Credit where credit is due: Who created who in Superman

•Superman and Lois Lane were created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938's Action Comics #1.

•Lex Luthor was created by Siegel and Shuster in 1940's Action Comics #23...althgough this earliest iteration, a typical criminal scientist type, went only by "Luthor" and had a full head of hair. His signature baldness seems to have originated from an artistic mistake in the Superman daily comic strip, and in 1960 Siegel added the loss of his hair into Luthor's backstory in Adventure Comics #271 with artist Al Plastino. It was in that same year that Luthor finally got the first name Lex, 20 years after his introduction. The businessman/corporate CEO version of the character was an innovation of John Byrne's post-Crisis 1986 reboot of the franchise, which began in The Man of Steel. Following Byrne, the character is usually depicted as a synthesis of mad scientist, supervillain and businessman. 

•Krypto was created by Otto Binder, Curt Swan and Sy Barry in 1955's Adventure Comis #210.

•The original Green Lantern was created by Martin Nodell and Bill Finger in 1940's All-American Comics #16, although the name and concept was refigured by John Broome, Gil Kane and Julius Schwartz and applied to new character Hal Jordan in 1959's Showcase #22. The Guy Gardner character was introduced by Broome and Kane in 1968's Green Lantern #59...although it's Steve Englehart and Joe Staton's 1985 version of the character from the pages of Green Lantern, further popularized by his appearances in various Justice League-related titles, that has become the dominant one...and informed the Superman film. (Staton seems to have originated the signature hairstyle, although artist Kevin Maguire exaggerated and perfected it.)

•The original Hawkgirl was created by Gardner Fox, Dennis Neville and Sheldon Moldoff in 1941's All Star Comics #5, in which supporting character Shiera Sanders first donned her own version of Hawkman's costume. While the film never gives its Hawkgirl's real name, the latest Hawkgirl is the Kendra Saunders version of the character, which was apparently created by writers James Robinson and David Goyer and first drawn by artists Scott Benefiel and Mark Popst in 1999's JSA Secret Files & Origins #1. 

•The original Mister Terrific was created by Charles Reizenstein and Hal Sharp in 1942's Sensation Comics #1. The second version of the character, Michael Holt, was created by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake in 1997's Spectre #54 (And you can read more about that issue in my previous post). I can't figure out who designed his costume and T-Spheres, though, both of which made their first published appearance in 1999's JSA Secret Files & Origins #1, drawn by an artist credited only as "Grey."

•"Rex" is, of course, Rex Mason, better known as Metamorpho, The Element Man. He was created by Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon in 1965's The Brave and The Bold #57. His girlfriend Sapphire Stagg makes an unnamed cameo in the film, and there's a sign for her father Simon Stagg's business briefly visible at one point.

•The Engineer was created by disgraced writer Warren Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch in 1999's The Authority.

•The creation of Perry White is a bit complicated, given that he was not original to the Superman comics but was instead created for the Adventures of Superman radio serial in 1940. The character's creation is credited to George Ludlam (the radio folks contributed a lot to the Superman mythos that was then integrated into the comics) and he was played by Julian Noa, who probably deserves some credit, too. Siegel and artist Wayne Boring then introduced White into the comics, in 1940's Superman #7. 

•Jimmy Olsen has a similarly convoluted creation story. He too was introduced in the Adventures of Superman radio show, and producer Bob Maxwell gets credit for his creation, although surely the show's writer or writers and voice actor deserve some credit too, right? He was introduced into the comics by Siegel and Shuster in 1941's Superman #13, although the character wouldn't really seem to become himself until actor Jack Larson's portrayal of him on the 1952 Adventures of Superman TV show popularized him. He then got his own title Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen in 1954, and editor Mort Weisinger refocused the character in outlandish, comedic stories, often involving unlikely transformations.

•Eve Tessmacher and Otis were both created by director Richard Donner and writer Mario Puzo for the 1978 film Superman, and they were played by Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty, respectively. 

•Steve Lombard was created by Carey Bates and Curt Swan in 1973's Superman #264.

•Cat Grant was created by Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway in 1987's The Adventures of Superman #424.

•"Troupe" is Ron Troupe, and he was created by Jerry Ordway and Tom Grummet in 1991's The Adventures of Superman #480.

•Superman's biological parents Jor-El and Lara were introduced by Siegel and Shuster in the Superman newspaper comic strip in 1939.

•The Kents had another slow-rolling creation, evolving over the years and across media. Superman's first appearance mentioned only that he was found as a baby by "a passing motorist." Siegel and Shuster introduced his adoptive parents in 1939's Superman #1, naming only Mrs. Kent as "Mary." Their names and the specifics of their finding and adopting the baby Superman changed a lot in the Golden Age, depending on the medium, and their part in the Superman story remains fairly fluid, with different comic takes and different mass media adaptations differing in the specifics of Superman being found...and whether one or both of the Kents are still alive or if they have passed away.

•Maxwell Lord was created by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire in 1987's Justice League #1.

Finally, this one gets a mild spoiler warning, although I am assuming anyone who sees the film will figure it out almost as soon as he appears on screen, if not before, as I had...

•"Ultraman" is the name of Superman's evil opposite doppelganger from Earth-3 and was created by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky in 1964's Justice League of America #29. The version who appears in the new film is an imperfect clone of Superman made by Lex Luthor, and this backstory somewhat resembles that of John Byrne's 1986, post-Crisis origins of long-time Superman enemy Bizarro from the pages of 1986's The Man of Steel #5. (The original Bizarro, for what it's worth, was created by Otto Binder and George Papp for 1958's Superboy #68.)

