uncertain about what he was doing but ready to plow ahead.
Lois was harder to picture. Joe and Jerry wanted to get her right, but there was no model at hand. So they hired one, from a Situation Wanted ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, at the lavish rate of $1.50 an hour, which was more than either boy made in a day. Jolan Kovacs, a skinny kid whose only training was posing before her bedroom mirror, had advertised herself as an “attractive model” named Joanne Carter. At two in the afternoon on a frigid Saturday in January, the scared high school student showed up at Joe’s apartment. “My heart was pounding,” she remembered forty years later, by which time she had still another name: Mrs. Jerry Siegel. “I knocked on the door, and a boy my age, wearing glasses, opened the door a crack, and I said, ‘I’m the model Mr. Shuster wrote to.’ So he opened the door and he motioned me in. We hit it off right away. We started talking about movies, we were talking about everything, and I was thawing out. And a woman stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, ‘Hello’—an older woman—and a little girl ran through the living room, chased by a little boy, and out again. And we were talking for the longest time, and finally I said, ‘Does Mr. Shuster know I’m here?’ And he said, ‘I’m Mr. Shuster.’ …
“So I posed for him, and his mother would look in, and I was turning blue,” Joanne confessed. “My sister’s bathing suit was too big, so I pinned it in the back. And he said, ‘Never mind. I’ll put a little bit more here, a little bit more there.’ But he used my face and my hairdo and my poses that just made me look more voluptuous—and older. I had to be older.” Jerry remembered that day even more distinctly and fondly: “ ‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘She’s terrific!’ But I was too meek and mild to let Joanne know how great I thought she was. She was a very attractive girl, and I was just a teenaged kid, with a giant sized inferiority complex, who had nothing but grandiose plans that seemed very far from materializing into actuality.”
Just how far is clear in hindsight. There they were, two young men who had just turned twenty, with no prospects of any kind nearly a year after graduating from high school. Both were shy of the grades and money needed for college. Neither had a real job, nor a place to live other than where they always had: with their parents. Yet they were paying money they did not have, to a teenage model who was not a model, to play a voluptuous newswoman who existed only in their imaginations. So far those imaginations had come up short, producing four renderings of a superhero who remained a closely held secret, not by design but because Jerry could not find anyone to buy his manuscript or Joe Shuster’s drawings. Now even they were having doubts. “I have a feeling of affection for those lost supermen of the comics into whom I tried to breathe life, but who never surfaced onto comics pages,” Jerry said. “On paper, they were the mightiest men on Earth. But in real life they were very, very fragile.”
· · ·
MAJOR MALCOLM WHEELER-NICHOLSON’S biography reads like a Jerry Siegel adventure strip. The son of an early suffragette, he grew up at the turn of the twentieth century in a household that counted Herbert Hoover’s wife and Teddy Roosevelt’s mother among its intimates. A horseman from boyhood, Wheeler-Nicholson attended a military academy and then enlisted in the cavalry. He was one of its youngest senior officers and led one of the African American units known as Buffalo Soldiers. In Texas, he operated under the command of General John J. Pershing and chased bandits back across the Mexican border. In the Philippines, his squad set a world speed record for assembling its tripod-mounted machine gun. In Siberia, he was an intelligence officer working out of the Japanese embassy. When he turned on the military, publicly denouncing the outmoded way it trained and promoted troops, he was court-martialed and became the target of what his family has reason to believe was an Army-orchestrated assassination attempt.
His life as a gadabout is just half the story of the man his children knew as the Old Man, his grandchildren called Nick, and the comic book world knows as the Major. One of the most prolific pulp fiction writers of his day, he published more than ninety novels, novellas, short stories, and serials, which turned up on shelves as far away as New Zealand. He was a historian and a visionary. He knew the long and fertile life that comics had enjoyed in U.S. newspapers, beginning in the late 1800s with the launch of strips such as The Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids. The titles made clear the young audience newspaper titans were going after, and Wheeler-Nicholson was fixated on attracting that audience, along with its parents, by blending the magazine form of pulps with the picture presentation of comic strips. What he really longed for was a graphic novel—the perfect way, this literary entrepreneur thought, to bring culture to the masses—but it would be another generation before anyone even imagined that format. Instead he settled for what was at hand, launching National Allied Magazines in 1934 and a year later publishing what many consider the prototype of today’s comic magazine. Unlike its progenitors, New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine featured comic strips that hadn’t already run in newspapers and it carried moneymaking advertisements. Its title was apt both because of its ground-breaking contents and because it measured a whopping ten by fifteen inches.
