December 7, 2022 • 47 mins
Long before Nicolas Cage's copy of Action #1 was stolen, high school pals Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had to conjure up the character. But Superman may have never seen the light of day if not for a real crime that changed the duo’s lives forever.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Cleveland, Ohio, nineteen thirty two. The Great Depression is in
full swing, and it's not exactly a barrel of laughs.
Economic hardship is everywhere, and people are growing desperate, desperate
enough to do anything for even a few dollars. Tucked
into Cleveland Business District is a secondhand clothing shop. It's
(00:27):
run by a man named Mitchell Segull. He's a Lithuanian
Jewish immigrant born Mikhail Segalovitch. The shop does a fair business.
He's able to provide for his family, his wife, his
son Jerry, Jerry, siblings five in all. Mitchell's shop has suits, shirts,
(00:47):
shoes previously worn, but in this economic climate, affording any
kind of clothing at all is a luxury. Anyone walking
through the door is greeted warmly. The two men coming
in to his shop now, just before he starts closing up,
he welcomes, how can I help you, gentlemen? They don't answer. Ah,
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that's a very nice, very shop. Would you like to
try it on? The men pull suits from the racks,
stretching out the sleeves admiring them. Mitchell has a good
selection of sizes and colors. Maybe this man wants to
look good for a job interview. Maybe he's going to
be married, or maybe he has something else in mind. Rabbi, stop,
(01:40):
it's a robber. One man has grabbed a suit and
is headed for the door. Mitchell begins to move towards them,
shouting there's two of them and only one of him.
They pry the suit from his grasp, a suit that
won't be easily replaced, that could earn him money he
won't have. The struggle is half a name literally and metaphorically,
(02:02):
all across the country. But even though Mitchell is one
of many here, he's all alone. Please no, no. The
men flee the store, leaving Mitchell on the floor. He
can't catch his breath and his chest is heavy. Does
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he think he's been shot? Soon his wife will learn
she's a widow, and his children will be told they
no longer have a father. For the next six years. Really,
for the rest of his life, his teenage son Jerry
will wish someone had been there to protect Mitchell, to
(02:44):
save him, someone who could shake the thieves out of
their car as they ran away in terror, protecting an
innocent man who only wanted to go to work to
provide for his family. Someone invulnerable. Our story starts with
a robbery, a coppy of Superman's first appearance being taken
from the home of Nicholas Cage. But Superman's story starts
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here with another robbery, and in the eyes of Jerry Siegel,
it won't be the last. Superman was taken from him
over and over again, stolen a thousand times before a
thief ever set foot on Cages property. For I Heart Radio,
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this is Stealing Superman. I'm your host, Dani Schwartz, and
this is episode six Another Planet In three. One year
after his father died, Jerry Siegel walked down from his
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second floor shared bedroom at a hundred and six two
Kimberly Avenue in Cleveland, headed to Glenville High When he
was finished for the day, he'd head back home and
immerse himself in science fiction in the Pulpse. Those were
the digest sized fiction collections with titles like Amazing Stories
and Private Detective that let the imaginations of their authors
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run wild. The full color covers held big promises, rockets
to outer space, malevolent aliens, mad scientists. Jerry loved them.
He breathed in the cheap brown paper and used it
as kindling for his own imagination. Jerry wanted to be
a writer, a sci fi writer, just like the ones
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he had admired in the Pulps. Everyone knew it too,
I know my mom told me the story word. She
was about seven or eight at that time, and she'd
come over with her siblings. She had a four other siblings,
and they come over the house and they knock on
the door, and Jerry would be in his bedroom. He
had this kind of like an attic bedroom where he
kept this typewriter and he wrote all kinds of stories,
even as a young team. And he'd look out the
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window and he see them coming up of the driveway
and then he would go around to the door and
they say opened the door, and he would say, wait,
I'm gonna use my X ray vision to tell you
what you're wearing. And he would say, Irv, you're wearing
a white shirt, and Ruth, you're wearing a blue dress.
And of course he knew this because he looked out
the window, but he wanted to pretending he had X
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ray vision, and they didn't know what X revision even was.
So he had all these ideas. And this was even
before Superman. You know, he was coming with these different ideas.
That's Gary Kaplan. Gary is a cousin of Jerry's and
knows a lot about the family history, which means he
knows quite a bit about our shared cultural history. Well,
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I remember in the beginning, I didn't even know that
men was graded by a family member. When I was
really young, I was I remember I was watching The
Adventures a Superman on TV with George Reeves. My mom
walked in the room. She says, you know, that's your cousin,
And at first I didn't know what she was talking
about because I knew Superman wasn't real. She's no, she says,
she's my cousin. Jerry. He created Superman with his friend Joe,
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and I was like shocked. In life, there are different
kinds of fortune, good and bad circumstances. Losing his father
was a tragedy, but not long before, Jerry Siegal had
met someone who would change his life, a classmate named
Joe Schuster. The Joe Gary mentioned they had actually lived
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near each other for a few years, but didn't know it. Yes,
Jerry lived in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland and Joe
lived in the Kinsman area of Cleveland, and they didn't
know each other. The neighbors are not too far apart,
but there were different neighborhoods. And Joe went to Alexander
Hamilton Junior High and they had a newspaper there, the
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Junior High, and my uncle was editor of that paper
as a ninth grader, and Joe was an illustrator and
he did comics for that paper. And this was an
early nineteen thirties. Jerry and Joe met through another cousin
of Jerry's who knew Joe's family had moved to Cleveland
from Toronto a few years earlier, and believed that the
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two boys would get together like a house on fire.
That's because Joe was also a science fiction fanatic, but
he didn't want to write for the Pulps exactly. Joe
was a born artist, an illustrator, self taught mostly from
tracing other art. Someone who might feel more comfortable drawing
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the covers that enticed people from the drug store shelves
or the introductory drawings that set the stage for the
story to follow. Joe would draw on anything, even wallpaper
someone had thrown away. They had the same type of
personalities and they related off. They both loved science fiction,
and those days, science fiction was relatively small compared to today,
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so it was something that only a few people were
interested in. And they read the pol magazines like Amazing Stories,
and they love that kind of stuff, and they wanted
to do something similar to that, but something really really
different and new, and they kept coming up with ideas,
and your Wood write and Joe would illustrate. It's hard
to explain how serendipitous this meeting was. Jerry and Joe
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were even alphabetized in class close together. The universe seemed
to want to make certain they would meet their skills
complemented each other perfectly for what was at the time
a virtually unknown medium, the comic book. In the nineteen thirties,
comics usually referred to comics strips, the sequential art published
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in newspapers that offered tiny snippets of illustrated humor and adventure.
Some publishers collected the strips into periodicals, and that over
time gave way to creating original, long form illustrated stories,
Beginning with ninety five New Fund number one, which is
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believed to be the first all new collection of comic
book stories. Along with Jazz, it would be one of
the rare homegrown mediums of art in the United States.
But Jerry and Joe weren't thinking of birthing a new medium.
They were high school kids having fun collaborating. Jerry conjured
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up sci fi tales and Joe visualized them. One of
their stories was titled Reign of the Superman, which they
published in their own pulp magazine they named Science Fiction.
It was about a maniacal scientist trying to craft an
unstoppable monster with powers of telepathy, super eyesight, and hearing
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via a special serum. But this superman was a crook,
a villain. All he wants is money and power. You
can see the wheels turning how Jerry and Joe were
moving towards something new and different, something pop culture didn't
even have a word for yet. As they moved through
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high school, Jerry and Joe absorbed what was happening in
the world around them. One of the biggest local heroes
in town was Benny Friedman, a football player for Glenville
High the quarterback, he was solidly built and had a
spit curl falling down over his forehead. He wore form
fitting tights and in the Olympics all anyone could talk
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about was Jesse Owens, a Cleveland native who was believed
to be the fastest man alive, like he had superpowers.
