Happy Birthday Jerry Siegel!

[esquirecomics]

On what would have been his 91st birthday. - Jerry Siegel (1914-1996)

 

The New York Times

 

January 31, 1996, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

 

NAME: Jerry Siegel

 

SECTION: Section B; Page 6; Column 4; National Desk

 

LENGTH: 649 words

 

HEADLINE: Jerry Siegel, Superman's Creator, Dies at 81

 

BYLINE: By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

 

BODY:

Jerry Siegel, whose teen-age yearning for girls gave the world Superman, died in Los Angeles on Sunday. He was 81 but was remembered less as the Cleveland visionary who dreamed up the greatest superhero of all time than as the naive young man who sold the rights to a billion-dollar cultural and commercial juggernaut for $130.

 

It was Mr. Siegel's partner, Joe Shuster, who eventually gave Superman his familiar skin-tight costume and accompanying cape, but it was Mr. Siegel who had imagined Superman whole, from his birth on the doomed planet Krypton and his rocket arrival on Earth to his superhuman powers and his mild-mannered alter ego, Clark Kent.

 

The vision, as he later told it, came to him in a jumble all at once, during a sleepless summer night in Cleveland in 1934 after his graduation from Glenville High School, where he and Mr. Shuster had already teamed up to produce a stream of comic strip characters, including an earlier Superman, whom Mr. Siegel had imagined as a bald mad scientist.

 

But for all of the instant-imagined detail of the second Superman's extraterrestrial origins, his upbringing by doting foster parents and his decision to dedicate his awesome powers "to assist humanity," Mr. Siegal made no secret that the focus of his creative vision, the real creature of his dreams, was Lois Lane, Kent's fellow reporter on The Daily Planet.

 

She was the woman who would yearn for Superman even as she shunned Kent, not knowing that beneath that mild-mannered exterior was in fact the very man of steel, not to mention the longing heart of Jerry Siegel.

 

Even discussing Superman's origins 40 years later, Mr. Siegel, who said he had thought of becoming a reporter, seemed still to feel the stings he had suffered as a scrawny, bespectacled high school student:

 

"I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed," he said. "It occurred to me: what if I had something going for me, like jumping over buildings or throwing cars around or something like that?"

 

Even after Mr. Shuster had rendered Mr. Siegel's fantasy in ink, it took the partners several years to find a publisher willing to accept their creation.

 

And when they did, in New York, where they had been hired to produce other comic book characters, their dream of cashing in was quickly shattered.

 

In March 1938, in exchange for $130 in cash, they signed away all rights to Superman to DC Comics, the company that brought Superman to commercial life that June.

 

When the character proved an immediate sensation and the partners sought a share of the profits, they were dismissed and lived the rest of their lives near the poverty line. After a series of lawsuits to recover their creative property failed, Mr. Shuster was eventually reduced to becoming a messenger in Manhattan and Mr. Siegel worked as a clerk typist in Los Angeles for $7,000 a year.

 

In 1978, after the first Superman movie made more than $80 million, DC, which over the years has received more than $250 million of the more than $1 billion that Superman has earned from movies, television and an incredible array of commercial products, bowed to public opinion, restored their bylines and gave each man a $20,000-a-year annuity, later raised to $30,000.

 

In their final years, the two men lived within a few blocks of each other in Los Angeles, where Mr. Shuster, blind in the last years of his life, died in 1992.

 

Mr. Siegel may have been the man who created Superman, but his failure to safeguard his rights soured him on the man from another planet.

 

"I can't stand to look at a Superman comic book," he said in 1975. "It makes my physically ill. I love Superman, and yet to me he has become an alien thing."

 

He is survived by his wife, Joanne, their daughter, Laura Carter Larson of Los Angeles; a son, Michael, by a previous marriage, and two grandchildren.

 

The Jerusalem Post

 

May 1, 1996, Wednesday

 

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 7

 

LENGTH: 1672 words

 

HEADLINE: Superman: A Jewish hero

 

BYLINE: Eric J. Greenberg, The Jewish Week

 

BODY:

JERRY Siegel's greatest creation has become perhaps the best known symbol of tikkun olam (putting the world to rights) in 20th-century popular culture: Superman.

 

Siegel, a teenaged budding science-fiction writer from Cleveland when he invented the Man of Steel in the late 1930s, died this year at the age of 81.

 

Colleagues and admirers agree that his invention of the blue-and-red garbed hero who epitomizes the continuing fight for truth and justice revolutionized not only the comic-book industry but world mythology. And Jewish cultural observers note that the Superman legend seems to resonate with Jewish themes.

