The Creation and Theft of Superman!
Superheroes in Hollywood. An on-going series of articles looking at the various superhero films pre-2000.
A few years ago, I began to write a book. The book would cover all of the various superhero films that came before Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. The emphasis was to show how the various comic book creators got screwed out of money and ownership by various sources, the main ones being their publishers and those in Hollywood. I worked on this project for a long while, but, I couldn’t tie it all together, so I abandoned the project.
Instead of letting all that work go to waste, I’ll post it all here, in it’s raw form, for all to read. By all means, let me know where you think I got it right, and wrong.
Note: This work is copyright 2024 Daniel Best and cannot be reproduced, reprinted or otherwise used in publications for profit etc etc without the express permission of the author (me). If you want to use this research, get in touch and we’ll talk.
The Creation and Theft of Superman
Appropriately it all started with Superman in 1938. To be fair, others did come first. Tarzan in 1912. Dick Tracy popped up in 1931. Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician in 1934. 1936 saw the introduction of The Phantom.
The difference between those who came before Superman and Superman itself was simple - those who came first were men. Normal men. Sure, Tarzan was strong, Flash Gordon was an astronaut. Mandrake could gesture hypnotically and hypnotise his foes, and The Phantom, who lived in the jungle, had a rock-solid punch. Dick Tracy was a detective who had gadgets and a rogue’s gallery to rival anyone. Others, such as Tim Tyler, Red Barry, Joe Palooka and Jungle Jim (a great Tarzan rip-off) also appeared before Superman but again were merely men.
What set Superman apart was he was an alien who had superpowers, not merely a man was operating at the peak of his potential, with almost limitless powers. He was the first superhero. Superman provided a template for everyone else to follow, and characters did follow, in spades.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s back up and have a bit of a history lesson.
To understand the present, we first need to study the past. For superheroes, comic books and the films made from them, that means looking at the creators.
(Above: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, 1934)
Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster met when they were in high school. Both were quiet, both painfully shy and fantasists. They both loved science fiction, and both would contribute to the early days of science fiction fandom. Much has been written about Jerry, more than has been written about Joe.
Joe was born in Canada and grew up in Toronto. The Shuster’s were an interesting family. Joe’s father, Julius and his brother Jack came to Canada from Rotterdam and married sisters Ida and Bessie, who had come to Canada from Kiev. Joe’s family lived upstairs in the two-story house, his uncle and aunt lived downstairs. Joe and his sister Jean grew up with their cousin Frank. All three were as close as siblings could be. Joe and Frank would spend entire days watching silent films in a cinema where Jack Shuster worked as the projectionist. Frank would grow up to form a popular comedy duo – Wayne and Shuster.
Julius moved his family moved to Cleveland in 1924 for business reasons. Joe wasn’t as taken with Cleveland as he was Toronto.
Cleveland was not nearly as metropolitan as Toronto was, and it was not as big or as beautiful. Whatever buildings I saw In Toronto remained in my mind and came out in the form of Metropolis. As I realized later, Toronto is a much more beautiful city than Cleveland ever was.[i]
Both Jerry and Joe were introverts. Being naturally shy and with vivid imaginations, they gravitated towards each other. Jerry could write and Joe could draw. They began their partnership while still in school, producing little strips and gags for their high school newspaper, The Glenville Torch. Jerry would write poems of longing and love and sign them Stiletto Vance, fooling no-one.
Jerry and Joe’s first collaboration was an original character called Goober the Mighty (above). Jerry wrote little stories about Goober, a lion, and Joe would draw him. Their first collaboration appeared in the Torch, on 7 May 1931. Once the pair were working together, they didn’t stop.
Joe’s sister, Jean, who, unlike everyone who has written about Superman since (including me), was there and would later talk about how the pair met and worked.
They met in high school. They were introduced by a cousin, by Jerry's cousin, and they immediately came over to our house. And we had a big dining room table, and they immediately started talking about science fiction and got very, very excited about HG Wells and all the great science fiction things that were going on. And they were both great fans, and so the first day they thought, we ought to do something together. So immediate. They worked together.[ii]
(Above The Cleveland Plain dealer, 12 September 1926)
(Above: Weird Tales, Vol 16, #5. November 1930)
(Above: Jerry Siegel advertises his fanzine in the pages of Amazing Stories, Vol 7 #6, September 1932)
Jerry would publish science fiction fanzines, with Joe providing illustrations. The circumstances of the creation of Superman have been long reported and debated upon. What can be agreed upon is that Jerry Siegel got the idea and had Joe Shuster visualise it. One fanzine, Science Fiction #3, was published by Jerry in 1933 and featured the first Superman story – The Reign of the Superman, a bald despot with no resemblance to the Superman the world would later fall in love with.