For America, New Fun helped kick-start the emerging medium of comic books. For Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, it was a career-launcher. The Major needed writers to produce his strips, ideally ones who came cheap. It was his shortage of funds as much as creative zeal that inspired him to include only original material in his books, rather than buying the expensive right to reprint what newspapers already had published. No matter that Jerry and Joe were young and untested, or that their heroes were an unlikely swordsman from seventeenth-century France and an even less likely private detective investigating the supernatural. The Major needed filler. The boys needed money. And so the October 1935 issue of New Fun featured two single-page Siegel and Shuster titles: “Henri Duval of France, Famed Soldier of Fortune” and “Doctor Occult, the Ghost Detective,” a story whose protagonist had not just Superman’s cape but his face.
It seemed like manna from heaven. For eight months, Jerry and Joe had tried to peddle their revamped superhero but found no takers. The Publishers Syndicate of Chicago turned them down. Owners of the Famous Funnies comic book returned their package unopened, Jerry’s knotted strings still intact. The Bell Syndicate wrote that “the drawings are well done and the idea is rather interesting, but we would not care to undertake the syndication.” So low were their funds that Joe was hawking ice cream bars on the street, and the only way Jerry could afford a movie was by selling empty milk bottles back to storekeepers. They had even started cannibalizing their sacrosanct Superman, with Doctor Occult getting his face and Henri Duval his penchant for adventure. Now, thanks to the Major, Henri Duval and Doctor Occult were being sold on the streets of Cleveland, with a promise of more work. Wheeler-Nicholson asked Jerry and Joe to prepare a four-page strip about a rip-roaring FBI agent, to be called “Federal Men,” which would run in one of the new comic books he was launching. He also had ideas for three new series—“Calling All Cars: Sandy Kean and the Radio Squad,” “Spy,” and “Slam Bradley,” a hard-bitten private eye who seemed like a dry run for Superman. Finally, in a move the young artists had been waiting for forever, Wheeler-Nicholson wrote that their idea for a Superman comic strip “stands a very good chance.”
The Major kept his promise about publishing nearly everything Jerry and Joe sent in, but there were red flags. His launches of books like Detective Comics were delayed. Promises of 15 percent of profits and half of syndicate sales remained promises. Some checks that were due never came, and one bounced. Early in 1936, Wheeler-Nicholson sent Jerry a payment with this postscript: “Do not be alarmed over the legal phraseology on the back of the checks. Our lawyers made us put it on after we had a couple of unfortunate experiences with chiselers who tried to hold us up after we’d paid them in full.” But the boys were alarmed, less by the request that they release their rights than by the mounting evidence that the Major was running out of money. So while they continued to write and draw for him, and to live off what payments they got, they determined not to trust him with their prize possession. Please, they asked him, give us back our Superman scripts.
The truth is that Wheeler-Nicholson really did believe in Superman. His was the kind of life the Major had lived, a freewheeling and crusading one, and he was convinced that Jerry and Joe were sitting on a gold mine. That is what the Old Man told his children over the dinner table, where, said his son Douglas, Superman “was a major subject of discussion.” The truth also is that the Major’s approach to money was a lot like Joe’s father’s: noble intentions, bungled execution. In another business and another era this literary entrepreneur might have squeezed by, but not in the middle of the worst economic downturn in U.S. history, nor in a fledgling industry populated by racketeers and sharks. Two with the sharpest teeth would swallow up Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing houses before he saw what was happening.