When in Cleveland, visit the scenic West Side Market

Earlier this week I visited Cleveland's West Side Market in Ohio City for the first time. There I happened upon this three-part mural by Gary and Laura Dumm. You may recognize Gary Dumm's name from some American Splendor comics.

I  found out upon returning home that the Dumms were responsible for the mural, which they call a "love letter to Cleveland" and essentially lists a bunch of people and things that Cleveland is responsible for. That link will take you to better pictures and explanations of who is who and what is what, but you'll probably recognize the gentleman with the eyebrows peeking over an issue of American Splendor immediately.

Just around the corner are two other late Cleveland comics-makers, and their most famous creations:

That was a nice, unexpected surprise.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Horizontal Books, an honest-to-goodness, brick and mortar, not-used-books bookstore that wasn't a Barnes and Noble. I don't come across those very often. How are they still in business?

Well, I don't know, but they sure as hell offer some crazy amazing (craymazing!) discounts; you get 50% off your first book purchase, if you buy two books, you get 60% off and, if you buy three or more, you get 70% off.

So I got this particular haul—

—of $79.96 worth of books for just $25.92 cents, a savings of $55.96! If you can't see 'em clearly, that's G.I. Joe/Transformers Vol. 1 (reprinting some old Marvel crossovers), Dungeons & Dragons Classics Vol. 4 (reprinting the last chunk of DC/TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons monthly) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Vol. 4 (reprinting just four issues of the old Archie Comics ninja turtles, which translates into about $5 per issue, which is pretty damn steep), all from IDW, and the Hera volume of George O'Connor's excellent Olympians series from First Second.

Their selection wasn't the greatest, but it changes pretty frequently, and those are some great deals. Those IDW books are all so expensive that deep discounts are pretty much the only way I'd buy 'em, especially considering I have swathes of each in crumbling, yellowing comic book form somewhere in my vast comics midden.

Finally, on a West Side Market/comics intersection note, check out these cookies one of the vendors was selling:

I did not purchase one, so I have no idea how they taste, but they're aesthetically pleasing, anyway.

Well that's interesting.

The title page of the latest (and, sadly, last) issue of DC's Superman Family Adventures not only contains the credits of the folks who made this issue and the traditional "Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" credits but, if you read between the panels, you'll also see these new credits:

Superboy created by Jerry Siegel.

Supergirl based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family.

That's a lot of creation credits. I guess I'll wait for someone like Jeff Trexler to explain what this means and why it's happening now at The Beat.

That last bit about Supergirl being based on Superman (and, I suppose, 'boy) is particularly interesting though, because that character is singled out by name, whereas this particularly issue is filled to bursting with Superman characters (Both sets of his parents, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane) and characters based on Superman in the same way Supergirl is (that is, wearing red capes and Superman logos, and, in some cases, coming from Krypton and having his powers, like Steel, Krypto, Streaky, Squeaky and, um, is that Super Turtle...?)

The issue also contains plenty of other characters who generally earn "created by" credits, like Batman and Wonder Woman and, to much more occasionally, Aquaman (Darkseid, the Justice League and a handful of Super Pets also appear).

I've always been curious about the whys and hows of creation credits, as, from a reader's perspective, they seem quite arbitrary. The last DC trade I read, for example, was Secret Six: The Darkest House, and I noticed it had a "Doom Patrol created by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani" credit on the title page, as the Doom Patrol appear in two of the seven issues collected in the trade. Other guest stars, like, Jack Kirby's Etrigan the Demon or Keith Giffen's Ambush Bug didn't have "created by" credits, nor did the Secret Six (which may be understandable, as it's basically just a repurposed name from a completely unrelated comic book concept), nor did any of their more prominent individual members, like Bane, Catman or Deadshot.

Should be interesting to keep an eye on the credits pages of DC comics, particularly the ones starring characters who wears capes and S-shields, in the near future...

Heroes for Brad Meltzer's kids

The only prose of Brad Meltzer's that I have personally read were his contributions to the 2004 Sean Howe-edited essay collection Give Our Regards to the Atomsmahers: Writers On Comics and the 2001 collection The Games We Played: A Celebration of Childhood and Imagination, so I'm not exactly expert in his non-comics writing. That's why I didn't know of the existence of his 2010 Heroes For My Son and 2012 Heroes For My Daughter until I happened to be in the same aisle of the library as them the other day.

The premise of the books is pretty much right there in their titles. Upon the birth of his son, Meltzer started thinking about the wisdom he would pass on to his first child, and he soon began thinking of remarkable individuals who possessed and expressed particular virtues he hoped his son would possess. He came up with 52. And then another whole book of examples.

The books are sweet, and of the graduation gift sort. After the introductions (the intro in Son has a pretty funny anecdote involving Meltzer's grandfather telling him the same four-sentence story about Batman and Robin over and over again), there is a photo of a hero with a two or three sentence biography of them, followed by a page telling a particular anecdote about that hero, and what exactly makes the heroic. As a sort of page punctuation, there's a quote from each.

The figures included are generally the sort that you might expect a grade-schooler to write a report on at some point, ranging from historical figures to pop artists to athletes to people who made the news for something extraordinary to members of Meltzer's own family.

Knowing that Meltzer has written for DC Comics in the past, and that he holds enormous affection for certain comic book superheroes (thanks to his essay in Atom-Smashers), I checked both books out to see if any of those heroes turned out to be superheroes, or the people who created those superheroes.

It turns out, I didn't have to skim long. The third entry was "Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, Inventors of the first superhero" (See the image above).

Here's Meltzer's entry on the pair, in its entirety:

They weren't good-looking.

They weren't popular.

And they were so poor that they used to draw on the back of butcher's paper.

But they were two best friends.

With one dream.

