A boy in Glenville
Jerome Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 1914, the youngest of six children of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His parents, born Mikhel Iankel Segalovich and Sora Meita Khaikels, had left the Russian Empire to escape antisemitism and arrived in New York in 1900, becoming Michael and Sarah Siegel. Michael, a tailor, ran a small clothing store. In 1928 the family moved to Glenville, then the heart of Jewish Cleveland, and Jerry enrolled at Glenville High School.
He was a shy, bespectacled boy who lived in his imagination. He read pulp magazines and newspaper adventure strips, wrote letters to newspaper columns (one was printed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer when he was twelve), and fell hard for the new world of science fiction. In 1929 he began producing his own amateur science fiction magazine, Cosmic Stories, filled with stories the professional pulps had rejected. Then, in June 1932, his father died of a heart attack after a confrontation with a thief at his shop. Some writers have since wondered whether the loss shaped the idea of an invulnerable protector; Siegel himself never said so.
Meeting Joe Shuster
At Glenville High, around 1930, Siegel met Joe Shuster, a quiet, nearsighted boy from a poor Jewish family who had moved to Cleveland from Toronto and who could draw. “When Joe and I first met,” Siegel later said, “it was like the right chemicals coming together.” Siegel wrote and Shuster illustrated for the school paper, the Glenville Torch, including Goober the Mighty, a parody of Tarzan.
In January 1933 Siegel’s fanzine Science Fiction published his story “The Reign of the Superman,” under the pen name Herbert S. Fine, with Shuster’s illustrations. Its title character was a bald vagrant who gains mental powers from an experimental drug and uses them for evil. The story went nowhere, but the name stayed with Siegel. Over the next months he reimagined the Superman as a hero instead of a villain, reasoning that heroes made better strips.
Five years of rejection
From 1933 Siegel and Shuster tried to sell Superman as a newspaper strip, and for years every syndicate turned them down. Siegel even sought other artists, sending scripts in 1933 and 1934 to professionals in other cities, and each version of the story moved closer to the one the world would know: a baby sent from a dying world, adopted by a kind couple named Kent, who grows up to use his powers for the good of humanity. Siegel later described the night the idea of the dual identity came to him, the mild-mannered Clark Kent hiding the hero beneath. Clark Kent, he wrote, grew out of his own private life and Shuster’s.
Meanwhile the pair broke into the young comic book business. From 1935 they sold features to National Allied Publications in New York, the forerunner of DC Comics, beginning with the swashbuckler Henri Duval and the occult detective Doctor Occult in New Fun Comics #6 (October 1935). In 1937 they created the brawling detective Slam Bradley for the first issue of Detective Comics.
The birth of the superhero
Early in 1938 the publisher was looking for material for a new anthology, Action Comics, and Superman, rejected by the McClure syndicate, was forwarded to it. Siegel and Shuster reworked their strips into thirteen comic book pages. In March 1938 they signed away all rights to the character to Detective Comics, Inc. for $130, ten dollars a page, as was standard practice at the time. Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938, went on sale on April 18, 1938, with Superman lifting a car over his head on its cover.
The first printing of 200,000 copies sold out, and sales of the series soon approached a million copies a month. Siegel wrote and Shuster drew a hero who was something genuinely new: an orphan from the doomed planet Krypton, raised as the mild-mannered Clark Kent, with a costume, a code name, extraordinary powers and a mission to help others. In Siegel’s early Depression-era stories Superman is a social crusader, rescuing a wrongly condemned prisoner, confronting a wife-beater, battling corrupt politicians and slumlords. A daily newspaper strip followed in January 1939, written by Siegel, and by 1941 it had an estimated 20 million readers. Superman got his own comic book in 1939, a radio series in 1940 and lavish animated cartoons in 1941.
Superman against Hitler
Siegel’s hero quickly became a weapon in the war of ideas. In February 1940, nearly two years before the United States entered the war, Look magazine published a two-page story by Siegel and Shuster called “How Superman Would End the War,” in which Superman seizes Hitler and Stalin and hauls them before the League of Nations. The SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps answered on April 25, 1940, with an article attacking Siegel personally, calling him “the inventive Israelite” and “an intellectually and physically circumcised chap,” and accusing Superman of poisoning American youth.