(Above: The Reign of the Superman by ‘Howard Fine’, aka Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Science Fiction #3, circa January 1933)
The story of how Jerry visualised was told in breathless style by Jim Steranko in his brilliant The Steranko History of Comics Volume One.
On a sweltering summer night in 1933, Jerry Siegel lay in bed counting the cracks in the ceiling of his Cleveland, Ohio bedroom. The air was still and heavy. Clouds drifted past the moon. Up there was wind. If only I could fly. If only...and SUPERMAN was conceived, not in his entirely, but little by little throughout a long and sleepless night
Siegel tells it this way, ‘I hop right out of bed and write this down, and then l go back and think some more for about two hours and get up again and write that down. This goes on all night at two-hour intervals, until in the morning I have a complete script.’
Without stopping for breakfast, he raced through the deserted dawn to awaken his friend Joe Shuster, 12 blocks away. Breathlessly, he explained the nature of his creation. Shuster was ecstatic. Without wasting a moment, they began developing the character in comic strip form. Both were 17 years old.[iii]
Jim loves his corn.
This account, which Steranko has always said was based on conversations with Jerry and Joe, continued,
Initially, Superman was a variation of pulp heavyweight Doc Savage. The concept, and even the name Superman, could easily have been inspired by a Street & Smith advertisement that ran in the early 30's pulps. Comparison between Shuster's original Superman drawing, and Doc's promotional ads bears marked similarities.
The idea of a visitor from a world other than our own probably took its fictional bows in Voltaire's 1752 tale Micromegas. Since then, countless authors have employed the idea including H. G. Wells in War Of The Worlds. More probably the thought came from John W. Campbell's Aarn Munro stories about a descendant of earthmen raised on the planet Jupiter who, because of the planet's dense gravity, is a mental and physical Superman on earth. Siegel used this man from another planet speculation to explain the reason for his protagonist's extraordinary physical development.
Whatever it may be, Superman's appeal was one of intrinsic simplicity. Kids understood it better than anyone. His outfit was more colorful, more flamboyant than the Phantom's. His method of operation more direct than Dick Tracy. And he was stronger than Tarzan, Buck Rogers and everyone else put together. He lacked the adult, sophisticated veneer of Flash Gordon, the talkativeness of Terry. In short, he was the graphic representation of the ultimate childhood dream-self.[iv]
Jerry took exception to Jim’s account after the History of Comics was published. He fired off a letter to fanzine publisher Richard Kyle in 1973.
The creation of Superman was not as described in the Steranko book.
I have never read the Aarn Munro stories. Have checked, after I saw the Steranko assertion, and learned Aarn Munro appear in Astounding Stories magazine, Dec. 1934 issue, in a story entitled The Mightiest Machine. Superman had been originated. and was being offered for consideration prior to December of 1934. The Sam Moskowitz book Seekers of Tomorrow mentions on pg. 366 that the Aarn Munro story dealt with ‘a race of devillike creatures who first lived on Earth, migrate to another planet and once again constitute a danger to the mother world.’
At a party, after the Steranko book appeared, Forrest J. Ackerman showed me a bound collection of all the issues of my Science Fiction fanzine. I could not recall ever having written any such purported review of The Gladiator, and so I carefully examined the bound copies of the Science Fiction fanzine I had published many years ago; I could find no such review in any of the issues.
Steranko wrote about Superman, ‘His outfit was more colorful, more flamboyant than the Phantom's.’ From page 268 of the hardcover book, The Great Movie Serials by Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut, ‘Falk once described his Ghost Who Walks as a combination of Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan and Superman. That was a charitable description since The Phantom came before Superman and that strip owes something to the Phantom in point of fact, as does Batman and all the long-underwear boys discussed in this chapter.’ And E. Nelson Bridwell in his error-filled introduction to the Superman hardcover Crown book asked whence came Superman's skintight costume: ‘From the Phantom?’