At the brink of World War II, in the midst of the Great Depression, two kids from Cleveland didn't just give us the world's first superhero.

They gave us to something to believe in.

The quote at the end of their entry, by the way, isn't a quote from "one of the first rejection letters for Superman,": "The trouble with this, kid, is that it's too sensational. Nobody would believe it."

So that was pretty cool of Meltzer.

Siegiel and Shuster were the only comics creators in either book, which, I should note, includes women in Son and men in Daughter, although there are plenty of folks around the fringes of comics, mixed in with more obvious candidates like Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Helen Keller and Rosa Parks.

These include cartoonist-turned-author/artist Dr. Seuss (as with Superman's dads, Meltzer points out that success didn't come easy to Geisel, noting his first book was rejected by 27 publishers), Superman's one-time opponent Muhammad Ali, Superman actor Christopher Reeve, cartoon (and comics!) character Lisa Simpson (for her creation of a Lisa Lionheart doll to replace Malibu Stacy), Muppets creator Jim Henson, the Three Stooges and popular comics subjects Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Leonardo Da Vinci. Oh, and All-Star Squadron character Winston Churchill.

On the importance of Superman's shorts

I just started reading Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero by Larry Tye (Random House; 2012). This is the very first paragraph of Tye's preface:

The most enduring American hero of the last century is soemone who lived half his life in disguise and the other half as the world's most recognizable man. He is not Jack Kennedy or Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Batman or Jerry Seinfeld, although all of them were inspired by him. It was on his muscle-bound back that the iconic comic book took flight and the very idea of the superhero was born. He appeared on more radio broadcasts than Ellery queen and in more movies than Marlon Brando, who once pretended to be his father. He helped give America the backbone to wage war against the Nazis, the Great Depression, and the Red Menace. He remains an intimate to kids from Boston to Belgrade and has adult devotees who, like Talmudic scholars, parse his every utterance. And he has done it all with an innocence and confidence that allowed him to appear publicly wearing underpants over full-body tights, and to assume an alter ego who kept pursuing the prettiest girl in town even though he seldom got her.

Now last September, when DC decided to reboot and redesign their entire stable of superheroes, supervillains and the various characters that share their DC Universe setting, artist and co-publisher Jim Lee gave Superman a new costume which looked a lot like his traditional one, sans shorts. In fact, not only did Lee's new Superman costume not include the shorts, but, through an in-story act of cosmic manipulation that altered the setting's entire history, Superman never wore underpants over full-body tights.

And from the images Warner Brothers have released of the suit that Henry Cavill will be wearing in next year's Man of Steel movie, that version of Superman will similarly be going without shorts.

A few pages later in his preface, Tye writes that "Each generation got the Superman it needed and deserved. Each changed offered a Rorschach test of that times and its dreams." If that's true, what does that say about these first years of the 2010s...?

Does it mean our Superman is not as innocent and as confident as the one of the previous seventy-some years...?

What does finally losing his shorts after seven decades tell us about our Superman? He's self-conscious, insecure and worries so much about what others think about him that he'll make radical changes just to try and look cooler...?

Some lame things Grant Morrison said in public a while back, which are even lamer in context

Grant Morrison received a great deal of media attention in July of this year, as he was promoting his then just-released comics history/memoir Supergods. Some of those interviews gained him a lot of negative attention, for some fairly foolish sounding things he said.

One was this Q-and-A style interview conducted by Brian Hiatt for Rolling Stone, which accompanied a sizable feature on Morrison for the magazine online.

In that Q-and-A, Morrison discussed Alan Moore, Mark Millar, rape and misogyny in comics, and non-superhero comics, among other topics, and his comments set off some alarm bells. Here, for example, is The Comics Journal’s Dan Nadel responding to Morrison’s conflation and dismissal of non-superhero comics as Chris Ware and “those Comics Journal guys." And here is David Brothers responding to Morrison’s statement that he never wrote about rape in his 30 years of comics-writing, as well as calling him out on an even more troubling thing he said in another interview about Supergods.

That was an interview with Kiel Phegley for Comic Book Resources, in which he said something quite unfortunate about Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Superman.

Here’s the exchange in full:

From Siegel and Shuster through later chapters on Kirby or Jim Starlin, you cover a lot of the creative life of the people behind comics and how one informs the other, and you make some particular observations about Siegel and Shuster's desires as artists as well as professionals. There's so much chatter over the lawsuits over Superman and what not, but for you, did you feel like the characters transcend some of those debates on their own terms, or is that creative personality something that informs how our whole industry works even to today?

Well, to me it's never been honestly what's interesting about this stuff. I think the stories outlast all of those complications. You look at the people who created those characters, and they're all dead. But the characters will still be around in 50 years probably – at least the best of them will. So I try not to concern myself with that. These are deals made in times before I was even born. I can say from experience that young creative people tend to sell rights to things because they want to get noticed. They want to sell their work and to be commercial. Then when they grow up and get a bit smarter, they suddenly realize it maybe wasn't so good and that the adults have it real nice. [Laughs] But still, it's kind of the world. I wouldn't want to comment on that because it was something I wasn't around for. I can't tell why they decided to do what they did. Obviously Bob Kane came in at the same age and got a very different deal and profited hugely from Batman's success. So who knows? They were boys of the same age, but maybe some of them were more keen to sell the rights than others. It all just takes a different business head.

As I’ve said before, it’s an extremely unfortunate statement coming from Morrison, and he probably should've stopped talking when he hit the bit about not really being interested in the subject, or not being comfortable talking about it.

I was hoping he had merely misspoke—perhaps he was jetlagged, and in the middle of some terrible press junket where he was doing phone interview after phone interview?—and one of the reasons I was looking forward to sitting down with Supergods was to see how he dealt with the issue in the context of the book.