The first of that pair, Harry Donenfeld, was a survivor. Born in Romania in 1893 just as it was turning against Jews like him, he came to America with his parents and brother and made his way as a child on the pulsating streets of New York’s Lower East Side as a barker—pulling customers into clothing stores or dance halls, or hawking Yiddish and Russian newspapers. Harry neither denied nor embraced his Yiddishkeit roots, but he was hungry to leave his Jewish ghetto and determined never to go back. Money was his way out, and he made his through magazines with titles like Juicy Tales and Strange Suicides. Harry couldn’t write, edit, or draw. What he did better than anyone was the hard sell. “He could sell ice to the Eskimos,” said the now ninety-nine-year-old Jack Adams, who worked for him back then. “Once he got an order from Hearst for nine million inserts for magazines after he entertained their buyer by getting him drunk and laid in Canada.… Harry didn’t know from nothing except making money.” Some of that money was from printing the publications at his family’s shop, but over the years more came from distributing them to drugstores and newsstands. The delivery trucks and drivers were ones bootleggers had used to supply speakeasies with hooch during Prohibition. So were the whatever-it-takes tactics needed to build and sustain regional monopolies, of which Harry had plenty. They were what led him, by the early 1930s, to become a magazine publisher and owner. As long as people were buying, what went inside the publications didn’t matter.
The indictments changed all that. New York’s new no-nonsense mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was cracking down on public indecency, and nothing met that era’s definition so clearly as pictures Harry ran in Pep! that glimpsed a woman’s privates. A grand jury in Kentucky was equally offended. Harry beat the second rap and convinced an underling to take the fall for the first (the favor was returned when Harry gave the patsy, Herbie Siegel, a job for life). One lesson Harry took away was that while smut was profitable enough to sometimes justify the risk, it was best not just to sell it from behind the counter but to be a silent partner to avoid any potential embarrassment or jail time. The other lesson was to diversify.
Jack Liebowitz was everything Harry Donenfeld wasn’t. His roots were in the same Jewish ghetto, and both had ties to the rabble-rousing International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but while Harry merely printed the guild’s brochures and took its money, Jack was an officer and true believer. What Jack remembers most from his boyhood was not really having one. He was born in Ukraine in 1900, the year his father died. In 1904 his mother disappeared to America, leaving him and his older brother behind with their grandparents. By the time she came back his brother had succumbed to diphtheria. Five months before his tenth birthday, Jack, his mother, and his little sister stole across the border in the dead of night into Austria, then made their way to Holland and got tickets in steerage for the journey to America. In New York, Jack slept on the roof of his tenement to escape the summer heat and his stepfather. With other kids, he used trash can covers to fend off rival gangs. He never owned an overcoat, or slept in a bed he didn’t share with three brothers.
While Harry came away from his hardscrabble upbringing as a joyful backslapper, Jack emerged hardheaded and glum. Harry always had an expensive cigar in his mouth; Jack smoked cigarettes he bummed from friends, which was his way of disciplining himself not to smoke too much and to save money. Harry was the bluffer who showed his cards only when he had to and generally walked away with the jackpot; Jack was the house, getting a cut of every bet and never trusting to chance. His soul, like his training, was that of an accountant.
Jack went to work for Harry in 1935 after the Depression killed his hopes of making it on his own. Newly unearthed home movie footage of the two from those early years attests to the awkward pair they were—Harry short and thick, Jack six inches taller, thirty pounds lighter, and blanching as a beaming Harry, knowing the reaction he will get, reaches up and presses his face against Jack’s in a warm embrace. But their differences made them perfect partners. Jack worked out the details of deals Harry made with a handshake, turned down bribes Harry had trouble resisting, and tidied up Harry’s messes. Seven years Harry’s junior, Jack acted like his big brother. In the process, Jack Liebowitz made himself so indispensable that Harry Donenfeld promoted him from bookkeeper to second-in-command and then to partner, with Jack bringing little equity to the table and barely anyone noticing. Not even Jack noticed as his flirtation with socialism yielded to a fondness for money.