There's a synthesis here, a translucent glimpse into the creative
minds of Jerry and Joe. They were being inundated with
information about people with physical abilities far beyond the norm
at a time the world was in desperate need of
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a figure of hope, a figure that began to emerge
from a symphony of fiction. They had both consumed with
darkof breathing out, connected the right for death, and refugating alive.
They decided their superpowered antagonist worked better as a protagonist.
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His origin was the stuff of science fiction. Born on
a planet called Krypton that was about to end and
sent off to Earth to be raised by mortals. A
skin tight costume broadcast his other worldliness. A small curl
hung over his forehead. He had speed and incredible powers.
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It was an homage to the strong men of the era,
who were famous for feats of strength. Joe Shuster was
trying to come up with costumes, and he said, these
county fairs all over the country, and he used to
have these strong men that would come to town. You know,
these guys with the handlebar mustaches and they would ben
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steal on their bare hands and break chains, and they
were these costumes that would be it would be like
tights with swim trunks over the tights. And hey, Joe
would go to these county fairs where they have these strongman.
He would take his art pad and he would illustrate
or he would draw these strongman. He would get ideas.
Because Superman ended up with kind of costume with people
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joking he's wearing his underpants on the outside, but really
that is what the strongman used to have. They have
these tights and they had these boots, and they had
the swim trunks over that, and that's what he decided
to go with. The s on his chest stood for Superman.
It also could have stood for Seagull and Schuster. It
was a few years when they were in eleventh grade
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is when they came up with the Superman idea. It
wasn't a percent like it is today Superman the original
one and even half a costume originally, and they drew one.
It was a publisher actually interested because all the all
the publishers they were communicating with wouldn't publish anything they
came up with because they were high school kids, you know.
And there was a publisher who was publishing a comic
called Detective Dan, which was really like the first real
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comic book, because all the other comics were really comic
strips and newspapers. They were syndicated. There were no comic
books originally. So they saw this. I though, this would
be really cool, this is what they would like to do.
So they contacted that publisher and he said he was interested.
But then the company went out of business a few
weeks later, and they were so frustrated the cover they
put for Superman, which basically he was as bear chested
Joe Schuster was so upset that he destroyed everything except
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Jerry Siegel managed to say the cover that Jerry imagined
Superman could be the next comic strip hit. It was
clear that Superman was a visual character, one whose physical
abilities needed to be seen, not just described. But the
New York comic strip publishers Jerry queried were indifferent. At best.
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Superman was strange, a weird amalgam of sci fi and
the kind of street level justice dished out by Dick Tracy.
Superman was virtually invulnerable, but seemed content to punch the
lights out of common thieves, thieves who might rob innocent shopkeepers.
Jerry eventually tried his luck with National Allied Publications, which
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had already published a few of Jerry and Joe's stories.
And just to be clear that publisher later known as
d C Comics went through several names and was involved
in acquisitions early on, will spare you the confusion and
just refer to them as d C. The company was
gearing up to begin printing a new anthology comic book
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title Action Comics Short and to the point, to grab
a young reader's attention. They took a look at Jerry
and Joe's submission and believed Superman would be a good fit.
No one, of course, could predict what Superman would bring,
that he would be the beginning of the superhero age.
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And then they kept working on it, and they sent
it to other publishers, and they came up with the
Superman costume and so forth, and in many other aspects
of it, including that he was not from Earth originally
he was from Earth, and how he came to Crypton
and added different gravity and that would allow him to
be able to leap tall buildings with the single bound
and so forth, because they wanted to make sure they
could justify how we could do all these things and
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lived how the objects because the weight on earth was different,
although he couldn't fly in the beginning. But they kept
getting objections. They graduated high school in nineteen thirty four,
and they still worked at it, and they kept trying
and trying and trying, and they never gave up. And
finally publisher finally agreed to publish it, and that publisher
later became known as d C Comics. Harry Donnenfeld, who
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headed up DC, offered the two young men the opportunity
to write and illustrate their first Superman story. Jerry and Joe,
who had been trying to break into the business of
telling stories for years, eagerly accepted, and so in April
of ninety eight, the cover of Action Comics number one
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depicted the debut of Superman and and the birth of
the American comic book Superhero. A single copy would come
to be worth millions of dollars. Back then it was
ten cents. But that big break came with a catch.
They said, Hey, we're gonna publish it, and not only
that we're gonna give you a tenure contract, guaranteed money,
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guarantee salary to write and illustrate Superman. Well, this was
their dream come true. So they were excited to agree
to that d C. And I'll call it d C
so as that we know for the audience. They said,
but we agree to sign you this tenure contract, we
must own the rights, not you. And they wanted to
make sure they Superman got published, so they agreed to that,
and they got a very small conversations for the writing.
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Harry Donnenfeld paid Jerry and Joe a hundred and thirty
dollars and in return, Jerry and Joe gave Harry everything
Superman to have and hold forever. The contract said forever.
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How can you even measure the success of a genre
that didn't yet exist? When Action number one hit news stands,
there was no such thing as a superhero. Sure, the
Phantom had worn tights and comic strips, and Doc Savage
had unbreakable skin, but Superman was something else and readers
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knew it. D C printed two hundred thousand copies of
Action number one and watched as it sold out. Who
knows why kids like anything but that cover of Superman
hefting a car over his head while people run away
from him was galvanizing. No one had seen anything like it.
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It stood out one because it was colorful too, because
of what it had on the cover. I mean, people
knew what comics were, well, they know what comics worrying
that they had started to show up, and they knew
what what comic strips were, so they recognized, you know,
that's what this was. But you have this strange picture
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of this guy in this suit, and the suit was
like nothing else before, and he's lifting this car and
kind of smashing it and it's a brand new car.
That's brad Rica. Brad wrote the definitive dual biography of
Jerry and Joe. It's called Superboys and it was published. So,
you know, I teach once, I teach a class in
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comics and we always analyze this cover. You know, what
is it about this cover that got kids to buy it?
Because that's the oldest anecdote in Superman lores that you know,
kids bought this thing and that's why comics and Superman
took off. And you look at that cover and he
doesn't even look like a hero, and that he looks
like the villain because there's somebody's brand new car and
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he's destroying it. And who has a brand new car
in the depression? And nobody but somebody in class. And
I tried to remember who said it, so I feel
bad about it, but I'll always acknowledge that somebody said
it. It It wasn't me. They said, no, that's not why
kids bought this book. And if you look at the
picture of the cover of Action Comics one, if you
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know kind of picture in your head, they're Superman lifting
the car and there's this guy on the bottom left
who's with his both his hands he kind of looks
like the scream and both his hands on his face,
and he's running kind of out of the cover with
a scream on his mouth. And somebody said, that's why
kids bought it, and the rest of the custles like,
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why what are you talking about? They bought it because
of Supermans. He's super cool. No matter the reason, Action
Comics was a hit, Superman became a regular feature, eclipsing
any other character within its pages. In nine he got
his own title, and he had come from all places Cleveland,
where Brad was from. When I got older and I realized, well,
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they did come from Cleveland, and they did create Superman here.
The question that kept nagging at me was, well, how
they do it? Because to me, that's like the Superman,
the first superhero, really the first superhero. It's the Philosopher's stone, right,
you know, how did they figure out to put all
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these different things together and have this magic to create
somebody who wears his his underwear on the outside and
that we all still love, you know, almost eighty years later.