Unfortunately, Morrison’s treatment of Siegel and Shuster’s treatment is even more depressing in context; far from not wanting to comment on something that happened before he was born or not being interested in the subject, he devotes several paragraphs providing a counter-narrative to the conventional wisdom that the young creators got screwed over by the savvy and experienced suits at National Comics.

The single most troubling line in the whole 420-page volume comes in a paragraph assessing the influence of the first Superman comic story to see publication by National Comics:

By the time the first Superman story concluded, thirteen pages after its breathtaking opening scene, our hero apprehended no fewer than five lawbreakers and taken a moment to root out corruption in the US Senate. Every new reveal made both the individual story and the overall concept seem even more exciting. It gave the medium a character innovation to call its own. He gave the world the first superhero.

It’s that last sentence. Read it again, paying special attention to the pronoun that it begins with. He, not they.

Superman, not Siegel and Shuster.

In a way, it can perhaps be seen as in keeping with Morrison’s view of the evolution of the superhero as a concept that’s really real, even if Superman exists mostly in the 2-D reality of printed pages of DC comics (with occasional excursions outside of his home universe and into 3- and 4-D reality). But it’s a solidification of the idea that the character’s the thing, not the creator. In Morrison’s shamanic view as expressed there, it’s as if Superman came to Siegel and Shuster as divine inspiration, and used them to introduce himself to our perception of reality, as if they were in the throes of the comics-making equivalent of automatic writing.

Morrison talks up Siegel and Shuster’s considerable talents at great length, devoting almost an entire chapter to the first Superman story and the cover of the first issue of Action Comics, but the effect of that pronoun choice is heartbreaking.

And it gets worse.

After a paragraph in which Morrison notes the two young artists’ struggles to come up with an idea and sell it, he notes that with Superman they “struck gold” and that they sold all the rights to National Comics for $130:

If you listen to the right voices, you’ll hear and believe what I heard and believed growing up in this business, and it won’t be long before a dark and evil fairy tale unfolds: the grim cautionary fable of two innocent seventeen-year-old boys seduced by the forked tongues of cartoon fat-cat capitalists and top-hatted bloodsuckers. In this Hollywood tragedy, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are depicted as doe-eyed ingénues in a world of razor-toothed predators.

The truth, as ever, is less dramatic. The deal was done in 1938, before Superman boomed. Siegel and Shuster were both twenty-three when they sold the copyright to Superman. They had worked together for several years in the cutthroat world of pulp periodical publishing, and, like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers, they were creating a product to sell. Superman was a foot in the door, a potential break that might put them in demand as big-time pop content providers. Superman was a sacrifice to the gods of commercial success. If my own understanding of the creative mind carries any weight, I’d suspect that both Siegel and Shuster imagined they’d create other, better characters.

Morrison then notes in a parenthetical statement a paragraph later that in 1975, bad publicity pressured Warner Bros. to award Siegel and Shuster $20,000 per year, in addition to creator credit on everything Superman.

“I’m sure it helped, but as an example of how far the business has come,” Morrison then writes, “Today a prolific and popular comics writer could make the same amount in a week.”

Holy shit. Twenty-thousand dollars…in a week?

Is that what Morrison pulls down? Because he’s one of the four most popular superhero comic book writers (along with Geoff Johns, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar), and perhaps the third most prolific of the four.

Wait. That can’t possibly be right. Because 52 times $20,000 is $1,040,000 dollars. That’s a million bucks a year. Is Grant Morrison a fucking millionaire? Because, if so, that makes his dismissal of Shuster and Siegel’s screwing over seem not just impolitic—given his current gig writing Action Comics and the success he’s had with the character in JLA and All-Star Superman—but almost monstrous.

Morrison is, by the way, super-rich, which makes his statements about art comics in Rolling Stone seem even worse in context as well.

Here it is again:

There have been histories of comic books, but your book Supergods is all superheroes. It's a counter-narrative to the idea that comics need to outgrow this superhero stuff.

I can appreciate someone like Chris Ware for his artistry, which I think is beautiful, but I think his attitude stinks, it just seems to be the attitude of somebody really privileged, and honestly, try living here, try living on an Indian reservation and shut up, and really seeing all that nihilistic stuff, it really makes me angry, it's unhelpful to all of us, and it's coming from people who have money and success to talk like that and bring those aspects of the way we live in favor of all the others, and it's indefensible.

So I never liked that stuff, I always thought that I had a real Scottish working class thing against the fact that these were done by privileged American college kids, and they were telling me the world was flat. "You're telling me the world is flat, pal?" And it's not helpful, it doesn't get us anywhere. OK, so it is, then what? What are you going to do about it, college kid? My book wasn't academic. I can't take on those Comics Journalguys, they flattened me, as they did, it's just defensive, smartass kids.

He first made it big with original graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Ground, which he says is “the bestselling original graphic novel of all time.”

It took him a month to write, he says, and before it went on sale, “Karen Berger called to tell me I was rich. Initial orders were for 120,000 copies, with Dave and me on a dollar royalty for each.

That’s $120,000 right out of the gate, and the book still sells well over 20 years later. While Morrison doesn’t say how much he’s worth or anything, it’s clear that after Arkham Asylum, he wasn’t merely able to simply live off writing comics (the dream of most artists; to make enough doing what they love to not have a day job any longer), to not simply live comfortably writing comics, but to live luxuriously off of them, being able to take spur of the moment vacations to exotic locations whenever he was feeling bored.

He was 27-years-old.

Sneering at Chris Ware for being someone really privileged with money and success, or for the people who make comics that aren’t superhero comics as a bunch of privileged American college students sounds a bit silly, coming from someone who made $120,000 in a month for writing a comic book script.

