Superman

by Larry Tye

  Guests of the Earth was his next publication. He printed it after hours on the high school mimeograph machine and published it under an equally Waspy pseudonym: Hugh Langley. When an English teacher saw it, she demanded, “Jerome, why do you write these kinds of stories, when there are so many more worthwhile things you could write about?” His science teacher didn’t bother to ask, dismissing Jerry’s pamphlets as “junk” and “foolishness.” His parents loved their last-born but were equally unimpressed with his scribbling. Michel merely shrugged. Sarah considered Jerry’s dream of becoming a writer “a wild, erratic notion and that nothing would really come of it,” Jerry remembered later. “She told me that of all her children, she worried the most about me.”

  No matter. Like his fellow science fiction aficionados, Jerry was not writing for his parents or their peers. His audience was youngsters like himself. So he wrote what he dreamed about—messages from the planet Mars, bullied boys who got even, an ape-man named Goober who was raised by lions. Neither the characters nor the writing was especially persuasive, not with lines like these: “ ‘Goober!’ he shouted, ‘Don’t you recognize your old pal? It’s me—Izzy the Ape! I’ve changed my name, that’s all. Nobody knew the difference in Cleveland, I look so much like the people there.’ ” But the school paper published it for just that reason: It was not overthought. The language and plots were precisely right for kids like Jerry, kids with outsize imaginations and visions of a world beyond Cleveland, and who had peed in their pants or worried they might.

  What did matter to Jerry was money. His dad, a tailor from Lithuania, had squeezed out a living selling and altering suits and other secondhand clothes. Sarah helped out behind the counter. At its best the shop’s revenues were barely enough to sustain a family of eight, and during the Depression sales and profits were even lower. After Michel died, the Siegels were destitute. Harry, Jerry’s oldest brother, kept them housed and fed with money he earned as a mailman. Others kicked in what they could, even Jerome, Sarah’s baby and pet. That meant working after school as a delivery boy for a print shop, where he earned the royal rate of four dollars a week and dreamed of hitting the jackpot with his writing. It also meant sharing a bed with his brother Leo.

  Most of the stories he wrote were mailed back by publishers or were gone forever, so Jerry decided to try his hand once more at publishing. His new magazine had a title worthy of his lofty hopes: Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. He was not the only writer this time; fellow Glenville High students chipped in. Jerry was, however, still the sole executive, holding the titles of owner, editor, secretary, treasurer, and office boy. He continued to rely on the school mimeograph machine, but he vowed that would change when ads he placed in more established science fiction publications swelled his magazine’s circulation. His rates—fifteen cents a copy, or $1.50 a year—were no bargain, not when thick pulps could be had for a thin dime. And he continued to sign with a name not his own: Herbert S. Fine, which blended the name of his cousin Herbert Schwartz with his mother’s maiden name, Fine. Looking back, there are two names that stand out even more in Science Fiction: its primary illustrator, Joe Shuster, and the main character in a story in its third issue, Super-Man.

  Jerry’s and Joe’s names would become as conjoined and revered in the world of comics as those of Rodgers and Hammerstein in song and Tracy and Hepburn in cinema. Jerry and Joe met through Jerry’s cousin Jerry Fine, who lived in another part of Cleveland. Fine wrote a column in junior high called “Jerry the Journalist,” which Shuster illustrated. When Joe was about to enter ninth grade his family moved to Glenville, and Fine suggested he look up Jerry Siegel. The boys looked almost like brothers even though Jerry was four inches taller and forty pounds heavier, and they seemed fated to become a twosome. Both wore glasses, were petrified of girls, and preferred to stay indoors reading when everyone else their age was in the park playing ball, which made them two-for-one targets for schoolyard toughs. Both were the children of Jewish refugees, and Joe’s dad, Julius, was a tailor like Michel Siegel. Both grew up poor, although the Shusters’ cramped apartment made the Siegels’ two-story home ten blocks away look like a mansion.