According to The Great Movie Serials book and Martin L. Grein’s column in The Buyer' s Guide, No. 31, Lee Falk created The Phantom in 1936. I have proof that the Superman newspaper strips drawn by Joe and written by me were being submitted to markets prior to 1936 when The Phantom was first published, and any statement that Joe copied Superman's costume from the costume of the Phantom is untrue.[v]
For his part, Joe based the character on the silent film action heroes that he and Frank had devoured in the 1920s in Toronto. As far as Joe was concerned, Superman was Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Kent was a combination of Harold Lloyd and Joe himself. Frank Shuster, who was there, confirmed this to the Toronto Star shortly before Joe’s death in 1992.
I'd try to get him to come out and play ball because I was a much more active and physical kind of guy. I’ll admit that Joe believed in lifting weights and making himself strong, but he was never one for actual activity. He looked like the stereotypical ninety-pound weakling getting sand kicked his face. And it later occurred to me that he was Clark Kent - the sort of nebbish in glasses that everyone wanted to kick around - but underneath he was the Man of Steel. It came from him being the quiet, pensive kid who sat there drawing and underneath it all, really wanting to have strength and power.[vi]
In 2006, Jean was the last person alive who was in the room when Jerry gave Joe the concept for Superman. When she passed, that was it. There is nobody left with such a direct link. Jean remembered how Jerry and Joe worked.
Jerry got the idea, he came over and around the dining table, and he would talk about his idea for a story and, then Joe would say, well, then -- well, how about this? And he would draw it out real, real fast and say, how does this look to you? And Jerry would say, yes, great. Great. Great. And they were both excited and enthusiastic and very, very excited.[vii]
In 1933, Siegel tried to sell the Superman concept to a comic book publisher in Chicago. It was accepted for publication, but the company soon went bankrupt, and Jerry went back to shopping it around to syndicate agents and publishers. Nobody was interested.
(Above: Unpublished Superman daily strip by Jerry Siegel and Russell Keaton, 1934)
Jerry thought that Joe might be the weak link. His artwork was not bad, it just was not good, like Hal Foster was good and Russel Keaton was good. Jerry decided to strike out on his own and in 1934, he sent his scripts to Keaton, then drawing Buck Rogers. Keaton was interested enough to draw Superman’s origin story. Again, nobody was interested, so Keaton went back to Buck Rogers and Siegel went back to Shuster. Siegel tried again in late 1934.
I decided that I'd like to do Superman as a newspaper strip. I approached Joe about it, and he was enthusiastic about the possibility. I was up late one night, and more and more ideas kept coming to me, and I kept writing out several weeks of syndicate strips for the proposed newspaper strip. When morning came, I had written several weeks of material, and I dashed over to Joe's place and showed it to him.
Of course, Joe had worked on that earlier version of Superman, and when I came to him with this new version of it, he was immediately sold. And when I saw the drawings that were emerging from his pencil I almost flipped. I knew he had matured a great deal since he had done The Superman, and I thought he was doing a great job on the new art.[viii]
By now the pair had a fairly large portfolio of strips, so they approached Detective Comics, Inc in 1937. The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, almost. People often believe that Superman was the first work that Jerry and Joe did for Detective Comics (which I’ll begin referring to as DC Comics from here on). The truth is that before DC Comics bought Superman, Jerry and Joe had been working there, producing comic strips, for over two years.
(New Fun #6. October 1935. Doctor Occult by ‘Ledger and Reuths’, aka Siegel and Shuster)
(More Fun #7. January 1936. Henri Duval by Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster)
The pair started at DC Comics in 1935. They had placed several of their original creations, including Dr. Occult: The Ghost Detective, Henri Duval, Federal Men, Calling All Cars, Slam Bradley, Bart Regan and Spy with the company. Their work was appearing on a regular basis in New Comics, More Fun, New Adventure Comics and Detective Comics, to the point where they signed their Dr. Occult strip ‘Leger/Reuths. DC Comics were always keen to see what the pair would bring in next. As Siegel explained.
When we broke into the field, we both indulged in what we thought was very experimental stuff. In the writing, I tried to incorporate what was so popular in the pulp field into the comics field. I used a great number of captions along with dialogue balloons, visualizing the way a pulp comic should be. I feel now that we were pioneering, and that much of what followed was influenced by the way we handled our very early work, like Slam Bradley, especially.
Slam Bradley was a dry run for Superman. Superman had already been created, and we didn't want to give away the Superman idea; but we just couldn't resist putting into Slam Bradley some of the stuff which we knew would be in Superman, if and when we got Superman launched.[ix]
Their early work wasn’t taking the world by storm. The stories were basic, the artwork was crude, even by the standards of the day, but they were reliable, compliant and cheap. They would be guaranteed $10 a page for future stories.