Neither Harry nor Jack cared about art or storytelling, but they did know more than the Major about how to make a buck, and they liked the idea of branching out from the smooshies and horrors to cleaner kids’ stuff. Not only did they print and deliver New Fun and Wheeler-Nicholson’s other comic books, they also loaned him the cash to publish them. And while the Major could stay a step ahead of his writers, artists, and process servers, Harry and Jack were pros at spotting a dodger. Harry had defied the Depression trend that was bankrupting other publishers, getting his financing from a quiet partner named Paul Sampliner and Paul’s indulgent mother, and buying up other presses as they teetered. In 1937 Jack became an uninvited partner in Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing house; by the next spring, the whole show was Harry and Jack’s. The Major walked away with his debts wiped clean, his wallet empty, and his heart broken. Harry and Jack had all three of the Major’s books, all published under the Detective Comics banner. They now owned the trucks, the printing presses, and the actual magazines, which gave them a foothold in this new world of kids’ literature along with the diversity Harry the pornographer had been seeking.
Were those shifts in ownership aboveboard? Absolutely, according to Jack Liebowitz, who in his unpublished memoir said it was a straightforward matter: Wheeler-Nicholson couldn’t pay his artists or writers or pay back his loans, creditors pushed him into bankruptcy, and “I went down to court and bought the two magazines.” What Jack doesn’t say but his company’s records show is that Harry had orchestrated everything. He bought up, for fifty cents on the dollar, debts the Major owed his printer and engraver, thus meeting the three-creditor standard needed to force Wheeler-Nicholson into bankruptcy. The backdrop was Dickensian. Harry and Jack feted the Major by sending him on vacation to Cuba, tried unsuccessfully to buy him out for seventy-five thousand dollars, then took him to debtors’ court during Christmas week. Harry made it happen; Jack dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. The Major, meanwhile, overcame bouts of booze and nerves and moved on. His wife, Elsa, never did. “She hated them,” said Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson, referring to Harry and Jack. “Any time any mention of them came up, she would spit fire.”
The upheaval in ownership touched Jerry, Joe, and Superman in two ways. It gave Wheeler-Nicholson’s old companies new bosses who could pay their bills, and it put the boys on notice that Harry and Jack relished playing hardball. Jerry spent 1936 and 1937 the way he had the two previous years, pitching Superman to anyone he thought might listen. Getting heard was harder than ever. United Feature Syndicate called the whole Superman concept “a rather immature piece of work. It is attractive because of its freshness and naïveté, but this is likely to wear off after the feature runs for a while.” The Ledger Syndicate was equally blunt: “We feel that editors and the public have had their fill for the time being of interplanetary and superhuman subjects.” By the end of 1937, copies of Jerry and Joe’s Superman comic strip could be found in the backs of filing cabinets and the bottoms of wastebaskets across the world of publishing.
One of those who received the strip years before and never forgot it was Maxwell Charles Gaines, a senior executive at the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. Gaines could not interest his bosses so he sent back the drawings. Three years later, in December 1937, Gaines was looking for new material and decided to take another shot at Superman. Jerry and Joe mailed him proposals for five strips—about a cowboy, an adventurer, a detective, a sports star, and a sci-fi scientist, all knockoffs of icons like the Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy—along with their latest rendition of Superman. The sketches still were on Gaines’s mind and in his office a few weeks later when he got a call from the new owners of Major Wheeler-Nicholson’s publishing business.
Jack and Harry wanted to launch another book. They had a title, Action Comics, but no material. So, as Jack wrote in his memoir, he phoned his friend Charlie Gaines. “I said, do you have any material laying around. The newspaper syndicate usually had stuff laying around. Stuff that had been submitted to them which had been turned down. So he sent me over a pile of stuff. Among that pile of stuff was Superman which had been submitted by Siegel and Shuster to the syndicate which had turned it down like all other syndicates turned it down. It was six strips, daily strips, made for newspapers. Anyway, we liked it.” Charlie and Jack called Jerry in Cleveland. Gaines said he had bad news and good: His syndicate was not interested in any of the comic strips, but Jack might be. Would it be okay, Gaines wanted to know, if he turned over to Jack the scripts—including Superman?