  Julius Shuster was brilliant with a needle and thread but not with a ledger. He had sunk his meager inheritance into a tailor shop in Toronto’s garment district, but the shop failed when he charged too little for clothes that took too long to stitch. His family was accustomed to changing apartments on rent day, but this time they moved all the way to Cleveland, for the promise of a job manufacturing men’s suits. Joe had always helped pay the family’s bills with the meager wages he could get by peddling newspapers, hawking ice cream cones, and apprenticing with a sign painter. Still, there were winter days and sometimes entire seasons when the Shusters went without coal for the furnace or enough food for three meals. Liabilities like those were not disabling back then, not during the Depression and certainly not to children like Jerry and Joe, whose parents were needy immigrants. The firmest basis for their bond had always been the passion they shared for fantastic stories, which is the way each saw himself getting even with his bulliers and getting out of Glenville. The very day they met, after Joe introduced himself to Jerry at the library, they dashed off to Joe’s apartment and got to work on their first project.

  Joe Shuster had loved the comics since he was a toddler back in Canada, when his dad would boost him onto his knee and read aloud strips like The Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, and Joe’s favorite, Little Nemo in Slumberland. He also loved drawing, and he used to go on sketching even when the house was so cold he had to wrap up in a pair of sweaters and gloves. Lacking money for a drawing board, he improvised: the wooden slab his mother used to knead her Sabbath challah worked almost as well. Instead of a sketch pad he made do with butcher paper, discarded wallpaper, and the barren walls of their rented apartment. A scholarship let him study at the Cleveland School of Art and he bought himself more instruction, for ten cents a class, at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute. His artwork was inspired but never visionary. The simple lines and expressive faces got across his message the same way Jerry’s craftsmanlike words did—with joy, without flair. They were a well-matched pair.

  Joe’s limits were a matter of optics as well as talent. Even as a boy he had major eye troubles. “He was in a sight-seeing class,” remembers his junior high classmate Jerry Fine. “They had sight-seeing classes for those kids who couldn’t see well. Joe was very, very nearsighted. His drawing had to be two to three inches from his face.” Rosie Shuster, Joe’s niece, describes his eyes as “rheumy and soft-focused. He had Coke-bottle glasses. His family didn’t want him to draw in the first place.”

  Eyesight was only the most obvious way in which Jerry and Joe, for all they shared, were different. Next to most of his peers Jerry seemed reticent, but Joe was so sheepish and sweet he made Jerry look fiery and bossy. Jerry did most of the talking, then and later; Joe trusted that Jerry would represent his interests. Crazy Joey, as one adoring cousin called him, had a broader, deeper inner life than Jerry, with fewer bridges to the real world. That made it easier both to like Joe and to take advantage of him. Joe gave Jerry the two things he most wanted: images to bring his words to life, and the clear understanding that Jerry was in charge.

  Their first big collaboration was an illustrated short story called “The Reign of the Super-Man,” a twist on the Frankenstein fable that they completed in 1932 and published the next January. The protagonist was Professor Ernest Smalley, a megalomaniacal scientist who tested a mind-bending chemical on a homeless man named Bill Dunn. The experiment yielded a monster with the power not just to read people’s thoughts but to control them. Before Smalley could put that power to use, Dunn killed him, then hatched his own plan to manipulate stocks, clean up at racetracks, and generate enough wealth to dominate the planet. At the last instant Dunn lost his powers, returning to the breadline from which Smalley had plucked him. As he did, he had a bout of conscience: “I see, no
w, how wrong I was. If I had worked for the good of humanity, my name would have gone down in history with a blessing—instead of a curse.”

  Phew. The world was saved from a monster and Jerry was saved from what he would soon realize was a bad idea. A planet as troubled as his needed a hero, not another villain. At the time, he and Joe were glad to have a full-blown science fiction story, one that filled nine pages of Science Fiction. And certain of its themes would stick: an outer-space origin for Smalley’s chemicals and Dunn’s powers, a newspaper writer as the Super-Man’s sidekick, and a sense of whimsy that was pure Jerry. The young writer named his reporter Forrest Ackerman, after the young science fiction fan who would later invent the term sci-fi. The Super-Man visited a library where his deskmate was reading Science Fiction. He also misbehaved there in much the way Jerry had, with the same result: a reprimand from the librarian. Yet the most striking element in this first take on Superman was its indecision—not just about big matters like whether the central character should be good or evil, but over whether to spell his name with a hyphen (as in the title), as “Superman” (the way it was in the text of the story), or as SUPERMAN (as he contemplated here and switched to in his next rendering). “The Reign of the Super-Man,” Jerry explained later, was composed when he was very young, and while the central character was callow, he also “was a giant step forward on: The Road to Superman.”