 

How else to explain the story of Kal-el (a curiously Hebraic-sounding name), who is forced to leave the planet of his birth after its destruction? And when the stranger arrives in a foreign land, he must keep his true identity a secret, masquerading as mild-mannered Clark Kent, who hides beneath a felt hat and glasses.

 

"The older I got, the more I saw there was something profoundly Jewish to Superman, that he somehow was one of us," says Daniel Schifrin, communications director of the US's National Foundation for Jewish Culture. "Underneath the glasses and timidity there lurks a great strength that just needs to be let out. Like Clark Kent, we've been Diaspora Jews for so long, being viewed as timid and bookish, when underneath there are fierce Hebrew warriors doing God's work."

 

Schifrin also observes that Superman was born at a time of economic despair and racism (the Depression and World War II), a time of special trepidation for Jews worldwide.

 

"There was a pervasive sense that Jews were somehow weak in some way that was how others saw them in Europe and in the States," Schifrin says. "In a way, Superman was a countermeasure or a reaction formation to that sense of themselves."

 

Siegel's widow, Joanne Carter Siegel the original model for Lois Lane told The Jewish Week that her husband never really talked about the possible Jewish roots of the Man of Tomorrow.

 

"I've heard about that (Jewish connection) before. I've been told that Kal-el in Hebrew means God," she said during a telephone interview from her California home. "As a child, he (Siegel) heard the (Hebrew) language. I don't know whether it was conscious; it may have been coming out of his subconscious mind." But, she added, "It's nice of (some people) to think that way. I don't think he would have been offended."

 

However, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the The New Republic, counters: "If Superman is an American Jewish fantasy, it's the fantasy of escaping from identity. An encounter with his origins makes him weak, almost to death," he says, apparently referring to the deadly metal kryptonite.

 

"Second, he has it bad for a woman like Lois Lane. And third, he thinks justice will be brought about by the unprecedented use of physical force. I think he is a perfect symbol of what ails the American Jew," the noted critic says.

 

Paul Levitz, publisher of DC Comics (a subsidiary of Warner Communications) and former Superman scriptwriter, says he also has heard the stories of Superman's Jewish origins, but has never been able to confirm them.

 

"I never heard Jerry talk about that theory," he says. But according to Levitz, 39, a Jewish subtext in comic books wouldn't be unusual, especially since the comic-book business was largely created by American Jews in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

 

"There was a really high percentage of Jewish writers and artists, and for whatever reason there was a great outpouring of passion. It's something we as a people should be proud of," he says.

 

SIEGEL could be described as the Abraham of the comic-book industry.

 

"You might say that Jerry is the father of us all. He started the superhero business," says Stan Lee, who two decades later founded Marvel Comics and created Spiderman.

 

"Without the Superman concept, I don't think comics would have lasted," notes former DC Comics editor Julie Schwartz, who helped revive the superhero industry in the early 1960s.

 

Schwartz, who met Siegel in 1932, recalls the several draft versions of Superman that Siegel was working on, but could never get Siegel to reveal the origin of the name Kal-el.

 

Even if Superman may not be "Jewish," Siegel and his cocreator, childhood friend Joe Shuster, have earned their place in Jewish history.

 

According to the book The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time, the dynamic duo of Siegel and Shuster are listed at No. 100, not far behind Steven Spielberg (95) Menachem Begin (73) and Henry Kissinger (79). Moses was No. 1 and Maimonides No. 16.

 

Levitz says Siegel attained "the rarest of literary achievements; creating a character that transcends the medium in which the story is told." Indeed Superman has been wildly popular in every entertainment medium to feature him, from comic books, newspaper comic strips, radio serials, theatrical cartoons, movie serials, TV cartoons, Broadway musicals, television shows (including the classic 1950s The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves and today's Lois and Clark) and four feature movies starring Christopher Reeve.

 

All this from humble beginnings: Siegel and Shuster couldn't find a publisher for nearly four years.

 

IT WAS somewhere between late 1935 and 1937 that the teenage Siegel, a scrawny, bespectacled graduate of Glenville High School, dreamed up the story of Superman, rocketed by his parents from the doomed planet Krypton to Earth, where he gained superhuman abilities like Samsonian strength, X-ray vision, super speed, heat vision and invulnerability.

 

At the time, Joanne Carter was a 15-year-old aspiring model.

 

She answered a modeling ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer placed by teenage artist Joe Shuster. Almost as fast as a speeding bullet, she became the prototype for Lois Lane.

 

"I had wavy, shoulder-length hair. They wanted a wholesome Lois Lane," she says. She married Siegel nearly 10 years later.

 

Joanne Siegel says it's hard to pin down the exact year Siegel finalized the concept of Superman, and she hopes to research the subject for a book. An early incarnation had Superman as a bald-headed evil scientist who looked suspiciously like arch villain Lex Luthor.

