How Two Cleveland Teenagers Invented Superman and Sold Him for $130
On a hot night in the summer of 1934, a nineteen-year-old in a working-class corner of Cleveland could not sleep. Jerry Siegel lay in the heat in the Glenville neighborhood, on the city’s East Side, and a character he had been chewing on for two years finally arrived whole. He got up, scribbled, lay back down, got up again. By his own telling he did this all night, in two-hour intervals, until the man was finished in his head: an orphan from a dead world, raised on a farm, who could outrun a train and leap an eighth of a mile, and who hid all of it behind a mild reporter’s spectacles.
In the morning he ran through Glenville to his friend Joe Shuster’s apartment. Shuster was the artist; Siegel was the writer. They worked straight through the day, and by nightfall the first weeks of a comic strip existed on paper.
It would take them almost four more years to give it away.
Two sons of immigrants
Siegel and Shuster were both children of Jewish immigrant families, living near each other in Glenville, and they met as teenagers at Glenville High School in 1931. Siegel wrote; Shuster drew, self-taught, studying the pulp magazines at the newsstand because he could not always afford to buy them. They were obsessed with science fiction and adventure pulps — the kind of cheap, lurid stories where a single extraordinary man bent the world to his will.
Siegel had reason to dream up a protector. In 1932, his father, Mitchell, died of a heart attack during a robbery at his clothing store. The earliest Superman sketches, it has often been noted, show the hero stopping a man with a gun.
The two were not strangers to failure or to the name. In January 1933, Siegel published a short story called “The Reign of the Super-Man” in his own mimeographed fanzine, Science Fiction, writing under the pen name Herbert S. Fine, with an illustration by Shuster. That Superman was a villain: a bald, telepathic vagrant who takes an experimental serum and uses his new powers to manipulate and profit and amuse himself cruelly. The story went nowhere. Siegel decided the idea would sell better if the powerful man were good instead.
Rejected by everyone
The version Siegel built after that sleepless 1934 night was the one the world would eventually know — the survivor of a destroyed planet, the disguise, the costume. But a character is not a sale.
The dream was newspapers. A daily comic strip syndicated across the country was where the money and the prestige were, and that is where Siegel aimed Superman. For roughly the next three years, the strip was turned down by essentially every syndicate editor in the business. The pitch was too outlandish, too juvenile, too far from anything that had worked before. The rejections piled up.
The character’s eventual home was, in a sense, an accident of timing and a tight deadline.
Thirteen pages, pasted together
In 1938, a new outfit connected to what would become DC Comics was launching an anthology title called Action Comics and needed material fast. M.C. Gaines, who had seen the rejected Superman strip, judged it ill-suited to newspapers but passed it along to Vin Sullivan, the editor assembling the new book. Sullivan needed a lead feature on a punishing schedule. Sheldon Mayer dug out the rejected newspaper strips, and Siegel and Shuster were told to cut and rearrange them into thirteen comic-book pages — reworking panels meant to unspool over weeks into a single self-contained story.
To run it, they had to sell it. Siegel and Shuster signed over all rights to Superman for $130 — ten dollars a page. The two men, then in their early twenties, took the check.
“Champion of the oppressed”
Action Comics #1 went on sale on April 18, 1938, with a cover date of June. It cost ten cents. The cover showed Superman hoisting a green sedan over his head and smashing it against a rock while terrified men scattered — an image so strange that publisher Harry Donenfeld thought it ridiculous, and Superman did not appear on the cover again until issue #7.
The Superman inside was leaner than the icon he became. He could not fly; he made enormous leaps, an eighth of a mile at a time, clearing a twenty-story building. He ran faster than an express train. Nothing less than a bursting artillery shell could pierce his skin. He spent the issue not battling aliens but breaking into the governor’s mansion to stop the execution of an innocent woman, manhandling a wife-beater, and terrorizing a crooked Washington lobbyist — a “champion of the oppressed,” in the book’s own words, aimed squarely at Depression-era villains in suits. The flight would come later, in the early 1940s — first on the radio serial, then in the Fleischer animated cartoons, whose animators found all those leaps silly-looking on screen and got the publisher’s permission to let him fly.
The print run was about 200,000 copies. It sold out. The company took a while to realize the Superman story was the reason; once it did, monthly sales of the new character’s adventures soon climbed toward a million.
The longest part of the story
The two teenagers from Glenville had created the template for an entire industry — the costumed superhero — and had signed away the thing itself for the price of a month’s rent.
What followed was decades of trying to get it back. In 1947, near the end of their contract, Siegel and Shuster sued to reclaim Superman and lost; a New York court upheld the 1938 transfer and ruled the character belonged to the company. A narrower win over the spin-off Superboy brought them a settlement of about $94,000 — paid in exchange for signing away every remaining claim. The company took their jobs and, by 1948, erased their names from the comics entirely. For years the most successful character in American publishing carried no trace of the men who made him.
The credit returned only under pressure. In 1975, with a big-budget Superman movie in the works, the artists Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams ran a public campaign shaming Warner over the state of the two creators — Adams put Siegel on every talk show that would have him, and Siegel issued a nine-page press release placing a “curse” on the coming film. The negative publicity worked. Warner Communications restored their byline — “Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,” the line that has run on the character ever since — and granted each man a pension of $20,000 a year and health benefits for life. The first issue to carry the restored credit appeared in 1976.
Superman has since outsold and outlived nearly everything around him. He began as a bald villain in a basement fanzine, then as a sleepless boy’s answer to a father’s tragic death, and finally as thirteen pages of rejected newspaper strips, pasted together to fill a hole in a magazine, signed away for one hundred and thirty dollars.