  Soon Jerry noticed on newsstands a publication called Detective Dan, a forerunner of the modern comic book that lasted only that single issue but made a mark on at least one of its young readers. He started imagining a comic book that featured him, or rather his Superman. The version he was drafting would again begin with a wild scientist empowering a normal human against his will, but this time the powers would be even more fantastic, and rather than becoming a criminal, the super-being would fight crime “with the fury of an outraged avenger.” Jerry and Joe worked up the copy and drawings, scraping together their nickels to pay for the paper, the ink, and the postage to mail everything to the owners of Detective Dan. Although the first response was encouraging, the second made it clear that the comic book was so unprofitable that its publishers put on hold any future stories.

  Jerry had thought highly enough of Joe’s talents in those early years that he gave him the title of art director at Science Fiction and enlisted him as a partner on his cherished Superman project. But now, with that project going nowhere, he had his doubts about their prospects. At first he thought the problem was that since they were just teenagers potential employers might presume their work was just a quick bit of patchwork, so he had Joe re-letter the cover of their mock comic book, backdating its origin from 1933 to 1928 to look as if it had been years in the making. Then he dropped Joe and tried to enlist an older, more established artist.

  Hal Foster, who drew the Sunday Tarzan strip, said he was too busy. Another Tarzan illustrator, J. Allen St. John, expressed interest in working with Jerry on a comic strip that Jerry called “Rex Carson of the Ether Patrol,” but the strip and the collaboration both died. Next on the list was Leo O’Mealia, who drew the Fu Manchu comic and soon found in his mailbox Jerry’s more fully developed script for Superman. This one was set in a future where the Earth was about to explode. Minutes before the blast, a super-powered scientist-adventurer used a time machine to transport himself to the present, where he became a crime-fighter. His character didn’t have a Clark Kent secret identity yet, although Jerry later recalled that there probably was a Lois Lane–like character. And he didn’t have a publisher, although O’Mealia and the Bell Syndicate, which published Fu Manchu, both showed a brief interest in the sketchy story.

  The one measurable result of Jerry’s efforts to enlist the help of O’Mealia came from the mild-mannered Joe Shuster. “When I told Joe of this, he unhappily destroyed the drawn-up pages of “THE SUPERMAN,” burning them in the furnace of his apartment building,” Jerry recalled. “At my request, he gave me as a gift the torn cover.” The story of Joe setting fire to the artwork is part of comic book lore, and most tellings say he did it in frustration after publishers rejected “The Superman.” In his memoir, Jerry set the record straight: Shuster was angry and depressed not just because publishers weren’t interested in their idea but because his partner had been disloyal to him.

  Jerry was unbowed by Joe’s reaction. His next target for collaboration was Russell Keaton, who drew and wrote the Skyroads strip. They exchanged a series of letters during the summer of 1934, with Keaton going as far as submitting what Jerry thought was inspired artwork for a Superman comic strip. Jerry, meanwhile, was fleshing out his thinking on his hero. He would not just be a man of adventure but would offer “great possibilities for humor,” a device that Jerry felt could disarm readers. Superman’s backstory also was shifting to what is now familiar ground. The last man on Earth had catapulted his baby rather than himself back in a time machine. The infant was found by passing motorists Sam and Molly Kent, who first turned him over to an orphanage, then adopted him and named him Clark. At the end of the second week of Jerry’s scripts, Sam said to his wife, “We’ve been blind, Molly. The lad’s strength is a God-send! I see now that he’s destined for wonderful things.” The story resonated more this way, and Keaton helped bring it alive with his drawings. The artist was interested enough to set up a meeting with a publisher late in 1934, but then, for reasons Jerry never understood, Keaton told him that “the book is closed.” Maybe the publisher wasn’t interested. Maybe Keaton was shocked to discover how young and inexperienced Jerry was. Maybe Jerry was simply a pest. Keaton is no longer around to ask, but Denis Kitchen, a comics publisher who represents Keaton’s estate, says the illustrator was “a professional in his mid-twenties communicating with a teenager with a wacky idea about a guy with superpowers.… I think Keaton was very surprised by Superman’s eventual success, since he didn’t have any faith in it.”