It was the question Jerry had been waiting five years to answer. No matter that to the accountant-turned-publisher, the work of the young writer’s dreams was “a pile of stuff.” Vin Sullivan, an editor who stayed on during the transition from Wheeler-Nicholson to Donenfeld-Liebowitz, called Jerry in January 1938 to make plans. The boys would have to cut and paste their newspaper-style format into material that would fit in a thirteen-page comic book. And they would have to do it fast, Sullivan said, since Superman was destined for the inaugural issue of Action Comics. After lying around lifeless for what seemed like half a lifetime, Superman was on the fast track.
The matter of money was settled almost as fast. On March 1, Jack mailed Jerry and Joe a check for $412—$282 for work that had been done for but not yet paid by the Major, and, almost as an afterthought, $130 for Superman. It was double what they were used to and a fair rate—$10 a page—for the era and their experience, so Jerry and Joe cashed it and split it down the middle. It also was a swindle on the order of the Dutch West India Company’s 1626 purchase of Manhattan from the natives for $24, for Jack and Harry were buying not merely the thirteen pages of that first Superman comic, but the right to do what they would with the character. They could clip his powers or his hair, bring him to life in new media or kill him outright, or do whatever else they wanted. Harry and Jack were the honchos now, the boys mere hirelings. Jerry and Joe’s deal with the publishing house was for five years; Superman’s was forever.
That $130 contract signaled the beginning not just of the Superman character but of what would become a multibillion-dollar industry: comic book superheroes. It also was the defining narrative—the original sin—in the relationship between comic book creators and owners. Jerry and Joe may have brought to life their superhero, but that is not what mattered. What counted then and for decades after was who had the money to put that hero on the printed page and deliver those pages to the public. To the publishers went not just the profits but the power. Each writer or artist who took up that cause in the future would hark back to what Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz did to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As if to underline the point—to demonstrate that for $130 Jerry and Joe, like all comics creators back then, were giving up everything—their Superman artwork was destroyed soon after it was used. There would be no chance for them to sell it again or save it for posterity.
IT WAS APRIL 1938 and the world was holding its breath. The Führer’s storm troopers had just occupied and annexed Austria and were ready to steamroll into Czechoslovakia. Joseph Stalin had shown the West and his countrymen that he was as ruthless as the Nazis by staging a show trial for Nikolai Bukharin, a champion of the revolution, and then liquidating him. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was in full motion, but one in three Americans remained ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished, and 250,000 teenagers had taken to the road to earn money to send home. Never had America so craved a hero, if not a messiah. Never had a publisher so perfectly timed its release of a new title.
The very cover of Action Comics No. 1 signaled how groundbreaking—how uplifting—this Superman would be. There he was, in bold primary colors: blue full-body tights, a yellow chest shield, and candy-apple cape, booties, and briefs worn over his tights. He looked every bit the circus acrobat, only stronger, more agile, ready for action. No mask for this adventurer; he wanted the world to see who he was. While it was left to the imagination just whom he was fuming at, it was clear that no one would want to suffer the rage of a being who could single-handedly lift a car into the air and smash it against a rock. Hopefully he was on our side. The date printed on the top of the page was a standard bit of misdirection: It said June when, in a bid to ensure it would still look fresh if it sat unsold two months later, it actually went on sale in April. There was little doubt that this was a comic book that would justify its ten-cent price and deliver on its name, Action.
The first inside page introduced readers to the handsome, brash avenger that Jerry and Joe crafted during that sleepless night of writing and frenetic day of sketching three years earlier. A scientist on a faraway planet placed his infant son in a spaceship headed to Earth just before his planet died of old age. The child was found by a passing motorist, who turned him over to an orphanage. Reaching maturity in just the fourth panel of the comic, Superman was able to leap an eighth of a mile, vault a twenty-story building, and hoist tremendous weight. Nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin. How was that possible? The “scientific explanation” was there on page 1: He did it the same way a lowly ant supported weights hundreds of times its own, or a grasshopper leaped what to a man would be several city blocks. That was it: the entire birth, growth, and backstory of a breathtaking superhero laid out in a single comic book page measuring 7¾ by 10½ inches.