So to me then it became more of a kind
of a detective story that I really wanted to know
how they did it. It was Brad who debunked one
of the great Superman creation myths that Jerry's father had
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been shot during that clothing store robbery. What I found
is that, in fact, he did obviously die that night,
but what happened is he had a heart attack. Is
he was in his clothing store and some men came
in and they were going to steal a suit, and
he went to stop them and he dropped over of
heart failure. And it's hard to say whether he was
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scared or he just you know, didn't know to do.
We overexerted himself, but that's how he died. And then
a year later, like almost to the day, is when
Jerry comes up with the idea for Superman. And I
started to see once you kind of see that all
the early comics, there's all these panels where criminals dropped
dead of a heart attack when they see Superman, and
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Superman goes, well, they're weak and what else could I do?
And it's also Clark Kent, who's in one hand, Is
this really meek, mild mannered American journalist who faints when
there's action nearby turns into Superman? And this made me think,
this is why Jerry was so invested in it, because
he put the tragedy of his father's death into this
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character who is not the victim of crime but fights
crime as this immortal superhero forever in the comics and beyond.
And it made me see Superman is not just this,
at least their version, not just this commercial thing, colorful
thing to sell to kids who would go nuts. But really, this,
for lack of a better word, but maybe it is
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the word is As the work of art and his
mythology only grew. A new radio show followed, which introduced
Jimmy Olsen, as well as Kryptonite, which weakened Superman. A
series of theatrical cartoons by animation legend Max Fleischer were
produced and were so exquisite that they don't have equals
to this day. Superman toys began filling up shelves, model
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kits and statues and decoder rings. Kids were crazy for
him and the other heroes that followed, Batman, Captain America,
Wonder Woman, A damn had burst and out came heroes
with grandiose origin stories and spandex uniforms, but none were
as visible or as powerful as what Jerry and Joe
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had drunk up. For a few years, the two got
steady work from d C Comics, so much work that
the two hired artists to help fulfill the need for
Superman stories. Superman even got the syndicated newspaper comic strip
deal Jerry longed for, But when they'd asked for more
fair compensation, d C editors would remind them that Superman
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belonged to d C and if they were sore about it, well,
DC could find someone else to write and draw him.
That scared the two. Superman was theirs, if not legally
then creatively and emotionally, so they kept working, watching as
d C counted their money. In alone subsidiary company, Superman Inc.
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Made one point five million dollars. Jerry and Joe didn't
in my opinion, they knew what they were doing, that
it wasn't just buying another comics feature. And part of
this is that Harry Donond felt that lost out a
contract on the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger was
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hugely popular. Everyone was jealous of the Lone Ranger because
it all came out of one person that every time,
you know, you would license the Lone Ranger, but you
would hear it on the radio, you'd watch the serials,
you'd read the pulps and the whatever you had to
pay this guy, just like Disney with Mickey Mouse. And
I think Donald Felt really liked that because when he
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finally lost his contract, he was bringing Lone Ranger magazines.
I think he kind of was looking for a character
that he could do that with. And again that's just
a theory of my part. But also I think the
fact that once they got Superman, almost immediately they're turning
him into what we today would call a trans media empire.
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They're working on the radio show is what transforms the
audience for that, and then that just explodes. But I
think so the other side of it, Like you said,
they work on Superman for ten years, and they make
a lot of money, and they asked for raises, they
beg for raises, they get raises. It's a long and
tumultuous relationship. But they're very well paid, you know. They
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moved to new houses and they're kind of what I
call Cleveland famous around town and even bigger than that too.
And then Jerry went off to war. Joe couldn't serve
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because of his poor eyesight, and Superman couldn't either. With
his powers, it would be easy to imagine him pummeling
the Axis, but that would minimize the sacrifices being made
by real heroes. So when Clark Kent tries to enlist,
he fails an eye exam, his X ray vision means
he accidentally reads the eye chart in the next room.
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While stationed in Hawaii, Jerry contributed to Stars and Stripes,
a periodical distributed to soldiers. His writing experience largely kept
him out of action, though he was away from his
own family. He had married a woman named Joanne, whom
Joe had used as the physical model for Lois Lane.
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The war was being unkind to Superman in another kind
of way, thanks to paper shortages. Paper drives were common,
with households donating their newspapers, magazines, and comics so they
could be pulped for the war efforts. There's no telling
how many thousands, or even millions of comics were destroyed
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this way, for good cause, obviously, but turned into confetti nonetheless,
and contributing to a scarcity of these comics that are
so valued today. The war ended one conflict, but when
Jerry returned home he was still fighting another, the one
with d C. He and Joe felt they had been
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strung along, placated with work and good salaries while d
C had profited handsomely from Superman. They suit the company
for five million dollars, based in part on the introduction
of Superboy, a juvenile version of the character the two
had created and DC had published without obtaining the copyright
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to the character. The two ultimately settled for a hundred
thousand dollars, sensing d C had three resources for a
long legal fight. As a result, Jerry and Joe were
persona non grata at d C and that infuriated both men,
but Jerry especially and he tended to act on his emotions,
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which led to another story Brad was able to debunk.
And there were other stories too. There was one that
took me forever to track down that he put on
a Superman cave and was going to jump off a
building in Midtown because he was so upset with the
way he had been treated. And I found out that
that story was wrong, even though you know, there are
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tons of comics professionals to this day who will swear
to its accuracy. All that was Jerry Siegel. It wasn't
it with some other guy just doing it for some
completely other reason. So there's a lot of stories like that.
And as his wife once called into d C and said,
we're out of money, we have a daughter, a young daughter,
Please give him some work. And there's just there's a
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lot of that. I think you said, it's kind of
extra legal, but kind of going on in the relationship
between him and DC. And then things got very personal
when DC sold the television rights to Superman in ninetift
Jerry and Joe felt slighted now the character. In their view,
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their character was being beamed into millions of household and
conquering another new medium, and they didn't get a penny
for it. Having spent the settlement money, Jerry retaliated in
whatever way he could. He wrote a letter to the
FBI admonishing the agency to investigate d SE alleging their
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employees had criminal and communist pasts. When the Superman Show
made it to air, Jerry proclaimed he was going on
a hunger strike to protest what he said was unfair
treatment by the company, and they began sending him a
little bit of money, if only to avoid the negative publicity.
But hadn't Jerry and Joe sold their rights free and clear,
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and of their own volition. They did, but in their eyes,
what was legal and what was ethical were worlds apart.
Without income from d C, both men were struggling, Joe
more so. His eyesight, which had long been an issue
for him, kept getting worse. At one point, he took
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on work as an artist for the underground adult illustration scene.
These were drawings of a lurid nature that appealed to
fetish enthusiasts, with men and women bound up and whipped.
In Joe's drawings of these scenarios, the men looked very
much like Clark Kent, and the women looked remarkably like
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Lois Lane. It was as though Joe was driven to
depict them as being victimized, perhaps in the way he
felt they were being tormented by d C, the way
he and Jerry were being mistreated. Joe, of course left
the drawings unsigned, and they weren't identified as his until
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decades later. In the late nineteen fifties, Jerry went back
to Deasey as a writer, invited into the fold by
new editors to resume being a co author of Superman's adventures.
He set about writing the best stories he could, but
the arrangement didn't last long, and by the nineteen sixties,
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Jerry was once more at odds with the company. He
pursued another lawsuit to try and reclaim Superman's copyright. Though
the odds weren't good, and Joe had relinquished the rights
not once but twice, a court sided with d C.
If the relationship was fractured, it suffered permanent injury. When
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d C entered into an agreement for a major motion
picture to be made about the character, Warner Brothers would
release Superman, the movie, starring Christopher Reeve as the Man
of Steel In Jerry wrote an open letter in which
he literally cursed the production. So I rate was he
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at the idea of d C profiting from the character
while he and Joe struggled to make ends meet. He
hoped He wrote that the movie quote super bombs. Yeah,
And it was that movie because there's stories of he
passed once on a New York street and it's his
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years before he passed, his wife and him passed. George
Rey said, Jerry fro and he just couldn't handle it.