Morrison’s (financial) fortunes only increased after that early point in his career, as well. A three-issue stint writing Spawn during the ‘90s boom brought him “another mini-fortune” and, while sales of comics have slid ever since, with hits like his Batman Inc or Final Crisis doing, at their best, in the neighborhood of 100,000 units a month, and considering how much of his work is in print in trade form (just about all of it), Morrison is probably doing pretty all right for himself.

Regardless of how working class his roots might have been, he’s clearly not so working class now, and hasn’t been for a good 25 years now, so it’s a bizarre thing to call out the poor bastards writing, drawing, lettering and in some cases even publishing their own goddam comic books.

To be fair—fairer than he seems to be to Siegel, Shuster and other Golden Age artists who just started to get their due in the last decade or so, fairer than he is to Ware and company—I don’t think Morrison reads, or is even vaguely aware of non-superhero literature and art comics at all after he himself hit it big and started working for DC Comics in the late eighties. (Still, it’s so…weird that he took Hiatt’s prompting that the celebration of the superhero above all else is sort of counter to a popular narrative to just jump on Chris Ware, and associate Ware with non-superhero comics, as if he was the only guy making comics that DC and Marvel didn’t publish).

Supergods is tailored to superhero discussion, so much so that when listing the big names writing consecutive issues of Spawn during Todd MacFarlane’s inspired stunt freelance writer hiring in 1993, he mentions Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller, but neglects to mention Dave Sim. Scott Pilgrim and Bryan Lee O’Malley are mentioned at the tail end of a discussion of superhero movies. The name Robert Crumb appears once, and is used in comparison to Frank Quietely’s art style. And that’s about it for Morrison’s discussion of comics outside the superhero reservation.

His history of comics seems narrow because his subject is superheroes, of course, but even that narrow subject is narrowed even further by limiting the discussion to mainstream, corporate American comics (with digressions into British comics, where they influence his career).

That is, “superhero” as Morrison defines it means Marvel, DC, ‘90s Image, and Hollywood blockbusters, essentially. It ignores manga, it ignores the rise of the graphic novel (aside form noting that Jenette Khan and Karen Berger anticipated it, and that Akrham Asylum capitalized on it by essentially getting there first), it ignores mini-comics and it ignores webcomics—not even engaging the superheroes of those aspects of the medium and industry, or the warping effect that those big, driving forces had on the Marvel/DC super-comic that is his main focus.

Naturally Chris Ware/privileged American college kid comics don’t come up in the book, and I suppose that’s why Morrison seems ignorant of what they are, who makes them, and whether his working-class formative years, the first three decades of his life, are more working-class than the likes of Ware’s or not.

Reading his book though, it’s clear Morrison is crazy rich by Guys Who Make Comics standards, and he looks and sounds foolish clucking about Ware looking at the gutter instead of looking at the stars because Ware’s so rich and famous he should devote his wealth and fame to something more positive.

Almost as foolish as he does essentially saying that Shuster and Siegel got what they deserved. Morrison would certainly lose a working-class roots-off against Shuster, sitting in his kitchen wearing a coat and gloves because it was so damn cold and his family couldn’t afford heat, drawing on the back of butcher paper or strips of wallpaper because they couldn’t afford paper.

Review: Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman

Wait a minute, is this cautionary tale of a couple of young, hard-working kids who created one of the most recognizable and profitable original characters of the 20th century, inventing a genre that would eventually buttress the emerging American comic book industry for much of the second half of that century in the process, only to get infamously screwed over in one of industry’s earliest and most blatant act of creators getting screwed over even appropriate for kids?

That was one of my thoughts when I first heard of writer Marc Tyler Nobleman and Ross MacDonald’s 2008 picture book Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and the creation of Superman. Theirs is not exactly a happy story, and although there are some happy endings in it—when their Superman first became a hit, when they became superhero comic superstars, when they managed to shame DC into giving them creator’s credits and some financial reward in the late seventies—it’s mostly a dark and, I’d say, tragic one. This being real life, there aren’t really any “endings,” happy or otherwise, so the above-mentioned victories were all temporary ones, followed by later trials and tribulations.

Even today, when the two boys of steel-turned-men of steel have passed on, their families are still locked in legal battle with the corporation that owns their creation (or “owns,” I guess, since ownership is one of the things being contested), and they and their memories are regularly subjected to ignorant smearing from anonymous fans of the genre they created and even very smart people working in their industry who should really know better.

Another was a rather intense curiosity about how one would go about writing a children’s picture book on the subject that wouldn’t necessarily be sanctioned by DC Comics, as the highly visual nature of picture books would seemingly require a lot of images of Superman, which DC could certainly object to the usage of (A point that was raised by the cover itself, which does have the word “Superman” on it, but the hero is pictured only as a vague strong man silhouette; if you already know Superman, you can see how that image is a blacked out one of him, but if you don’t…?

Nobleman solves the conundrum of telling Siegel and Shuster’s story without making it a tragedy by very carefully choosing where to begin and end his tale.

He focuses on the boys, particularly Siegel, at the beginning, and the difficulties of their early lives, with the decision of one editor from a company (that’s exactly as specific as Nobleman gets with National’s purchase of Superman from the boys) decides to buy their strip for “a new type of magazine called a comic book” being the climax, and the late Great Depression era’s embrace of the hero being the happy ending:

He debuted in 1938. His comic book was an instant hit. Soon he also won fans in a comic strip, on the radio, in animated shorts, in books, and in movie serials. When television caught on, he got a show there, too.

