A Toronto childhood
Joseph Shuster was born in Toronto on July 10, 1914, into a Jewish immigrant family. His father, Julius, originally Shusterowich, had come from Rotterdam and ran a small tailor shop in Toronto’s garment district; his mother, Ida, had come from Kyiv. The family was poor and moved often, living on Bathurst, Oxford and Borden Streets, and Joe attended Ryerson and Lansdowne public schools. His cousin Frank, later half of the beloved Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster, was also his closest childhood friend: the two were double first cousins, their fathers brothers and their mothers sisters.
His love of comics began on his father’s knee. Every evening, and above all on Sundays when the colour pages arrived, Julius read the funnies aloud to his small son, and Joe was enchanted by Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, with its dreamlike cities of the future. He began drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil, but paper was a luxury. He scrounged scraps from shops, and once found a stack of unused wallpaper rolls. “The backs were blank, naturally,” he remembered. “So it was a goldmine for me.” At nine he was selling the Toronto Daily Star on the streets downtown, staring up at the office towers that would later reappear in his drawings.
Cleveland and Jerry Siegel
In 1924 his father moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio, in search of work. Joe drew for his junior high school paper and then, at Glenville High School in the city’s Jewish neighbourhood, met Jerry Siegel, a fellow shy, bespectacled teenager with a head full of science fiction. Siegel wrote and Shuster drew, and the partnership was immediate. They produced comics for the school paper, the Glenville Torch, and Shuster illustrated Siegel’s fanzine, including the January 1933 story “The Reign of the Superman,” about a bald villain with mental powers. Shuster also studied art at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute and the Cleveland School of Art.
Poverty followed him. When the pair sold their first features to the New York publisher that became DC Comics in 1935, Shuster later recalled, one sample was drawn on brown wrapping paper and the other on the back of wallpaper from Toronto. The editors liked them but asked for clean copies in pen and ink, and Joe had to borrow money from his parents to buy his first real drawing paper.
Drawing a legend
Between 1933 and 1938 Siegel and Shuster reworked the Superman into a hero and tried to sell him as a newspaper strip, without success. At one low point, after a publisher backed out, Shuster was so discouraged that he destroyed the pages they had drawn; by some accounts only the cover survived because Siegel rescued it. When the strip finally found a home as a comic book feature in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938, it was Shuster’s pen that gave the world its first sight of a superhero: Superman hoisting a car over his head as terrified men flee.
Shuster designed the costume that became one of the most recognised images on earth: the blue suit, the red cape and boots, the emblem on the chest. He modelled Superman’s physique and confident grin on the swashbuckling film star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. For Clark Kent he combined the timid, bespectacled screen comedian Harold Lloyd with himself, a slight young man who lifted weights and dreamed of strength. Lois Lane was drawn from a model he hired, Joanne Carter, who would later marry Siegel. Clark Kent’s name came from the actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor. Shuster’s clean, dynamic style defined the look of the character through the early years, and later Superman artists were expected to follow it.
Metropolis is Toronto
When it came time to draw Superman’s city, Shuster turned not to Cleveland but to the Toronto of his childhood. “Whatever buildings I saw in Toronto remained in my mind and came out in the form of Metropolis,” he said in 1992. In tribute to the paper he had sold as a boy, he named Clark Kent’s employer the Daily Star; only in 1940, on instructions from New York, did it become the Daily Planet. The city that millions of readers imagined as the archetypal American metropolis was, in its earliest drawings, a memory of King Street West.
He never lost his attachment to Canada. His last visit to Toronto came in December 1941, when he was best man at his cousin Frank’s wedding. While in town he attended a benefit for the Toronto Star’s Santa Claus Fund, where an original Superman painting he had made was auctioned to help needy children.
How Superman changed the world
The success was immediate. The first printing of Action Comics #1 sold out, a newspaper strip followed in 1939 and a Superman comic book of his own the same year, then a radio series in 1940 and a celebrated series of animated cartoons in 1941, for which Shuster provided the model sheets. Within a few years Superman had launched the Golden Age of comic books and inspired a wave of costumed heroes. For the next decade Shuster and a growing studio of assistants turned out Superman stories and the daily strip, even as his eyesight, never good, began to fail. Poor vision kept him out of military service in the Second World War.
The superhero that Siegel and Shuster invented has become one of the most widespread stories in modern culture, adapted endlessly for film, television and games around the world. Its central idea, that great power exists to protect the weak, has been taken to heart by generations of young readers.
Losing Superman
In March 1938 Shuster and Siegel had sold all rights to Superman for $130. In 1947 they sued to recover them; the court upheld the publisher’s ownership, and they settled for about $94,000, after which their names were removed from the comics. Their next creation, Funnyman, was a failure, and Shuster’s career collapsed. He did freelance work, including horror stories, and, as was revealed only decades later, anonymous illustrations for Nights of Horror, a series of lurid underground booklets that were banned in New York in the 1950s. By the 1960s he was living on Long Island with his elderly mother, and his deteriorating eyesight at times made drawing impossible. The cartoonist Jerry Robinson recalled that Shuster once worked as a deliveryman and was recognised while delivering a package to DC’s own offices.
In 1975, as Warner Bros. prepared its Superman film, Siegel launched a public campaign over their treatment, and Shuster, by then nearly blind, joined him. With support from fellow cartoonists, they won a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year each, later $30,000, with health benefits, and the restoration of their credit as Superman’s creators.
Jewish roots, quiet life
Shuster’s parents had left Europe in part to escape antisemitic violence, and he grew up in the immigrant Jewish neighbourhoods of Toronto and Cleveland. He rarely spoke about religion, and neither he nor Siegel ever called Superman a Jewish creation. But many writers have seen in the two sons of Jewish immigrants, inventing a hero who arrives from a lost world and hides his strength behind a mild disguise, a story of the immigrant experience. In 1940 the newspaper of the SS attacked Superman as the work of Jews.
Shuster never married. In later life he moved to California, near his old partner, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles crowded with scrapbooks. He loved classical music, especially opera overtures, and kept buying the latest audio equipment, giving away older components to people who were visually impaired. He and Siegel still met for dinner several times a month.
Final interview and death
In April 1992, nearly blind and frail, Shuster broke a decade of public silence to speak to the Toronto Star for the paper’s centenary. He described the paper as a very important part of his life, explained how Toronto had shaped Metropolis, and said that the greatest thrill was knowing that new generations were growing up with Superman, even drawn by other hands. Three months later, on July 30, 1992, he died at his home in West Los Angeles of congestive heart failure and hypertension, at the age of seventy-eight. He left debts of nearly $20,000, which DC Comics agreed to pay.
Legacy
In 1985 DC Comics named him among the honourees of its anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great. Shuster and Siegel were inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. Canada has made him a national hero of popular culture: a 1991 Heritage Minute dramatised the creation of Superman, the Joe Shuster Awards for Canadian comics creators have been given since 2005, the year he entered the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame, and Toronto named Joe Shuster Way in his honour. In Cleveland, a street in Glenville was renamed Joe Shuster Lane. The poor boy who drew on the back of wallpaper gave the superhero its face, its costume and its city, and created an image of goodness that has outlived every lawsuit.
Sources & further reading
Joe Shuster, Wikipedia · Joe Shuster, The Canadian Encyclopedia · Shuster, Joseph, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University · Great Krypton! Superman was the Star’s Ace Reporter (Joe Shuster’s final interview), Toronto Star, 26 April 1992, via JoeShusterAwards.com (archived) · Superman, Wikipedia · 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.