 

After shopping around the character for nearly four years, DC Comics, then known as National Allied Periodicals, agreed to publish an adventure of the world's first superhero in Action Comics No. 1, dated June 1938. (An original copy recently sold for $ 137,500.) The success of the character with the large red S on his chest was, well, more powerful than a locomotive.

 

The rest of the supporting cast also was solid as steel: gruff newspaper editor Perry White, cub reporter Jimmy Olsen and hard-as-nails investigative reporter Lois Lane, a mentor for untold numbers of young American girls.

 

Current Superman comic writer Dan Jurgens says the creation of Lois Lane rivals Siegel's star creation: "Jerry created the first great feminist. She was a model for feminism, and female careers ended up being shaped by Lois Lane."

 

Joanne Siegel refutes the legendary accounts that have Siegel and Shuster selling the rights to Superman to DC Comics for $ 130 in March 1938, perhaps the greatest giveaway in literary history. She says the company coerced the 19-year-olds to sign a release form in order to get paid for previous work they did. "They had no intention of selling what they believed in," she says.

 

Whatever occurred, the dynamic duo never shared in the hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that Superman brought through movies, television and an endless line of licensed products, including drinking cups, beach towels and lunch pails.

 

It led to years of bitterness between Siegel and Shuster and DC Comics, as the pair lived from hand to mouth.

 

Marvel editor Lee, who knew Siegel for many years, says he hired Siegel as a proofreader during this period when the writer needed a job. "Everybody liked him," says Lee (formerly Lieber). "He was a hard worker."

 

IN 1978, after the huge success of the first Superman movie, DC Comics bowed to public pressure and granted the creators each an annual annuity of $ 30,000, and gave them credits in each Superman comic book.

 

"We have a good relationship now with DC and Time Warner," says Joanne Siegel. She says that, for her husband's 80th birthday last year, Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin sent her husband a large onyx sculpture of Superman stopping an onrushing train.

 

Joanne Siegel points out that her husband created numerous other comic-book characters during his career, including Superboy, Dr. Occult and The Spectre.

 

Interestingly, The Spectre is the story of the avenging spirit of God walking the Earth seeking justice and fighting evil. In one recent tale, it was revealed that this timeless spirit was also the Angel of Death that God sent in the Pessah story.

 

According to Joanne Siegel, "Jerry always said that's what he wanted to do come back in spirit form and fight evil."

 

But it is Siegel's Superman that inspired millions and led to the creation of Batman, Captain America and Captain Marvel. What distinguishes Superman is his integrity.

 

Current Spiderman assistant editor Glenn Greenberg notes that Superman started as "the champion of the underdog and all victims. Early scripts found Superman championing union struggles. He also fought Hitler and the Nazis in World War II."

 

Superman editor Mike Carlin said that, when he was a boy, Superman stood for things that were achievable for him. "A lot of people identified with Batman because he had no super powers. But I liked Superman because he always tried to do the right thing, for the right reasons."

 

Says Jurgens, who pens Superman's latest adventures: "Superman 24 hours a day is trying to make a change for positive in the world. He is trying to make life better for those around him." Or in Hebrew, tikkun olam..

[HouseofComics.Com]

Mark, thanks for posting that. I think I read it when it came out but it's always good to revisit pieces like that. As it happens, I have just started reading volume one of the Superman Archives so this is good background. Btw, the Superman archives vol. one has been discounted to $19.95 ($13.97 or so on Amazon) so it's highly affordable and highly recommended. It also has an excellent foreward by Steranko.

 

Marc

[action1kid]

Happy birthday to a great man.....

[Point Five]

Absolutely!

 

I'll always be grateful to Jerry Siegel. His creation of Superman led to the formation of the comic book industry as we know it, which has without question enriched my life. I still love reading his early Superman stories...his writing still brings out the kid in me, and in a lot of us I think.

[JohnBull]

Happy Birthday Jerry!

 

Whatever his early accomplishments, his contribution to the SA Superman family mythos is also immense. He wrote most of the great issues from the early 60's and those are probably my favourites in the characters history.

 

I think his name will live on for a very long time indeed.

[Aces]

Happy Birthday...

[Ringfinger]

How sad, I never knew that.

[thedude]

happy birthday to a true visionary, combining elements of science fiction and strong men such as Samson and Hercules, gave birth to the Superhero for without none of us would even be posting here.....

 

thanks Jerry..

 

thedude..

[Timulty]

You know it is funny how some the greatest joys in a person's life can turn to sorrows. Jerry Siegel has given comics fans a great gift. ¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Jerry!!