The last two pages sum up the visionary qualities of the Siegel and Shuster, and then skips past all of the unpleasant aspects of their relationship with National and comics in general between the late ‘40s and late ‘70s, ending with the words, “And today, on every story where his name appears, theirs do, too.”

It’s a smart strategy, one that accentuates the positive and simply avoids the negative. The story portion of the book doesn’t alter unpleasant facts; it just tactfully ignores them.

And then, right after the illustrated story portion of the book, Nobleman offers a three-page prose article entitled “The Greatest Superhero of All Time,” which offers up a nice, thorough summary of the real warts-and-all story.

“Superman went on to rescue just about everybody from just about anything,” it begins. “No cat stuck in a tree was insignificant, no menace threating the universe was insurmountable. Two people he couldn’t save in the nick of time, however, were his creators.

The next three paragraphs sum up what the story portion of the book covers, but it goes on for pages and pages, naming DC Comics, naming the $130 price they paid for Superman, the fact that first print run of Action was 200,000 (Hear that, Justice League #1?), the Look strip in which Superman captures Hitler, the Jewishness of Superman and his creators, their gradual alienation from their character and DC, and their 1975 press offensive inspired by the fact that Marlon Brando was to earn $3.7 million for twelve days of shooting his supporting role in Superman: The Movie, which Superman’s fathers were getting exactly nothing from the movie.

It continues their stories to the end of their lives, and to the current day, noting that legal negotiations continue, and, ending on an upbeat, noting that in 1936 the pair created such boastful taglines for Superman as “the greatest superhero of all time.”

“They were charmingly bold boasts that came true,” Nobleman concludes, “and still are true more than seventy years later.”

Back to the story itself, Nobleman reverse engineers a biography of the two from the power fantasy of their Superman stories (which, the argument can easily be made, was a power fantasy engineered from the inspiration of their real lives).

Siegel didn’t like school and the people there, not as much as he liked heroes like Tarzan and Buck Rogers and the pulp magazine that published their stories. He read them, and wrote his own stories, instead of plying with the other kids or talking to the girls he liked.

The kids he knew weren’t interested in the sorts of things Jerry was, “except Joe Shuster.”

Nobleman presents Shuster as anagalous to Siegel, only he did with pictures what Siegel did with words. Together they planned to come up with their own Tarzan-like character, sell a comic strip to a newspaper syndicate, and write and draw the sorts of stories they loved for a living.

Nobleman tells a semi-mythological sounding story of a night where Siegel tossed and turned, frantically wishing he had something special going for him, elements of Superman’s story coming to him one at a time, and staying up all night, he feverishly writes them all down, runs to Shuster’s house the next day, and, his friend similarly possessed, he watches as Shuster spends the day feverishly drawing.

This is the story Nobleman’s telling, a Horatio Alger-like story of two kids with big dreams, a lot of talent and a lot more hard work inventing something that could help them achieve those dreams and, a few story beats later, selling it and being embraced for their creation.

I wonder how MacDonald’s artwork would look to eyes other than mine (or the eyes of someone unfamiliar with Shuster's Superman art), as I was quite struck by how much his Siegel and Shuster look like Clark Kent, how much they look like one another, and how hard to read they are (we never see their eyes through their opaque glasses, save a few images where they, somewhat ironically, have Captain Marvel-like curved slits for eyes).

Of course, MacDonald is quite deliberately drawing in a style evocative of Shuster’s, a pretty inspired choice that gives the book a resonance it would otherwise lack, and a way of visually communicating how much the boys drew form their own lives in creating their masterwork (something the text drives home) and a way of portraying Superman that gives the book something of a documentary feel, and, I think, excuses any question over whether or not they were stepping on DC’s legal toes (Like, MacDonald wasn’t drawing Superman to sell a Superman book; instead he’s clearly drawing Superman like Shuster drew Superman because Shuster’s his subject matter, and Superman is what Shuster drew).While the Man of Steel doesn’t appear on the cover, he is on the title page, and on the last page, flying off into the sunset.The only other appearances he makes within are in a sketch of Shuster’s, on the cover of Action Comics #1* and then seen in the distance from behind, in black and white, on a movie screen.

I really liked the image that’s on the inside and back covers:The heart of the story is that night and day when Siegel imagines Superman’s powers and then Shuster brings them to life.

This occurs in a rather remarkable four-page series, beginning with a two-page spread in which young Siegel is shown imagining doing Superman-like things (leaping over a tall building in a single bound, hoisting a car over his head) and then,on the next page, as his ides begin to crystallize, the book takes on the form of a comic book for the next two pages—the only time it deviates from the more standard text-floating-above illustrations format of a picture book to resemble comics.In these, we see a proto-Superman who lacks his S-symbol (for Siegel and Shuster, a sort of signature hidden right in their creation’s logo), his signature cape and colors, as MacDonald draws him as a sort of empty character template whose details Shuster’s imagination has yet to fill in.

It was a very welcome read, even—especially?—now, a few years after it’s release. In a time when people are still occasionally arguing about Siegel and Shuster and National and DC, about who did what and who deserves what, in a time when creators and corporations and commentators continue to wrestle with ideas of creators rights and so many of us look to Siegel and Shuster’s biography as a cautionary tale, one of the bigger, darkle black marks on an industry history that often seems to have more black marks than bright spots, it’s nice to see the positive, heroic aspects of Siegel, Shuster and their incredible creation given this much emphasis.

Whatever happened after they got their big break, Siegel and Shuster did create Superman, and through inspiration and hard work, their dreams really did come true, even if only for a while.



*Sadly, the way MacDonald draws the cover of Action #1, the National suit holding it aloft covers the lower left corner of the cover. Which means we don't get to see how he would have drawn the best element of that cover. You know, this guy:

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have a piece about Andrae and Gordon's Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero up at Robot 6, if you'd like to read it.