By page 2 he was a full-grown Superman, racing off on adventures that didn’t stop until the story did, eleven pages later. Along the way he saved an innocent woman from electrocution, beat up a wife-beater, rescued Lois Lane from kidnappers, and intercepted a warmonger. No worries here about laws or social niceties. Bursting into the governor’s house was the only way to stop an unjust execution? Barrel ahead. Dashing across live electrical wires could make a lobbyist see the evil of his ways? Up we go. This Superman was a hell-raiser and an insurrectionist. Half Huckleberry Finn, half Robin Hood, he had a technique as straightforward and a purpose as pure as those of his teenage truth-and-justice-seeking creators. His story accounted for just thirteen of Action No. 1’s sixty-four pages, but those are the only pages the world remembers.
Literature’s most gripping love triangle also was there from the first, or at least the hint of it. Clark Kent was smitten with Lois Lane, asking her out on a date on page 6. Lois agreed, but when he pressed to find out why she was avoiding him, she let him have it: “Please Clark! I’ve been scribbling ‘sob stories’ all day long. Don’t ask me to dish out another.” A page later, she walked out on her timid colleague after he let a thug cut in on their dance, explaining, “You asked me earlier in the evening why I avoid you. I’ll tell you why now: because you’re a spineless, unbearable coward!” Lois’s time with Superman in this first story was too brief for her to fall in love, or for him to dodge. Not yet. Their newspaper already had a name, The Daily Star, but Clark and Lois’s boss was identified only by the nameplate on his desk: EDITOR.
It did not take long for the buzz to begin. Just who was this costumed hero anyway? writers, artists, and publishers wanted to know. And who were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the uncredited creators who were unknowns in both the old world of comic strips and the new one of comic books? Was their Superman an original or a knockoff? Would he sell? Would he last? Those questions still resonate seventy-five years later.
There was no question that Superman built on what came before. He was as strong as Samson, as fast as Hermes, and as brain-bendingly smart as Micromegas. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Rudolph Valentino were his model swashbucklers. Popeye and Tarzan showed him how to be a strongman. Whom better to look to for guidance on foppish dual identities than the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro? The Shadow offered up an alter ego named Kent and a female sidekick named Lane. Jerry and Joe made no secret of any of their inspirations, just as they acknowledged being saps for the endless newspaper comics, dime novels, science fiction tales, and cliff hanger movies they took in as kids, from Mutt and Jeff to the Merriwell brothers.
When does influence became borrowing and borrowing become plagiarism? Doc Savage lent Superman some of his best stuff. In less heroic settings, Doc used his formal first name, Clark, a nod to film star Clark Gable. Superman picked the same name with the same nod to the King of Hollywood. Doc had superhuman strength and a moral compass that compelled him never to kill an enemy unless there was no other way; so would Superman. Doc’s nickname was the Man of Bronze; Superman’s was the Man of Steel. There was no room for dames in Doc’s life, or in Supe’s. The borrowing was not confined to general concepts: Gimmicks like putting bad guys to sleep by pressing a nerve in the neck were fair game, as were entire plot lines. Jerry Siegel acknowledged having read Doc “with fascination,” but that was as far as he went. Comics historian Will Murray, who has documented the close connection between Doc and Superman, says Jerry may have stopped there for fear of being sued, but future Superman writers borrowed even more from Clark Savage, Jr.