Joe’s family was so poor that they couldn’t afford to buy proper paper for him to draw on. Joe had started out drawing on back of brown paper bags. He found his paper where he could. Jean would recall, ‘There were times when my mother was able to get Joe some pieces of white paper from the butcher. But that didn’t happen often.’[x]
Butchers paper, brown bags. Joe would scrounge paper from any source, as he recalled.
I would go from store to store in Toronto and pick up whatever they threw out. One day I was lucky enough to find a bunch of wallpaper rolls that were unused and left over from some job. The backs were blank, naturally. So, it was a goldmine for me, and I went home with every roll I could carry. I kept using that wallpaper for a long time.
Years later, Jerry and I sold our first two stories to DC Comics - one was about Henry Duval and the other was Dr. Occult. One was drawn on brown wrapping paper and the other on the back of wallpaper from Toronto. And DC approved them, just like that! But DC did say, ‘We like your ideas, we like your scripts, and we like your drawings. But please copy over the stories in pen and ink on good paper.’
So I got my mother and father to lend me the money to go out and buy some decent paper – the first drawing paper I ever had – in order to submit the stories properly to DC Comics.[xi]
At the same time, Jerry pitched more characters Such as Bob Hazard, The Crimson Horseman, The Wraith, Chasty Crane and Streak Marvel, all of which were rejected.
DC Comics, using the company name Merwil Publishing Co, applied for a trademark for Action Comics on 27 January 1938. Jerry and Joe signed the contract handing over Superman on 1 March. At the same time as they banked the $130 for Action Comics, they also made $210 for Detective Comics, and $72 for More Fun and New Adventure Comics. They made $412 for their June cover-dated comic books, a sizable amount for young men in 1938.
The ads for Action Comics #1 began to appear in April 1938, with the first ad appearing in More Fun Comics #38 (above). Jerry and Joe made $430 in April; this was for their July cover dated comic book work. The same month April 18, 1938, Action Comics #1 with Superman, appeared on the newsstands.
Detective Comics, Inc, filed a trademark application on 26 August 1938. It was now all theirs. It would be romantic to say that once Action Comics appeared, the world was never the same. The reality is it was just another comic book at the start.
For their Superman launch, DC repurposed the newspaper strip. Shuster explained the process.
Action #1 was taken directly from the newspaper strip: it was pasted up. They were in a rush to meet the deadline on the first issue. Everything happened very fast: they made the decision to publish it and said to us, ‘Just go out and turn out 13 pages based on your strip.’ It was a rush job, and one of the things I least like to do is to rush my artwork. I'm too much of a perfectionist to do anything which is mediocre. The only solution Jerry and I could come up with was to cut up the strips into panels and paste the panels on a sheet the size of the page. If some panels were too long, we would shorten them - cut them off - if they were too short, we would extend them. You see, some of the panels were extended to fit the size of the page. It was quite an art job.[xii]
Jerry and Joe kept up their frantic pace for DC Comics. As Superman gained in popularity, Joe worked harder at it, at the cost of his other artwork.
Superman was picked up by the McClure syndicate for publication as a newspaper strip. Now things started to happen. Superman would be in newspapers; this is where the real money was being made at the time. And, showing just how popular the character had become, a new comic book, called Superman was launched, the first issue appearing on 18 May 1939. By now Shuster was hiring other artists to assist him in keeping to deadlines. And complaints about his artwork were coming in from DC Comics. Joe was the weak link, Jerry was the troublemaker. It would become worse in the future.
With Superman, Siegel and Shuster became forever interlinked, no matter what they would do apart, nor how many years went by without a single word being said between them. They were no longer Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster; they were Siegel and Shuster. Like Lennon and McCartney, who came after, they were best known as a pair rather than working solo and anything they did after was always compared to their original creation (Siegel/Shuster = Superman. Lennon/McCartney = The Beatles).
And much like Lennon and McCartney, it was not all plain sailing.
Superman caught the public’s interest and attention quickly. In January 1940, Superman was a nationally syndicated radio show. By March that year, Superman was known across America and would soon be known around the world.
In a little under two years, Superman had gone from being the lead-off feature in a comic book to a nationally known and recognized brand., with an estimated six million people reading the daily strip and 6,790,000 the weekend, full color, half page. And money was streaming into the offices of DC comics.