Siegel was drafted into the U.S. Army in June 1943 and served in Hawaii, writing a humour column for the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes, until his discharge in January 1946. He also created other characters at DC, notably the ghostly avenger the Spectre in 1940, with artist Bernard Baily.
The long fight for credit
While Siegel was in the Army, DC published Superboy, a young Superman, based on an idea he had submitted but the company had not bought. In 1947 he and Shuster sued to recover their rights. The court ruled that the publisher owned Superman, though Superboy belonged to Siegel, and the pair settled for about $94,000 and signed away their claims. DC removed their names from the stories. Their next creation, the comic hero Funnyman, failed, and Siegel struggled for years as a freelance writer.
In 1959 he returned to DC as a writer without a byline, inventing many members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, including Brainiac 5, Phantom Girl and Matter-Eater Lad. When a second lawsuit loomed in the late 1960s, the work dried up again. He wrote for Marvel under the name Joe Carter, for Archie Comics, for the British comic Lion and for Italy’s Disney comic Topolino, and for a time worked as a clerk-typist for a Los Angeles public agency. In 1975, hearing that Warner Bros. was planning a big-budget Superman film, he went to the press. Backed by cartoonists including Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson, he and Shuster shamed the company into granting them a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year, later raised to $30,000, and restoring their credit. Since then Superman stories have carried the words “created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.”
Family and final years
Siegel married Bella Lifshitz, a Jewish woman from Glenville, in 1939; their son Michael was born in 1944, and the marriage ended in 1948. That year he married Joanne Carter, who years earlier had modelled for Shuster’s drawings of Lois Lane. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1951. He never lost the fan’s enthusiasm that had started it all: at the 1940 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago he turned up at the costume masquerade dressed as Clark Kent. The family moved to California in 1968. Siegel and Shuster remained friends to the end, often meeting for dinner. Siegel died of heart failure in Los Angeles on January 28, 1996, at the age of eighty-one. After his death his widow and daughter pursued his share of the Superman copyright in court for years; the litigation ended in favour of the publisher under a settlement the courts held binding.
A Jewish immigrant’s hero
Siegel never described Superman as a Jewish character, but many writers have seen in him the story of the children of immigrants who created him. Superman is the ultimate newcomer: sent alone from a doomed homeland, adopted by strangers, hiding his true identity behind a meek and assimilated surface while serving the country that took him in. Commentators, including the rabbi Simcha Weinstein, have pointed to parallels with Moses, a baby sent away to escape death and raised in a foreign land, and to his Kryptonian name, Kal-El, which echoes Hebrew. The Nazis, at least, had no doubt about where Superman came from, and they made Siegel’s Jewishness the centre of their attack.
Legacy
Superman created the template for the superhero: the costume, the code name, the secret identity, the extraordinary powers and the mission to protect the weak. His success launched the Golden Age of comic books and an industry of heroes that now dominates films, television and popular culture worldwide. More Superman comic books have been sold than those of any other American superhero. Siegel and Shuster were inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993, and Siegel received the Bill Finger Award for comic book writing posthumously in 2005. In 2009 his boyhood home in Glenville, where the teenage partners developed their hero, was restored with money raised by an international auction of comic art and rededicated, and his street was renamed Jerry Siegel Lane. Since 2012 a Superman exhibit at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport has welcomed travellers to the city “where the legend began.” A shy Jewish teenager in Cleveland gave the world a hero whose whole purpose was to help those in need, and the idea has never lost its power.
Sources & further reading
Jerry Siegel, Wikipedia · Siegel, Jerome, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University · The SS and Superman (Das Schwarze Korps, 25 April 1940), German Propaganda Archive, Calvin University · Jerry Siegel, Wikiquote · Superman, Wikipedia · Larson v. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Loeb & Loeb (2013) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.