The case for a connection with Philip Wylie’s Hugo Danner was even stronger. Hugo hurdled across rivers, bounded into the air, raised a cannon skyward with one hand, and lifted an automobile by its bumper. Like Superman, Hugo was said to be as strong as steel, and both used their strength to take on evildoers ranging from arms merchants to entire armies. How did Hugo get to be so strong? “Did you ever watch an ant carry many times its weight? Or see a grasshopper jump fifty times its length?” Professor Danner asked his son, invoking the precise natural principles—even the very same insects—Jerry would to explain Superman’s prowess. Philip Wylie’s whole approach in Gladiator, blending science fiction with action lore, seemed state of the art when he published his novel in 1930 and a bit less fresh when Superman came along eight years later.
But was superhuman Hugo Danner actually Superman? Wylie thought so. In their first two years of writing and drawing the character, Jerry and Joe “used dialogue and scenes from GLADIATOR,” its author wrote a colleague in 1970. “I even consulted my lawyer to see if I ought not to sue for plagerism [sic]. He agreed I’d possibly win but found the ‘creators’ of ‘Superman’ were two young kids getting $25 a week apiece, only, and that a corporation owned the strip so recovery of damages would be costly, long, difficult and maybe fail owing to that legal set-up.” Wylie was right: He might have won had he sued, much as Superman’s publishers did later when they went after his imitators. Doc Savage’s creators—Lester Dent, John Nanovic, and H. W. Ralston—might have as well, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs. But as Wylie himself conceded later in his letter, “We all borrow in ways from others, tho. The first Superman wasn’t my Gladiator but Hercules or Samson.”
That was the point. Jerry and Joe did not cook up Superman from scratch. They built on as well as borrowed from a long line of mythmakers and storytellers, the same way Burroughs borrowed from Homer and Wylie from the ancient Hebrews. “Our concept,” Joe said, “would be to combine the best traits of all the heroes of history.” He and Jerry sometimes took more than they might have, with too little paraphrasing or crediting. But Doc Savage was an earthling whose hardest job was building his muscles and brainpower; Superman was an alien whose biggest challenge was deciding what to do with the powers he was born with. Danner, too, was decidedly different, a dark presence done in by his worry that mankind could not abide a superhuman such as him. Superman was a creature of light, and it was that very optimism that America loved most. And although Savage and Danner were human and Superman wasn’t, his pairing with Clark Kent gave him a groundedness and humanity Doc and Hugo couldn’t match.
What the two Cleveland teenagers had done was inspired. They had reached into the melting pot of fantastic characters bubbling up in the 1930s, picking out the choicest features then carefully reformulating them. Voilà: a freshly minted Man of Tomorrow for a world not sure it had one. Superman was an alien shipped to Earth rather than an earthling exploring the universe, like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon—and he had come to help. Superman was no mortal donning an exotic costume like Zorro or the Lone Ranger; just the opposite, this honest-to-God extraterrestrial walked and worked among mortals like us by disguising himself as a bumbling reporter. No wonder we adored him. Although his enemies included run-of-the-mill rogues tracked down by the likes of Dick Tracy and Sherlock Holmes, Superman also took on the demons of his day, from abusive husbands to war profiteers to a penal system that executed the innocent—all in the very first issue.
By his own admission, Joe’s renderings of Superman, Lois, and all the rest of Action No. 1 lacked luster and gloss. But that was their genius. They were straightforward and unprettied, making them as easy to follow as an architect’s blueprints. His skyscrapers were impressionistic shafts, his criminals had angular mugs and stiff features. Primitive, yes, but primal and even ethereal. Likewise, Jerry’s stories had his superhero racing up the sides of buildings and jerking getaway cars off the road: just the thing for ten-year-olds and for a nation tortured by self-doubt. Their creation was brilliant, whether or not Jerry and Joe themselves were. Superman was the ideal character at the right moment, and the boys sensed it even if they couldn’t foresee how long it all would last. Jerry and Joe simply wrote and drew what they knew—which is why Superman embraced the vigilante justice that Jerry longed to mete out to his father’s robbers, why Lois and Clark’s Daily Star was modeled not on a U.S. newspaper but on the Toronto Star, whose cartoons Joe’s father had read to him, and why Superman’s alter ego looked and acted so much like the young Messrs. Siegel and Shuster.