Not that Siegel and Shuster saw it. They might have earned more than any other artist and writer of comic books in their era did, but that was just crumbs from the table. They did not get a slice of the pie. Why?
Because Siegel and Shuster effectively wrote themselves out of their own story before it began.
In 1938, 3 January to be precise, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold Superman to DC for a total of $130. Co-publisher Jack Liebowitz was behind the deal. For Jack, it was easier than taking candy from a baby. Neither Siegel nor Shuster, two naïve young men, had any legal advice, not that it would have helped at the time. It was big money, back in 1938, and they were assured of more money to come and steady jobs.
For an America coming out of a depression, and a world sitting on the edge of a global conflict, the promise of a job and steady pay was irresistible. So, they signed. As both Jerry and Joe would later say, what did they know? Who was to know what was to come?
They wanted to get their characters published. The deal was put to them, sign here and you’re set. Any hesitation and the contract would just be taken away and handed to the next sap. That much they did know.
As cold as it reads, Jerry and Joe selling Superman to Detective Comics Inc was no different to any other sale the pair made to the company, or any other company, to that point in time. It was purely a business transaction. Nothing more, nothing else. They were making $130 a month alone from Slam Bradley at the same time as they sold Superman. DC owned Slam too, but you never saw Jerry and Joe going to court over that one. Nor did they go after Doctor Occult, which they sold to DC for $62.50 in 1935. Or Federal Men (they sold that one to DC in 1936) or Radio Squad. All of which were on their monthly roster and making money for the pair.
It wasn’t that the crumbs were bad. In 1937, Jerry and Joe earned $2,340 from DC alone, a decent sum for those post-depression years. The average annual wage in 1937 was $975. Jerry and Joe were earning quite a good living from their craft. It was just nothing compared to the pie, and others were getting rich from their work.
The downside was that Joe had to work like a dog to make his money. When it comes to a writer/artist relationship, the writer is limited by their imagination. The artist has to interpret it. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Jerry could knock a story out in a few days if need be. Joe was pumping out over 30 pages per month, all different stories. It was exhausting. And Superman was about to make that work a living hell.
They signed another contract with DC on 22 September 1936. The contract’s wording was clear – what you create is yours unless we buy it for publication. Then it’s ours. Simple really. Jerry and Joe began pitching all kinds of ideas before Superman landed.
Each and every contract made it clear. Consider the wording that DC inserted into a contract, signed by Jerry and Joe in September 1938.
All material, art and copy shall be owned by us and at our option, copyrighted and registered in our name or in the name of the parties designated by us.
‘Us’ didn’t mean Jerry and Joe. ‘Us’ meant Detective Comics, Inc, hereinafter referred to as the Employer. Jerry and Joe, hereinafter referred to as the Employees, couldn’t say that they weren’t aware of it. They weren’t lawyers, and they should have had one. Or at least someone in the industry to explain things. Ah, the perils of youth and enthusiasm. And the fear of poverty.
Hindsight is truly an evil thing. It makes geniuses out of all of us. Jerry and Joe would be paid $10 a page for their Superman work, $4.00 a page for their other comic book work. That money would be split between them equally, but anyone hired to help Joe out on the ever-increasing workload would be paid out of Joe’s cut. Jerry kept all his. By September 1938, that rate had risen to $15 a page.
The $10 per page was $4.00 more than anyone else at DC was getting at the time. Other creators working there didn’t get reprint cash, or syndication cash, or percentages for other media.
As the strip became popular it was sold for syndication. The page rate rose. Joe couldn’t keep up. He was never a fast artist. He had both Jerry and Jack on his back to pump out as much as he could. Who cared if he didn’t sleep or eat properly? The only solution for Joe was to establish a studio, hiring the likes of Wayne Boring to help him with the art.
At that time, the strip was sold to the McClure Syndicate. As time went on, I had quite a production staff, but I was already involved in the drawing. Not all of the aspects of it, but I was involved in the initial layouts, the penciling; and I did all the faces of Superman, every one of them — which was very tedious — because Jerry insisted (and I agreed with him) that there was nobody else who could really catch the spirit, the feeling of Superman. I did all the figures, too, as a matter of fact. My staff did mainly the backgrounds and the inking, the polishing up of the penciling —because a lot of my pencils were quite rough. But they were very spontaneous. What I did was get the initial action of the figure, and they would go on from there. The one thing they did not ink was Superman's face. For about an eight- or 10-year period, I did every face of Superman.[xiii]
The syndicate deal called for Jerry and Joe to split 40% of the net proceeds for the first year, rising to 50% for subsequent years.
