SUPER IDEA AT THE TIME
Book tells of rise and fall of Superman’s creators
While Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel racked up record box-office receipts and thumbed its nose at critics everywhere, you may have noticed something funny in the conversations around the movie: People keep calling it Superman by mistake.
It’s as if we can’t help ourselves. So indelibly is the title character branded onto the collective cultural DNA that it’s strange to think that, within living memory of some in the movie’s audience, he didn’t exist, that at some point someone thought him up, sat down and drew him.
Well, someone did. Or two people did, to be precise. Brad Ricca’s Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — The Creators of Superman is the story of how two proto-fanboys living in Cleveland during the depths of the Great Depression created arguably the most popular fictional character of the past century — and promptly signed away the rights for a grand total of $130.
Both Jewish, both the children of immigrants (Shuster was born in Toronto, where one of his cousins was Frank Shuster of Wayne and Shuster fame) and both what would now be called nerds, Siegel and Shuster formed an alliance in high school.
Siegel was the writer, Shuster the artist; their motivations were as much social (comics’ notoriety might actually enable them to speak to girls) as artistic. After plenty of trial and error — one early version of Superman was a shirtless villain — they tapped, consciously or not, into the hopes and fears of a populace battered by economic uncertainty and the looming threat of war.
Once the character was sold to National Comics (now DC Comics and owned by Time Warner) for the aforementioned pittance, the rise to popularity was phenomenal. Within two years, a giant Superman float featured in Macy’s 1940 Thanksgiving Day parade.
Even without a fair contract, Siegel and Shuster parlayed the comic’s vast syndication into personal salaries of up to $50,000 a year, a huge sum in the early 1940s. With remarkable speed, though, it all began to unravel.
An ill-advised lawsuit saw the two ultimately fired by National and forced to watch as their creation was entrusted to others and continued to reap vast rewards for its owners.
The book’s second half is thus a grim litany of deepening failure and frustration, with Siegel and Shuster slipping into semi-employed netherworlds, unable to come up with new ideas anywhere near as marketable as their one big score.
At one especially low ebb, Shuster resorted to illustrating a down-market exploitation book series called Nights of Horror. When the books were later linked to a series of gruesome copycat crimes, Shuster escaped bad publicity because he was too obscure to track down at the time.
Only much later, in the 1970s, after concerted media campaigns in advance of the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman film vehicle, did Time Warner grudgingly acknowledge Siegel and Shuster. By that time, sadly, failing health meant it was too late for either of them to enjoy it for long.
Compelling as the story is, in Ricca’s telling it becomes a case study in the limitations of authorial enthusiasm. For such an obvious champion of his subjects, Ricca shows an odd reluctance to let his raw material speak for itself, frequently indulging in the maddening practice of ascribing thoughts and reactions (“Jerry went up to his solitary room, silently furious”) to which he can’t possibly have been privy.
The result is an ungainly blend of meticulous documentation — 68 pages of notes, an extensive bibliography — and outright conjecture.
The book’s second half is thus a grim litany of deepening failure and frustration, with Siegel and Shuster slipping into semi-employed netherworlds.
Muddled metaphors, shaky claims (does Lora really rhyme with Sarah?) and sloppy editing abound.
Unpack this sentence, if you dare: “So when (Jerry) went to bed that night, if he even did, getting out of the chair and shuffling his feet in disbelief or taking the back stairs like a police car, he must have had an overwhelming sense of sudden inevitability.”
It doesn’t help Ricca’s cause that a heavy literary shadow follows his book at every step. Michael Chabon’s classic 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was inspired, at least partly, by Siegel and Shuster.
By choosing a subtitle that echoes Chabon so directly, Ricca invites a comparison that can only show his own book in a poor light. Though Ricca mentions and quotes Chabon only once, it’s enough to make you sigh for what might have been.
For devotees, though, such shortcomings might not matter in the end. Ricca knows his subject and, as a source text, his book has plenty to recommend itself. The illustrations are numerous and uniformly well-chosen, illuminating Superman’s conception and evolution in many ways.
Side- by- side comparisons show how Shuster drew on contemporary imagery, sometimes quite directly — photographs of 1936 Berlin Olympics hero (and Cleveland resident) Jesse Owens and Hollywood Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller are mirrored uncannily in early Superman panels.
A good case is also made for Superman’s longest-running superhero rival, Batman, having been inspired, if not outright lifted, from a minor character in an early Siegel Shuster cartoon.
Here, as is so often the case in this story, the irony is almost painful: Unlike Siegel and Shuster, Batman’s creator, Bob Kane, made sure to secure himself a royalty and became a wealthy man as a result. Think of that as you munch on your multiplex popcorn.