Van Lente and Dunlavey on the heirs of Siegel, Shuster and Kirby pursuing legal rights

On Sunday, Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood reprinted the full text of a letter the late Joanne Siegel, who passed away at the age of 93 last month, sent to Warner Brothers CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. Siegel is, most of you probably know, the wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and was, in fact the inspiration and model for Lois Lane. Along with her family and the estate of Superman's other creator, Joe Shuster, Siegel was involved in a tough, complicated series of legal battles with Warner Bros. over elements of the Superman franchise, and after a rather emotional build-up ("So I ask you to please consider—do these mean spirited tactics meet with your approval? Do you really think the families of Superman’s creators should be treated this way?"), she sums up the point of her letter thusly:

To protest harassment of us that will gain you nothing but bad blood and a continued fight.

To protest harassment of our attorney by falsely accusing him of improper conduct in an attempt to deprive us of legal counsel.

To make you aware that in reality this is a business matter and that continuing with litigation for many more years will only benefit your attorneys.

Heidi MacDonald's The Beat and Comic Book Resource's Robot 6 reprinted the contents of the letter, and when linking to it in the course of my own linkblogging at Blog@Newsarama, I referred tot he letter as "the saddest thing you'll read all day."

Well, I was wrong. I read much, much sadder things yesterday, without even having to venture into the "real" media's discussion of tragic international events. No, I simply read the comments threads on those Beat and Robot 6 posts.

If you've ever read a comment thread on any blog post dealing with the heirs of a comics creator dealing with the current owners of the intellectual properties their husbands or fathers made, then you know how miserable the sorts of things anonymous comics fans tend to spew in such arenas.

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's latest issue of Comic Book Comics, a history of comics presented as a comic book series, dealt with the history of Siegel and Shuster's dealings with DC over the ownership of Superman—as well as the similar difficulties that Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson and Jack Kirby had with DC/National and Marvel—and the Siegel and Shuster "story" hasn't really been completed in real life, so it doesn't really have a satisfying conclusion in their comic strip about it either (In 2008, judge Stephen G. larson ruled that the contents of Action Comics #1 revert to Siegel's heirs, and, Van Lente wrote, "The full implications of that decision are still being worked out, but it seems to be in the heirs' interest to work with the company," since, "many of the elements considered crucial to the mythos have appeared since Action #1 and are incontrovertibly owned by DC").

Van Lente and Dunlavey therefore ended their story with panel below, addressing the sorts of fan arguments against the creators and their families, reversing a creator-as-sheep, publisher-as-shepherd visual metaphor they employed throughout the story: Well said, guys.

Some additional thoughts on Craig Yoe's Secret Identity, a great idea for a cop show and searching for Jimmy Olsen fetishists

I have a short review of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams ComicArts) in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly which you would perhaps like to go read. Go on, I’ll wait right here for you.

Hey, welcome back. So yeah, that’s what the book is in general, and how it is.

For a general audience, it’s probably something of a curiosity, a tragic tale of how this industry treated the artists who founded it and the dirty secrets behind our most beloved heroes, a so-perfectly-dramatic-you couldn’t-invent-it true story of cosmic ironies. Coupled with naughty but safe coffee table-ready fetish art for guests to chuckle over while you finish brushing your teeth or finding your wallet before you go out.

I think that for an audience already immersed in the wonderful, horrible world of comic book creation, publishing and consumption, it’s a rather more urgent work—or at least Yoe’s opening essay is.

If there’s a positive aspect of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s experiences with the comics industry, I suppose it would be that they offer the ultimate cautionary tale for creators interested in the field and, I would hope by 2009, publishers on how to treat creators (I assume—or should that be hope?—that the folks running the comics industry today grew up sympathizing with the Siegels and Shusters of the world, and are now in comics because they love comics and are dedicated to not repeating the sins of the past, whereas the folks running the comics industry at its infancy were mostly guys from other industries who saw away to make some bucks).

And Yoe tells that story here, with a focus on Shuster. The opening essay neatly summarizes the ups and downs of Shuster’s life and career, rather elegantly relating things I had read about it before (the anecdote about the down-on-his-luck Shuster taking a job as a delivery boy and on one occasion having to deliver something to the offices he used to work at always stuck with me), and some new, equally sad anecdotes I had not (including a story about Shuster drawing Superman’s for strangers to prove he created him). And then there’s the subject of the book, the fetish art Shuster provided to accompany BDSM prose porn.

That being the reason for this book’s existence, it gets a lot of attention here, and I think it will prove particularly interesting in light of some fairly common topics in the comics blogosphere/comics media over the past few years, including the legal discussions revolving around the Siegel and Shuster families’ claims to certain aspects of DC’s Super-franchise and the mid-‘50s crackdown on comics that was the subject of David Hadju’s 2008 book The Ten-Cent Plague (recently released in paperback!)

It’s one part of the book I’d recommend pretty much anyone reading this blog read, and yet it’s hard to recommend the book itself too enthusiastically, as Yoe’s essay accounts for a relatively small amount of the entire $25 package. And the rest of the book is BDSM fetish art, which a lot of folks might understandably not want around their house.

(I should note though that as sensational as the art work might have been to 1950s audiences, it’s really rather tame. It looks pretty weird, and there is a lot of submission and people getting whipped and threats of sexual violence and rape, but they are more suggestive that exploitive; for the most part, they are things that are about to occur, and perhaps they do in the prose stories, but they’re not illustrated. The only nudity is the occasional nipple or the side of a woman’s ass. There’s no intercourse at all, and no gruesome wounds or anything; only things like scratches on a man’s chest or a woman’s bottom indicating that perhaps the raised whip has already fallen. Also, it is all Shuster art, so it’s hardly realistic looking, so much as it looks like excerpts from some kind of BDSM how-to manual).