And Joe would stand outside there was like the Superman
musical on Broadway, and he, you know, would see the
famous people coming in. He just froze. He just couldn't
deal with it. But then it was that movie because
they announced in the magazines there's gonna be this big
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Superman movie. But it was Brando is going to be
in it, and he was going to be paid this
obscene amount of money to be jo L. And that's
what put Jerry over the edge. Merlin Brando was to
play Superman's father, joor L. With Brando being the most
respected living actor at the time, he was paid handsomely
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for relatively little work. Almost four million dollars, a number
that grew when he received part of the box office gross,
more than Jerry and Joe could ever dream of seeing
from having created Superman. Money that went to an actor
who seemed slightly disinterested in the role and suggested to
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director Richard Donner he could play the character as a
suitcase or a bagel. He'd just do the voice. The
publicity was not perhaps what d C and Warner wanted,
so they agreed finally that Jerry and Joe were due
at least modest compensation beyond their initial one hundred and
thirty dollar payment and work for higher fees. After three
(33:24):
decades of fighting, d C began paying them each an
annual pension of thirty thousand dollars with healthcare. Of course,
that's something that's good, but it still didn't seem just
They created one of the most indelible characters in modern culture.
But there was another concession, one that was probably as
(33:47):
important to Jerry and Joe. From that point on, whenever
Superman appeared in print or on screen, a credit would
appear created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. If you
walk around Cleveland today, you'll see pages from Action Comics
number one, priceless pages stuck on an outdoor fence, and
(34:11):
in a testament to the respect due Jerry Siegel and
Joe Schuster, no one tries to pry them off or
deface them. The pages are oversized and FA similes, not
the real thing, but they're there in tribute to what
these two clevelanders really just two teenage boys contributed to
(34:31):
the world an idealized version of a hero beyond the
pettiness of human behavior, strong enough to defend the week.
For Jerry and Joe, Defending them and honoring their memory
meant creating the Siegell and Schuster Society, a nonprofit devoted
to keeping their roles as pioneers alive in the eyes
(34:54):
of the public. Here's Gary Kaplan. In two thousand and seven,
journalists for the Cleveland Playing Dealer, his name was Mike
san Jacomo wrote a story, it was a full page story,
asking why doesn't the city of Cleveland celebrate that Superman
was created in Cleveland? And this sort of brought a
lot of attention, and so a group of people got together,
(35:15):
some businessmen, some college professors, and they formed the Seagull
Schuester Society In two thousand and seven. My uncle was
on the board at that time. I was not. And
in two thousand and nine, two years later, they renovated
the home of Jerry Siegel, which was in pretty poor shape.
He had a typewriter in his attic bedroom where he
wrote so many of the stories, and so they wanted
to preserve the home, and with the help of author
(35:37):
Brad Meltzer, money was raised online and they raised over
a hundred thousand dollars but a hundred thousand dollars of
renovations in the home and they had a ribbon counting
ceremony in two thousand nine. It was a wonderful event.
In addition to that, Joe Schuster who illustrated it. This
home was nine blocks away and the home had already
been torn down years ago, so it was a new
home put there. But they put up a commemorative events
(35:58):
with the panels from Action Comics number one going all
the way around the fence, which is really really cool,
and so people drive by and they can see all
these panels of the comic from Action Comics number one.
And then in two thousand twelve, a Seagull Interstor Society
worked with Cleveland Hopkins Airport to put in a permanent
Superman exhibit which contains a datio Superman along with assign
(36:20):
this as welcome to Cleveland, where the legend began, and
everyone can see that as they go to the baggage
department at Cleveland Hopkins Airports. All's our society. In two
thousand thirteen, we work with the State of Ohio the legislature.
We put together a license plate with a Superman uh
S Sabney at the logo with the words truth, Justice
in American way. So anybody the know how can get
one of those license plates. And there's at the legal
(36:41):
a hundred thousand ohiolands have that license plate, including myself.
So those are some of the things that we have done,
and we're working at some other things right now too.
In a way, Jerry's home became a kind of shrine,
a place of cultural birth. It's also occupied by a
couple the Grays, who warmly welcome people make a pilgrimage
to pay their respects to Superman's co creator. It's the
(37:04):
best looking house on the block. You know you're in
the right place because there is a big s on
the wooden fence out front. For years some collectors arrived,
wondering if the rumors about Jerry leaving stacks of Action
number ones in the attic were true. After all, no
one knew they'd become cultural artifacts, prized like Maltese falcons.
(37:29):
Well where newsstands were typically they would have some comic books.
It could be a pharmacy, but it could be lots
of places. Really, it was ten cents to buy a
Superman comic, and who knew years later it would be
worth so valuable. Because what happened, people would buy it
and then the next one would come out so they
could throughout the old one. They wouldn't save it. No
one envisioned it would have some value to it. Author
(37:53):
Brad Meltzer traveled to the family home once along with
a journalist, and the current owners told him no one
had been in the attic in decades. He was seized
by the possibilities. Could there really be a small pile
of million dollar comics just sitting in this attic? So
he asked to go up, but there wasn't any easy
(38:13):
access to it. They promised they'd have their son take
a look. The Grays later phoned the reporter to state
that they had gone up and no, there was no
hidden treasure. Well, I suppose they'd say that regardless, wouldn't they. Well,
I can guarantee you there are no Superman actually Comics
number one in the house that the Grays occupy right
now in Cleveland, that I can tell you there's none
in there. Jerry himself saved many copies of Action Comics
(38:36):
Number one, and they had dozens of them. And his
daughter told me that what happened was well, him and
Joe both were financially devastated by losing their jobs, and
for years they had several things out. Joe worked for
the post office, and it was difficult for them. So
they ended up selling some of these Action Comic number
ones for money. So they get a hundred dollars maybe
(38:57):
for one, which was that's a pretty good return on
a ten s investment, you know. And then later they
may maybe they've got a few hundred dollars, you know,
and eventually they never left. I'm sure they never envisioned
it would be worth over a million dollars. The same
comic coveted by collectors and thieves who spend or steal millions,
once sold off for a few hundred dollars because Jerry
(39:18):
Siegal needed the money. It's a cutthroat media world out there,
with massive entities jocking for consumer dollars and comic book
properties treated like roadmaps to fortunes. Lost among all of
that maneuvering are the people responsible for creating these characters.
The Seagull family waged a legal battle for years against Warner,
(39:41):
arguing the estate was entitled to compensation and partial ownership
for the cultural pillars Superman had become. That fight seemingly
ended in with a court ruling that concluded years of
legal entanglement. Warner brothers would keep Superman in the Seagull
estate would get a settlement. So did d C steal Superman? No,
(40:07):
of course, not a deal was made, But what precedent
did Jerry and Joe have? Who could have anticipated what
Superman would become? The promise of making a living as
creators was intoxicating. What reason would either of them have
to ever lay down at night and imagine a world
(40:29):
where Superman was earning millions in toys and movies and comics,
while Joe would later be so downtrodden. He was awakened
by a cop on a park bench and taken for
a warm meal. Superman seemed to enrich everyone around him
except the two men who brought him to life. Not theft,
(40:52):
but something was taken. Today, living comic writers and artists
often see there were are co opted for movies or
streaming shows, but checks rarely make their way to their mailboxes.
Sometimes you can create something so big and immersive that
you can't get out from its shadow. Gary wants Jerry
(41:16):
and Joe to avoid that fate. Joe died in two Jerry.