Net. They’d not see much out of that. And it got worse. Detective Comics, Inc would take a percentage of their percentage. Jack made sure of that.
Jerry Siegel began to pester Jack and DC for more money right from the start, asking for increases and reprint fees and a better percentage from September 1938. He wanted his page rate increased to $15 per page.
In 1938, when Superman debuted, Jerry and Joe made $4,530 from DC alone. They split that money 50/50 and each earned $2,265. The average wage at the time in the USA was $1,730. In 1939 the combined amount was $8,612. In 1940 they made $38,080. In 1941, $56,573. 1942, $63,776. 1942, $61,489.
From 1937 to 1947, Jerry and Joe earned $401,194 from DC for Superman. That’s just over $200,000 each. The story of Siegel and Shuster being underpaid and crying poor during these early days is largely a myth. They didn’t earn as much as Jack Liebowitz or anyone else at an executive level at DC Comics, but they were not in the poor house. They earned more than Bob Kane who was hitting it big with Batman. Both Jerry and Joe now had houses – the average price for a decent house in America in 1940 was just under $3,000 – they had cars, clothes, offices, food – the lot.
When Jerry joined the army, during World War 2, Liebowitz, despite the abusive letters that Jerry sent him, continued to pay him for work that he never did. The money only stopped when Jerry decided to sue DC for ownership of Superman, dragging Joe with him.
What really sent Jerry over the edge was Superboy.
Jerry had proposed a Superboy strip as early as 1938. DC kept saying no. Once Jerry joined the army, they went ahead with it. Nobody told Jerry it was happening. Joe drew the first issue and then told Jerry. Naturally, Jerry wasn’t pleased with this.
After Superboy was launched, Jerry fought for the character. He always insisted that he created Superboy on his own, with no involvement from Joe. This was despite the earliest strips that the pair did having Superman as both a baby and a young lad.
It was just another nail in the coffin of Detective Comics, Inc for Jerry. Despite having nothing to do with the first Superboy story, DC had credited Jerry on the strip, and they paid him for it. Joe needed the money. Joe knew all too well that he hadn’t drawn the strip, Harry would simply assign it to another artist. As it stood, Joe was all but finished with drawing comics. His eyesight was failing, and his style was considered to be rudimentary, old fashioned and amateur. DC preferred the likes of Wayne Boring, George Roussos, Ira Yarbrough, Jack Burnley, Leo Nowak – artists that came from the Shuster studios. Artists that had started off drawing like Joe but evolved past his style. Artists that had been tutored and given their start by Joe.
Truth be known, DC preferred anyone to Joe Shuster when it came to drawing Superman, but they had a contract, and they were going to honor it. At least until one side decided to break it. Which Jerry did.
Another myth is that Jerry and Joe were best chums, forever. They weren’t. As the fame and money rolled in, they began to separate. Joe wasn’t happy that he had to pay the artists out of his end while Jerry kept all his cash. Jerry wasn’t pleased with Joe’s attitude and was annoyed that Joe would rarely do as Jerry told him. They were still joined via Superman, and they would see each other and socialize, politely, but other than that, they went their own ways. When the Superman suit failed, and the resulting strip, Funnyman, failed, Jerry and Joe drifted apart, only brought back together in the early 1970s.
Even worse was the sudden drop from the spotlight. Even though both men were shy, Shuster painfully so, and somewhat socially inept, Jerry loved being in the media. He appeared on radio shows, rubbed shoulders with Jack Benny and Fred Allen and was quoted in Time Magazine. Jerry was famous. Superman was his access to a world that he only ever dreamt about. Reporters spoke to him, people tolerated him.
Once DC dropped them, it all ended. Fred Allen and Jack Benny didn’t want to know Jerry. Reporters had other people to talk to.
Jerry and Joe were anonymous once more. Actually, worse than anonymous. In the comic book industry, they were the punchline to a bad joke, or a lesson for editors and owners to hold over the heads of their writers and artists (‘If we can screw Siegel and Shuster, we can screw you!’). For most people, they were a cautionary tale. Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.
Even now, nearly a hundred years after the event, those in the entertainment industry know what happened to Jerry and Joe, and they speak about it as a warning about trust.