  He may have been betrayed, but Joe Shuster did have faith, still, in Superman and in Jerry Siegel. And while Jerry had no scruples about going back to his abandoned partner, first he needed to retool his superhero. That happened on what he said was a hot summer night of divine-like inspiration whose timing and circumstances swelled slightly each time he revisited them. His most considered version came in his unpublished memoir—a hundred-page document whose exuberance and visual prose give it the feel of a comic book—where he recalled all the telling details of what he had done and thought a half century earlier. Jerry decided his only hope lay in crafting a hero so super that no publisher could resist, one whose story was just unbelievable enough to be credible. He vowed to stay up as late as it took. His newest incarnation of Superman would come from a dying planet called Krypton, not a dying Earth. Clark Kent, the superhero’s alter ego, would be a reporter, just the occupation to snoop around for trouble. Lois Lane was here, too—a Lois who “was ga-ga over super-powered Superman” and “had an antipathy toward meek, mild Clark.” The premise was easy: His character would have everything Jerry wanted for himself—he would be able to run faster than a train, leap over skyscrapers, and be noticed by a pretty girl. What teenage boy wouldn’t love to be able to do all that?

  The spine of the story was done late that night before Jerry climbed into his and Leo’s bed, leaving paper and pencil nearby. His sleep was fitful. Every time he woke he slipped into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and filled in another piece of the tale. “This went on until the wee hours of the morning,” he wrote in his late-life reminiscence. “At dawn, I enthusiastically raced about a dozen blocks to Joe’s apartment. I showed Joe the script and asked him if he would be interested in collaborating with me on this newest version of my Superman syndicate[d] comic strip project. He enthusiastically agreed, and got to work at once.”

  The loyal Joe, hunched barely an inch above the paper as he strained to see, started drawing. Jerry hovered over him. They stopped only to gulp down sandwiches. The reunited partners now saw Superman as their joint property, although they would later d
isagree on who originated what. “I conceived the character in my mind’s eye to have a very, very colorful costume of a cape and, you know, very, very colorful tights and boots and the letter ‘S’ on his chest,” Joe recounted. Jerry begged to differ: it was he who dressed the hero in bold colors and an athlete’s tights, and he who came up with the S, along with a cape that “would whip around when the character was in action.” They agreed that Superman had to be everything they were not: strapping and dashing, fearless yet composed. As for the superhero’s second self—Clark Kent—wasn’t it obvious? Like Jerry, Clark wore glasses, wilted at the sight of blood or a pretty girl, and spent his days penning articles for the newspaper. Both lost their fathers and had their childhoods interrupted. When Joe was unsure how Clark should look, Jerry would pose for him. When it came to Superman, Joe often posed himself, in front of a mirror—contorting his face to look enraged, beaming with self-satisfaction, and, most convincingly, making his hero look uncertain about what he was doing but ready to plow ahead.

  Lois was harder to picture. Joe and Jerry wanted to get her right, but there was no model at hand. So they hired one, from a Situation Wanted ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, at the lavish rate of $1.50 an hour, which was more than either boy made in a day. Jolan Kovacs, a skinny kid whose only training was posing before her bedroom mirror, had advertised herself as an “attractive model” named Joanne Carter. At two in the afternoon on a frigid Saturday in January, the scared high school student showed up at Joe’s apartment. “My heart was pounding,” she remembered forty years later, by which time she had still another name: Mrs. Jerry Siegel. “I knocked on the door, and a boy my age, wearing glasses, opened the door a crack, and I said, ‘I’m the model Mr. Shuster wrote to.’ So he opened the door and he motioned me in. We hit it off right away. We started talking about movies, we were talking about everything, and I was thawing out. And a woman stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, ‘Hello’—an older woman—and a little girl ran through the living room, chased by a little boy, and out again. And we were talking for the longest time, and finally I said, ‘Does Mr. Shuster know I’m here?’ And he said, ‘I’m Mr. Shuster.’ …