The Society raises money and promotes events to make sure
their memory remains a constant, that every time Superman bursts
through a wall, that fans will remember. The s can
stand for Segel and Schuster. And you know, Jerry's father
(41:40):
died during a botched robbery, and I think he thought
of his father a lot when he wanted to create somebody,
have somebody who would defend the defenseless, and he thought
of his father, I'm sure. And he made a bulletproof too.
But I think for that reason, with Siegel and Schuster
left behind, is much more than a comic book. There
is so much history thin the pages of Action Comics.
(42:01):
Number one superficially it's an object and one to be
coveted among the millionaire collectors of the world. But look
past the panels and you'll see a story about a
grieving son who coped with the loss of his father
by giving the world what everyone needs, a hero. What
you're buying isn't scarcity, but a representation of hope. Well.
(42:27):
I can't put a price on it. I think the
market decides the price like anything. But even if it
was only worth a dollar, I would want it, you know,
because it's historical and it means a lot to my family,
and it started the entire superhero genre. This one comic.
It all started with that, and now we have all
these superheroes everywhere and they're more popular than ever. And
(42:48):
during Joe made it happened, and I'm very proud of them.
The value of the world is, I would say, is huge.
I mean he's known all over the world. You could
go to visit cities in Tokyo and Paris and so worth,
and you see people walking out around with T shirts
with a Superman s chield on it all over the world.
Even in Ukraina they were showing people defending Ukraini and
(43:10):
somewhere wearing Superman T shirts because they thought like Superman
for that moment trying to defend the defense is just
like Jerry wanted Superman to defend the defense. So the
significance is tremendous. Here's brad Rika. Yeah, I've thought about
this a lot and other people too. It's it's a
really strange, almost unique kind of American artifact Action One
(43:34):
because it's like this almost holy relic because it's worth
so much money, but it's also this holy relic because
of what's in it, because it's the first appearance of Superman.
I mean, that's why it's in the Smithsonian, not because
it's worth millions of dollars. You know, everyone who's ever
seen an Action comics one, you have this moment where
(43:57):
it's like this is it, and then people that effect
really touched one or help it's the same thing. I'm like,
oh wait, this is just a comic, just paper and staples.
But it's something more too. It's so strange to think
of a thief stealing of all things Action one, right,
because it's the it's the superhero, it's the fight against crime,
(44:19):
and someone's trying to take that away. The thing with
Action one it has no physical value, right, but it's
kind of all that symbolic value. I mean it's valuable
because it's rare, certainly, but there's a lot of things
that are rare that aren't worth millions of dollars. I mean,
it's just Superman. It's the first superhero, and you know,
(44:42):
I think it gets more valuable with time because we
start to realize how more important that is to our
history than maybe we first thought. Was that on the
mind of the thief who took it from Nicholas Cage,
the they were really stealing someone's idealized version of Superman,
(45:04):
that they were robbing him of the innocence that the
character was supposed to be projecting. The thing about Superman, too,
is it's so it's it's Superman. It's the good guy,
you know. I mean, what do you do if you
steal it and you're just like looking at it every
night and Superman's right on the cover, just saying, you know,
why don't you steam lee? That's the wrong thing to do.
(45:26):
You can't like Superman and steal action one, No, you
probably can't. That would probably be the first thing you'd
want to ask anyone who surfaced with the comic why
why do it? But after eleven years, it didn't seem
like that day was ever going to come, that Superman
(45:46):
would be forever defeated by the Cage Party robber. But
then one day, Cages comic book dealer Stephen Fishler got
a call and an invitation to meet the two most
bizarre our characters of this entire story. The individual who
walked in behind me holding the Mandola folder is now
(46:08):
sitting in this office, and the Minola folder is now open,
and there's the book on like a little aprilic pedestal,
and we sit down. Yeah, that's an original action one
that's next time on Stealing Superman. Stealing Superman is written
(46:31):
by Jake Rawson, sound design and score by Jonathan Washington,
Additional production support by Josh Fisher. Original music by Aaron Kaufman,
Mixing and mastering by Baheed Fraser. Research and fact checking
by Jake Rawson and Austin Thompson, with production support from
Lulu Philip. Additional voices by Ruthie Stevens and Zarin Burnett.
(46:56):
Show logo by Lucy Quentinian. Our executive producer is Jason
English and I'm your host Danish worts. If you're enjoying
this show, check out Haileywood and Noble Blood and give
us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing
Superman is a production of I Heart Radio.
Cleveland, Ohio, nineteen thirty two. The Great Depression is in
full swing, and it's not exactly a barrel of laughs.
Economic hardship is everywhere, and people are growing desperate, desperate
enough to do anything for even a few dollars. Tucked
into Cleveland Business District is a secondhand clothing shop. It's
(00:27):
run by a man named Mitchell Segull. He's a Lithuanian
Jewish immigrant born Mikhail Segalovitch. The shop does a fair business.
He's able to provide for his family, his wife, his
son Jerry, Jerry, siblings five in all. Mitchell's shop has suits, shirts,
(00:47):
shoes previously worn, but in this economic climate, affording any
kind of clothing at all is a luxury. Anyone walking
through the door is greeted warmly. The two men coming
in to his shop now, just before he starts closing up,
he welcomes, how can I help you, gentlemen? They don't answer. Ah,
(01:11):
that's a very nice, very shop. Would you like to
try it on? The men pull suits from the racks,
stretching out the sleeves admiring them. Mitchell has a good
selection of sizes and colors. Maybe this man wants to
look good for a job interview. Maybe he's going to
be married, or maybe he has something else in mind. Rabbi, stop,
(01:40):
it's a robber. One man has grabbed a suit and
is headed for the door. Mitchell begins to move towards them,
shouting there's two of them and only one of him.
They pry the suit from his grasp, a suit that
won't be easily replaced, that could earn him money he
won't have. The struggle is half a name literally and metaphorically,
(02:02):
all across the country. But even though Mitchell is one
of many here, he's all alone. Please no, no. The
men flee the store, leaving Mitchell on the floor. He
can't catch his breath and his chest is heavy. Does
(02:22):
he think he's been shot? Soon his wife will learn
she's a widow, and his children will be told they
no longer have a father. For the next six years. Really,
for the rest of his life, his teenage son Jerry
will wish someone had been there to protect Mitchell, to
(02:44):
save him, someone who could shake the thieves out of
their car as they ran away in terror, protecting an
innocent man who only wanted to go to work to
provide for his family. Someone invulnerable. Our story starts with
a robbery, a coppy of Superman's first appearance being taken
from the home of Nicholas Cage. But Superman's story starts
(03:07):
here with another robbery, and in the eyes of Jerry Siegel,
it won't be the last. Superman was taken from him
over and over again, stolen a thousand times before a
thief ever set foot on Cages property. For I Heart Radio,
(03:32):
this is Stealing Superman. I'm your host, Dani Schwartz, and
this is episode six Another Planet In three. One year
after his father died, Jerry Siegel walked down from his
(03:52):
second floor shared bedroom at a hundred and six two
Kimberly Avenue in Cleveland, headed to Glenville High When he
was finished for the day, he'd head back home and
immerse himself in science fiction in the Pulpse. Those were
the digest sized fiction collections with titles like Amazing Stories
and Private Detective that let the imaginations of their authors
(04:17):
run wild. The full color covers held big promises, rockets
to outer space, malevolent aliens, mad scientists. Jerry loved them.
He breathed in the cheap brown paper and used it
as kindling for his own imagination. Jerry wanted to be
a writer, a sci fi writer, just like the ones
(04:38):
he had admired in the Pulps. Everyone knew it too,
I know my mom told me the story word. She
was about seven or eight at that time, and she'd
come over with her siblings. She had a four other siblings,
and they come over the house and they knock on
the door, and Jerry would be in his bedroom. He
had this kind of like an attic bedroom where he
kept this typewriter and he wrote all kinds of stories,
even as a young team. And he'd look out the
(05:01):
window and he see them coming up of the driveway
and then he would go around to the door and
they say opened the door, and he would say, wait,
I'm gonna use my X ray vision to tell you
what you're wearing. And he would say, Irv, you're wearing
a white shirt, and Ruth, you're wearing a blue dress.