As was their right, DC sold and licensed Superman for films, radio serials and television. They sold merchandising rights to anyone and everyone. Superman figures made of wood, Superman decoder rings, shirts, pajamas, kites, underwear, books, Superman play suits – if a logo could be whacked onto it, it was whacked on and sold. DC raked the coin in. Mort Weisinger, Jack Liebowitz, and Harry Donenfeld became millionaires thanks to Superman.
Jerry and Joe saw money from some deals, but Jerry felt they deserved more. They probably did. They made a fraction of what others did.
Mort, Jack, and Harry also fought those who would seek to steal the concept. In March 1939 the first Superman clone came along. Titled Wonder Man, it was published by Bruns Publications at the request of Victor Fox (now there was a character if ever there was one. When it came to business dealings, Victor Fox made Mort, Jack and Harry look good). No matter the name, Wonder Man, was just Superman with a new costume. DC saw it, filed suit and shut down Wonder Man once and for all.
Wonder Man was written and drawn by Will Eisner, who would eventually make his mark with the legendary The Spirit strip. At the time Eisner insisted that the comparisons with Superman were merely incidental, going as far as to state, under oath, during the trial that he’d never seen nor heard of Superman before he started Wonderman. That might have been true, as the character had only just debuted. Bruns argued that, if anything, Superman was a steal from other, established, characters such as The Phantom. At the time, that didn’t fool the judge.
We have compared the alleged infringing magazine of Bruns with the issues of ‘Action Comics’ and are satisfied that the finding that Bruns copied the pictures in the complainant's periodical is amply substantiated. Each publication portrays a man of miraculous strength and speed called ‘Superman’ in ‘Action Comics’ and ‘Wonderman’ in the magazine of Bruns. The attributes and antics of ‘Superman’ and ‘Wonderman’ are closely similar. Each at times -conceals his strength beneath ordinary clothing but after removing his cloak stands revealed in full panoply in a skintight acrobatic costume.
The only real difference between them is that ‘Superman’ wears a blue uniform and ‘Wonderman’ a red one. Each is termed the champion of the oppressed. Each is shown running toward a full moon ‘off into the night,’ and each is shown crushing a gun in his powerful hands. ‘Superman’ is pictured as stopping a bullet with his person and ‘Wonderman’ as arresting and throwing back shells.
Each is depicted as shot at by three men, yet as wholly impervious to the missiles that strike him. ‘Superman’ is shown as leaping over a 20-story building, and ‘Wonderman’ as leaping from building to building. ‘Superman’ and ‘Wonderman’ are each endowed with sufficient strength to rip open a steel door. Each is described as being the strongest man in the world and each as battling against ‘evil and injustice’.
Defendants attempt to avoid the copyright by the old argument that various attributes of ‘Superman’ find prototypes or analogues among the heroes of literature and mythology. But if the author of ‘Superman’ has portrayed a comic Hercules, yet if his production involves more than the presentation of a general type, he may copyright it and say of it: ‘A poor thing but mine own.’ Perhaps the periodicals of the complainant are foolish rather than comic, but they embody an original arrangement of incidents and a pictorial and literary form which preclude the contention that Bruns was not copying the antics of ‘Superman’ portrayed in ‘Action Comics.’ We think it plain that the defendants have used more than general types and ideas and have appropriated the pictorial and literary details embodied in the complainant's copyrights.[xiv]
Whack! Bruns was hit with costs and ordered to pulp the comic books. This was done and Victor Fox lived to steal another DC character.
It wouldn’t take him long.
(NEXT: The first superhero film, and it wasn’t Superman!
[i] The Toronto Star, 26 April 1992
[ii] Deposition Of Jean Adele Peavy, 11 Nov 2006, 1:26 p.m.
[iii] Jim Steranko, The History of Comics Volume One pg35
[iv] Ibid
[v] Jerry Siegel to Richard Kyle. 2 June 1973
[vi] The Toronto Star, 26 April 1992
[vii] Deposition Of Jean Adele Peavy, 11 Nov 2006, 1:26 p.m.
[viii] Nemo Classic Comics Library #2, August 1983
[ix] Ibid
[x] The Toronto Star, 26 April 1992
[xi] Ibid
[xii] Ibid
[xiii] Nemo Classic Comics Library #2, August 1983
[xiv] DETECTIVE COMICS, INC., v. BRUNS PUBLICATIONS, INC., ET AL. (Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, April 29, 1940) 111 F. (2d) 432. 45 U. S. P. Q. 291