I’d usually suggest the library for those who might not want to part with $25 for a comics-related work (or who might be troubled by some of the imagery), but given the subject matter, I’m not sure how common this will be in libraries (at least a few already have it at the moment, according to Worldcat.org). I know I was afraid to bring my review copy with me to the library to make any scans from it, and I’m glad I brought the ComicsArt catalog instead as I ended up sitting next to a little girl at the library playing video games on the next computer over as I went about scanning pictures of the Justice League fighting Dr. Destiny.

At any rate, there’s a link to my review of it, and a more long and rambly endorsement of the well-written and revelatory first 35 pages, but there are a few more reasons that I think it may particularly appeal to those in the comics blogosphere. Well, two more.


1.) Stan Lee’s introduction. Yeah, Stan Lee writes a one-page introduction, and it’s a pretty nice piece of writing, avoiding most of the peculiar personal tics one so often associates with Lee (it does end with the word “Excelsior!” however).

“One of the ironies of life is the fact that in comic book stories the good guy always wins out, and yet in real life neither Jerry nor Joe reaped any financial rewards from their creation,” Lee writes.

He mentions that he knew Siegel, but had never met Shuster, which struck me as a somehow impossible fact. The Golden Age comics industry that exists in my imagination all happens on the same block, and all the creators eat at the same diners, share cabs and meet at the same bars after work, I guess.

He refers to Yoe as, “My colorful friend Craig,” which gives me weird mental images of this guy


and this guy

out together for a night on the town or playing chess together in Central Park or drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups while on stake out together. He’s a comics historian. He’s comics history personified. Together they’re cops. That show would be fantastic!

Finally, Lee writes that “Obviously, there’s far more sexy stuff here within these pages than you’ll find in any mainstream super hero comic book.” (Lee doesn’t read any mainstream superhero comic books anymore, does he?) But there’s the good part: “Much of it isn’t the sort of material that rings my bell…”

Ah! There you have it, True Believers. I’m sure many of you have, over the years, wondered exactly what kind of sexy stuff it is that rings Stan Lee’s bell, as it were. Well, while we still don’t know his exact turn ons, we can safely eliminate the sorts of stuff in here.


2.) Many of the characters resemble the Superman cast to a downright disturbing degree. I don’t know if “thrilling” is necessarily the right word (probably not, when discussing fetish art), but “exciting” doesn’t seem quite right either. “Interesting” definitely isn’t an interesting enough word.

But it’s thrilling/exciting/interesting the degree to which so many of the characters share features with those we’re familiar with from Superman comics (not unlike the experience of reading The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo and recognizing grown-up versions of Betty, Veronica, Josie and Melody in lingerie).

Yoe wonders if this was simply a matter of the way Shuster draws, or if it was a small act of rebellion and intentional subversion, whether conscious or unconscious.

I don’t know. Based on the simplicity of Shuster’s character design, I suspect any pretty brunette he tried to draw would end up looking a lot like Lois Lane. He just didn’t work in enough details to give his gals, say, different shaped noses or faces or eyes. They were mostly defined by their hair and clothes.

But hey, if you ever wondered what Golden Age Lois Lane looked like in her undergarments, her bra falling off to reveal a nipple, here you go!

Here, for example, is a bald bad guy who looks like Lex Luthor dangling a woman who looks like Lois Lane over a pit inhabited by…whatever that animal is supposed to be (a dinosaur, maybe?):

That’s from the strangest set of illustrations, in which the bald chap has all sorts of bizarre devices, none of which match up with the story they were used to illustrate at all (Yoe doesn’t reprint the actual stories, just brief summaries, and context for the individual images).

Here is (a cropped image of) Lois, dressed up like a sexy maid, whipping a shirtless and bound Superman:
Given the weirdness of many of Lois Lane’s comics adventures, I can’t be sure that this same exact thing didn’t happen in a DC comic book. Although that whip would have been kryptonite.

And here is a photo I took of a page featuring Jimmy Olsen getting Lucy Lane high on marijuana as part of her initiation into a teenage sex gang in a story entitled Never Been Kissed.
I never saw the 1999 Drew Barrymore vehicle with the same name. That’s…that’s not what that movie was about, was it?!
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Check out Yoe’s secret-identity.net site for lots of examples from the book, and the extremely colorful-looking launch party for it, which involved live re-enactments of some of the pictures, and some crazy superhero costumes.


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A couple days ago when I was preparing this post, I looked online to see if I could find a scan of the above image featuring characters who looked like Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane smoking, not wanting to bring a book of fetish art with me to the public library to scan.

So I Google image-d "jimmy olsen" and "fetish," hoping I'd turn up a scan of the image, and dreading I'd find amateur porn featuring naked people wearing nothing but green check-patterned blazers, bow ties and drawn-on freckles, or maybe Jack Larson's head photoshopped onto naked bodies.

I didn't find what I wanted, but I didn't stumble upon a world I feared might exist (Apparently, no one actually has a real Jimmy Olsen fetish).

The number one result was the cover of Secret Identity, and the first page full of results had the cover and some select, non-Jimmy Olsen-looking scans from Secret Identity. Here, for no reason other than I found puzzling over why some of these came up amusing, are the top seven non-Secret Identity related Google image results for "Jimmy Olsen" and "fetish."








The cross-dressing story was no surprise, but the robot? Turtle Boy? Weird. The search I did, by the way, was like Sunday or Monday night. I just did another one to see if it's changed much, and the results were indeed different. Just in case you wanted to repeat the experiment. And hey, who wouldn't?