And of course he knew this because he looked out
the window, but he wanted to pretending he had X
(05:21):
ray vision, and they didn't know what X revision even was.
So he had all these ideas. And this was even
before Superman. You know, he was coming with these different ideas.
That's Gary Kaplan. Gary is a cousin of Jerry's and
knows a lot about the family history, which means he
knows quite a bit about our shared cultural history. Well,
(05:44):
I remember in the beginning, I didn't even know that
men was graded by a family member. When I was
really young, I was I remember I was watching The
Adventures a Superman on TV with George Reeves. My mom
walked in the room. She says, you know, that's your cousin,
And at first I didn't know what she was talking
about because I knew Superman wasn't real. She's no, she says,
she's my cousin. Jerry. He created Superman with his friend Joe,
(06:05):
and I was like shocked. In life, there are different
kinds of fortune, good and bad circumstances. Losing his father
was a tragedy, but not long before, Jerry Siegal had
met someone who would change his life, a classmate named
Joe Schuster. The Joe Gary mentioned they had actually lived
(06:28):
near each other for a few years, but didn't know it. Yes,
Jerry lived in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland and Joe
lived in the Kinsman area of Cleveland, and they didn't
know each other. The neighbors are not too far apart,
but there were different neighborhoods. And Joe went to Alexander
Hamilton Junior High and they had a newspaper there, the
(06:48):
Junior High, and my uncle was editor of that paper
as a ninth grader, and Joe was an illustrator and
he did comics for that paper. And this was an
early nineteen thirties. Jerry and Joe met through another cousin
of Jerry's who knew Joe's family had moved to Cleveland
from Toronto a few years earlier, and believed that the
(07:09):
two boys would get together like a house on fire.
That's because Joe was also a science fiction fanatic, but
he didn't want to write for the Pulps exactly. Joe
was a born artist, an illustrator, self taught mostly from
tracing other art. Someone who might feel more comfortable drawing
(07:30):
the covers that enticed people from the drug store shelves
or the introductory drawings that set the stage for the
story to follow. Joe would draw on anything, even wallpaper
someone had thrown away. They had the same type of
personalities and they related off. They both loved science fiction,
and those days, science fiction was relatively small compared to today,
(07:51):
so it was something that only a few people were
interested in. And they read the pol magazines like Amazing Stories,
and they love that kind of stuff, and they wanted
to do something similar to that, but something really really
different and new, and they kept coming up with ideas,
and your Wood write and Joe would illustrate. It's hard
to explain how serendipitous this meeting was. Jerry and Joe
(08:13):
were even alphabetized in class close together. The universe seemed
to want to make certain they would meet their skills
complemented each other perfectly for what was at the time
a virtually unknown medium, the comic book. In the nineteen thirties,
comics usually referred to comics strips, the sequential art published
(08:37):
in newspapers that offered tiny snippets of illustrated humor and adventure.
Some publishers collected the strips into periodicals, and that over
time gave way to creating original, long form illustrated stories,
Beginning with ninety five New Fund number one, which is
(08:58):
believed to be the first all new collection of comic
book stories. Along with Jazz, it would be one of
the rare homegrown mediums of art in the United States.
But Jerry and Joe weren't thinking of birthing a new medium.
They were high school kids having fun collaborating. Jerry conjured
(09:19):
up sci fi tales and Joe visualized them. One of
their stories was titled Reign of the Superman, which they
published in their own pulp magazine they named Science Fiction.
It was about a maniacal scientist trying to craft an
unstoppable monster with powers of telepathy, super eyesight, and hearing
(09:40):
via a special serum. But this superman was a crook,
a villain. All he wants is money and power. You
can see the wheels turning how Jerry and Joe were
moving towards something new and different, something pop culture didn't
even have a word for yet. As they moved through
(10:02):
high school, Jerry and Joe absorbed what was happening in
the world around them. One of the biggest local heroes
in town was Benny Friedman, a football player for Glenville
High the quarterback, he was solidly built and had a
spit curl falling down over his forehead. He wore form
fitting tights and in the Olympics all anyone could talk
(10:25):
about was Jesse Owens, a Cleveland native who was believed
to be the fastest man alive, like he had superpowers.
There's a synthesis here, a translucent glimpse into the creative
minds of Jerry and Joe. They were being inundated with
information about people with physical abilities far beyond the norm
at a time the world was in desperate need of
(10:48):
a figure of hope, a figure that began to emerge
from a symphony of fiction. They had both consumed with
darkof breathing out, connected the right for death, and refugating alive.
They decided their superpowered antagonist worked better as a protagonist.
(11:08):
His origin was the stuff of science fiction. Born on
a planet called Krypton that was about to end and
sent off to Earth to be raised by mortals. A
skin tight costume broadcast his other worldliness. A small curl
hung over his forehead. He had speed and incredible powers.
(11:29):
It was an homage to the strong men of the era,
who were famous for feats of strength. Joe Shuster was
trying to come up with costumes, and he said, these
county fairs all over the country, and he used to
have these strong men that would come to town. You know,
these guys with the handlebar mustaches and they would ben
(11:49):
steal on their bare hands and break chains, and they
were these costumes that would be it would be like
tights with swim trunks over the tights. And hey, Joe
would go to these county fairs where they have these strongman.
He would take his art pad and he would illustrate
or he would draw these strongman. He would get ideas.
Because Superman ended up with kind of costume with people
(12:12):
joking he's wearing his underpants on the outside, but really
that is what the strongman used to have. They have
these tights and they had these boots, and they had
the swim trunks over that, and that's what he decided
to go with. The s on his chest stood for Superman.
It also could have stood for Seagull and Schuster. It
was a few years when they were in eleventh grade
(12:34):
is when they came up with the Superman idea. It
wasn't a percent like it is today Superman the original
one and even half a costume originally, and they drew one.
It was a publisher actually interested because all the all
the publishers they were communicating with wouldn't publish anything they
came up with because they were high school kids, you know.
And there was a publisher who was publishing a comic
called Detective Dan, which was really like the first real
(12:56):
comic book, because all the other comics were really comic
strips and newspapers. They were syndicated. There were no comic
books originally. So they saw this. I though, this would
be really cool, this is what they would like to do.
So they contacted that publisher and he said he was interested.
But then the company went out of business a few
weeks later, and they were so frustrated the cover they
put for Superman, which basically he was as bear chested
Joe Schuster was so upset that he destroyed everything except
(13:19):
Jerry Siegel managed to say the cover that Jerry imagined
Superman could be the next comic strip hit. It was
clear that Superman was a visual character, one whose physical
abilities needed to be seen, not just described. But the
New York comic strip publishers Jerry queried were indifferent. At best.
(13:41):
Superman was strange, a weird amalgam of sci fi and
the kind of street level justice dished out by Dick Tracy.
Superman was virtually invulnerable, but seemed content to punch the
lights out of common thieves, thieves who might rob innocent shopkeepers.
Jerry eventually tried his luck with National Allied Publications, which
(14:05):
had already published a few of Jerry and Joe's stories.
And just to be clear that publisher later known as
d C Comics went through several names and was involved
in acquisitions early on, will spare you the confusion and
just refer to them as d C. The company was
gearing up to begin printing a new anthology comic book
(14:28):
title Action Comics Short and to the point, to grab
a young reader's attention. They took a look at Jerry
and Joe's submission and believed Superman would be a good fit.
No one, of course, could predict what Superman would bring,
that he would be the beginning of the superhero age.
(14:51):
And then they kept working on it, and they sent
it to other publishers, and they came up with the
Superman costume and so forth, and in many other aspects
of it, including that he was not from Earth originally
he was from Earth, and how he came to Crypton
and added different gravity and that would allow him to
be able to leap tall buildings with the single bound
and so forth, because they wanted to make sure they
could justify how we could do all these things and
(15:13):
lived how the objects because the weight on earth was different,
although he couldn't fly in the beginning. But they kept
getting objections. They graduated high school in nineteen thirty four,
and they still worked at it, and they kept trying
and trying and trying, and they never gave up. And
finally publisher finally agreed to publish it, and that publisher
later became known as d C Comics. Harry Donnenfeld, who
(15:36):
headed up DC, offered the two young men the opportunity
to write and illustrate their first Superman story. Jerry and Joe,
who had been trying to break into the business of
telling stories for years, eagerly accepted, and so in April
of ninety eight, the cover of Action Comics number one
(15:58):
depicted the debut of Superman and and the birth of
the American comic book Superhero. A single copy would come
to be worth millions of dollars. Back then it was
ten cents. But that big break came with a catch.
They said, Hey, we're gonna publish it, and not only
that we're gonna give you a tenure contract, guaranteed money,
(16:21):
guarantee salary to write and illustrate Superman. Well, this was
their dream come true. So they were excited to agree
to that d C. And I'll call it d C
so as that we know for the audience. They said,
but we agree to sign you this tenure contract, we
must own the rights, not you. And they wanted to
make sure they Superman got published, so they agreed to that,
and they got a very small conversations for the writing.
(16:45):
Harry Donnenfeld paid Jerry and Joe a hundred and thirty
dollars and in return, Jerry and Joe gave Harry everything
Superman to have and hold forever. The contract said forever.
(17:07):
How can you even measure the success of a genre
that didn't yet exist? When Action number one hit news stands,
there was no such thing as a superhero. Sure, the
Phantom had worn tights and comic strips, and Doc Savage
had unbreakable skin, but Superman was something else and readers
(17:28):
knew it. D C printed two hundred thousand copies of
Action number one and watched as it sold out. Who
knows why kids like anything but that cover of Superman
hefting a car over his head while people run away
from him was galvanizing. No one had seen anything like it.
(17:48):
It stood out one because it was colorful too, because
of what it had on the cover. I mean, people
knew what comics were, well, they know what comics worrying
that they had started to show up, and they knew
what what comic strips were, so they recognized, you know,
that's what this was. But you have this strange picture
(18:09):
of this guy in this suit, and the suit was
like nothing else before, and he's lifting this car and
kind of smashing it and it's a brand new car.
That's brad Rica. Brad wrote the definitive dual biography of
Jerry and Joe. It's called Superboys and it was published. So,
you know, I teach once, I teach a class in
(18:31):
comics and we always analyze this cover. You know, what
is it about this cover that got kids to buy it?
Because that's the oldest anecdote in Superman lores that you know,
kids bought this thing and that's why comics and Superman
took off. And you look at that cover and he
doesn't even look like a hero, and that he looks
like the villain because there's somebody's brand new car and
(18:53):
he's destroying it. And who has a brand new car
in the depression? And nobody but somebody in class. And
I tried to remember who said it, so I feel
bad about it, but I'll always acknowledge that somebody said
it. It It wasn't me. They said, no, that's not why
kids bought this book. And if you look at the
picture of the cover of Action Comics one, if you
(19:13):
know kind of picture in your head, they're Superman lifting
the car and there's this guy on the bottom left
who's with his both his hands he kind of looks
like the scream and both his hands on his face,
and he's running kind of out of the cover with
a scream on his mouth. And somebody said, that's why
kids bought it, and the rest of the custles like,
(19:35):
why what are you talking about? They bought it because
of Supermans. He's super cool. No matter the reason, Action
Comics was a hit, Superman became a regular feature, eclipsing
any other character within its pages. In nine he got
his own title, and he had come from all places Cleveland,
where Brad was from. When I got older and I realized, well,
(19:58):
they did come from Cleveland, and they did create Superman here.
The question that kept nagging at me was, well, how
they do it? Because to me, that's like the Superman,
the first superhero, really the first superhero. It's the Philosopher's stone, right,
you know, how did they figure out to put all
(20:19):
these different things together and have this magic to create
somebody who wears his his underwear on the outside and
that we all still love, you know, almost eighty years later.
So to me then it became more of a kind
of a detective story that I really wanted to know
how they did it. It was Brad who debunked one
of the great Superman creation myths that Jerry's father had
(20:41):
been shot during that clothing store robbery. What I found
is that, in fact, he did obviously die that night,
but what happened is he had a heart attack. Is
he was in his clothing store and some men came
in and they were going to steal a suit, and
he went to stop them and he dropped over of
heart failure. And it's hard to say whether he was
(21:04):
scared or he just you know, didn't know to do.
We overexerted himself, but that's how he died. And then
a year later, like almost to the day, is when
Jerry comes up with the idea for Superman. And I
started to see once you kind of see that all
the early comics, there's all these panels where criminals dropped
dead of a heart attack when they see Superman, and
(21:27):
Superman goes, well, they're weak and what else could I do?
And it's also Clark Kent, who's in one hand, Is
this really meek, mild mannered American journalist who faints when
there's action nearby turns into Superman? And this made me think,
this is why Jerry was so invested in it, because
he put the tragedy of his father's death into this
(21:48):
character who is not the victim of crime but fights
crime as this immortal superhero forever in the comics and beyond.
And it made me see Superman is not just this,
at least their version, not just this commercial thing, colorful
thing to sell to kids who would go nuts. But really, this,
for lack of a better word, but maybe it is
(22:10):
the word is As the work of art and his
mythology only grew. A new radio show followed, which introduced
Jimmy Olsen, as well as Kryptonite, which weakened Superman. A
series of theatrical cartoons by animation legend Max Fleischer were
produced and were so exquisite that they don't have equals
to this day. Superman toys began filling up shelves, model
(22:34):
kits and statues and decoder rings. Kids were crazy for
him and the other heroes that followed, Batman, Captain America,
Wonder Woman, A damn had burst and out came heroes
with grandiose origin stories and spandex uniforms, but none were
as visible or as powerful as what Jerry and Joe
(22:55):
had drunk up. For a few years, the two got
steady work from d C Comics, so much work that
the two hired artists to help fulfill the need for
Superman stories. Superman even got the syndicated newspaper comic strip
deal Jerry longed for, But when they'd asked for more
fair compensation, d C editors would remind them that Superman
(23:19):
belonged to d C and if they were sore about it, well,
DC could find someone else to write and draw him.
That scared the two. Superman was theirs, if not legally
then creatively and emotionally, so they kept working, watching as
d C counted their money. In alone subsidiary company, Superman Inc.
(23:44):
Made one point five million dollars. Jerry and Joe didn't
in my opinion, they knew what they were doing, that
it wasn't just buying another comics feature. And part of
this is that Harry Donond felt that lost out a
contract on the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger was
(24:04):
hugely popular. Everyone was jealous of the Lone Ranger because
it all came out of one person that every time,
you know, you would license the Lone Ranger, but you
would hear it on the radio, you'd watch the serials,
you'd read the pulps and the whatever you had to
pay this guy, just like Disney with Mickey Mouse. And
I think Donald Felt really liked that because when he
(24:25):
finally lost his contract, he was bringing Lone Ranger magazines.
I think he kind of was looking for a character
that he could do that with. And again that's just
a theory of my part. But also I think the
fact that once they got Superman, almost immediately they're turning
him into what we today would call a trans media empire.
(24:45):
They're working on the radio show is what transforms the
audience for that, and then that just explodes. But I
think so the other side of it, Like you said,
they work on Superman for ten years, and they make
a lot of money, and they asked for raises, they
beg for raises, they get raises. It's a long and
tumultuous relationship. But they're very well paid, you know. They
(25:05):
moved to new houses and they're kind of what I
call Cleveland famous around town and even bigger than that too.
And then Jerry went off to war. Joe couldn't serve
(25:26):
because of his poor eyesight, and Superman couldn't either. With
his powers, it would be easy to imagine him pummeling
the Axis, but that would minimize the sacrifices being made
by real heroes. So when Clark Kent tries to enlist,
he fails an eye exam, his X ray vision means
he accidentally reads the eye chart in the next room.
(25:49):
While stationed in Hawaii, Jerry contributed to Stars and Stripes,
a periodical distributed to soldiers. His writing experience largely kept
him out of action, though he was away from his
own family. He had married a woman named Joanne, whom
Joe had used as the physical model for Lois Lane.
(26:10):
The war was being unkind to Superman in another kind
of way, thanks to paper shortages. Paper drives were common,
with households donating their newspapers, magazines, and comics so they
could be pulped for the war efforts. There's no telling
how many thousands, or even millions of comics were destroyed
(26:30):
this way, for good cause, obviously, but turned into confetti nonetheless,
and contributing to a scarcity of these comics that are
so valued today. The war ended one conflict, but when
Jerry returned home he was still fighting another, the one
with d C. He and Joe felt they had been
(26:53):
strung along, placated with work and good salaries while d
C had profited handsomely from Superman. They suit the company
for five million dollars, based in part on the introduction
of Superboy, a juvenile version of the character the two
had created and DC had published without obtaining the copyright
(27:14):
to the character. The two ultimately settled for a hundred
thousand dollars, sensing d C had three resources for a
long legal fight. As a result, Jerry and Joe were
persona non grata at d C and that infuriated both men,
but Jerry especially and he tended to act on his emotions,
(27:35):
which led to another story Brad was able to debunk.
And there were other stories too. There was one that
took me forever to track down that he put on
a Superman cave and was going to jump off a
building in Midtown because he was so upset with the
way he had been treated. And I found out that
that story was wrong, even though you know, there are
(27:56):
tons of comics professionals to this day who will swear
to its accuracy. All that was Jerry Siegel. It wasn't
it with some other guy just doing it for some
completely other reason. So there's a lot of stories like that.
And as his wife once called into d C and said,
we're out of money, we have a daughter, a young daughter,
Please give him some work. And there's just there's a
(28:19):
lot of that. I think you said, it's kind of
extra legal, but kind of going on in the relationship
between him and DC. And then things got very personal
when DC sold the television rights to Superman in ninetift
Jerry and Joe felt slighted now the character. In their view,
(28:40):
their character was being beamed into millions of household and
conquering another new medium, and they didn't get a penny
for it. Having spent the settlement money, Jerry retaliated in
whatever way he could. He wrote a letter to the
FBI admonishing the agency to investigate d SE alleging their
(29:01):
employees had criminal and communist pasts. When the Superman Show
made it to air, Jerry proclaimed he was going on
a hunger strike to protest what he said was unfair
treatment by the company, and they began sending him a
little bit of money, if only to avoid the negative publicity.
But hadn't Jerry and Joe sold their rights free and clear,
(29:23):
and of their own volition. They did, but in their eyes,
what was legal and what was ethical were worlds apart.
Without income from d C, both men were struggling, Joe
more so. His eyesight, which had long been an issue
for him, kept getting worse. At one point, he took
(29:46):
on work as an artist for the underground adult illustration scene.
These were drawings of a lurid nature that appealed to
fetish enthusiasts, with men and women bound up and whipped.
In Joe's drawings of these scenarios, the men looked very
much like Clark Kent, and the women looked remarkably like
(30:08):
Lois Lane. It was as though Joe was driven to
depict them as being victimized, perhaps in the way he
felt they were being tormented by d C, the way
he and Jerry were being mistreated. Joe, of course left
the drawings unsigned, and they weren't identified as his until
(30:28):
decades later. In the late nineteen fifties, Jerry went back
to Deasey as a writer, invited into the fold by
new editors to resume being a co author of Superman's adventures.
He set about writing the best stories he could, but
the arrangement didn't last long, and by the nineteen sixties,
(30:49):
Jerry was once more at odds with the company. He
pursued another lawsuit to try and reclaim Superman's copyright. Though
the odds weren't good, and Joe had relinquished the rights
not once but twice, a court sided with d C.
If the relationship was fractured, it suffered permanent injury. When
(31:13):
d C entered into an agreement for a major motion
picture to be made about the character, Warner Brothers would
release Superman, the movie, starring Christopher Reeve as the Man
of Steel In Jerry wrote an open letter in which
he literally cursed the production. So I rate was he
(31:34):
at the idea of d C profiting from the character
while he and Joe struggled to make ends meet. He
hoped He wrote that the movie quote super bombs. Yeah,
And it was that movie because there's stories of he
passed once on a New York street and it's his
(31:55):
years before he passed, his wife and him passed. George
Rey said, Jerry fro and he just couldn't handle it.
And Joe would stand outside there was like the Superman
musical on Broadway, and he, you know, would see the
famous people coming in. He just froze. He just couldn't
deal with it. But then it was that movie because
they announced in the magazines there's gonna be this big
(32:17):
Superman movie. But it was Brando is going to be
in it, and he was going to be paid this
obscene amount of money to be jo L. And that's
what put Jerry over the edge. Merlin Brando was to
play Superman's father, joor L. With Brando being the most
respected living actor at the time, he was paid handsomely
(32:39):
for relatively little work. Almost four million dollars, a number
that grew when he received part of the box office gross,
more than Jerry and Joe could ever dream of seeing
from having created Superman. Money that went to an actor
who seemed slightly disinterested in the role and suggested to
(33:00):
director Richard Donner he could play the character as a
suitcase or a bagel. He'd just do the voice. The
publicity was not perhaps what d C and Warner wanted,
so they agreed finally that Jerry and Joe were due
at least modest compensation beyond their initial one hundred and
thirty dollar payment and work for higher fees. After three
(33:24):
decades of fighting, d C began paying them each an
annual pension of thirty thousand dollars with healthcare. Of course,
that's something that's good, but it still didn't seem just
They created one of the most indelible characters in modern culture.
But there was another concession, one that was probably as
(33:47):
important to Jerry and Joe. From that point on, whenever
Superman appeared in print or on screen, a credit would
appear created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. If you
walk around Cleveland today, you'll see pages from Action Comics
number one, priceless pages stuck on an outdoor fence, and
(34:11):
in a testament to the respect due Jerry Siegel and
Joe Schuster, no one tries to pry them off or
deface them. The pages are oversized and FA similes, not
the real thing, but they're there in tribute to what
these two clevelanders really just two teenage boys contributed to
(34:31):
the world an idealized version of a hero beyond the
pettiness of human behavior, strong enough to defend the week.
For Jerry and Joe, Defending them and honoring their memory
meant creating the Siegell and Schuster Society, a nonprofit devoted
to keeping their roles as pioneers alive in the eyes
(34:54):
of the public. Here's Gary Kaplan. In two thousand and seven,
journalists for the Cleveland Playing Dealer, his name was Mike
san Jacomo wrote a story, it was a full page story,
asking why doesn't the city of Cleveland celebrate that Superman
was created in Cleveland? And this sort of brought a
lot of attention, and so a group of people got together,
(35:15):
some businessmen, some college professors, and they formed the Seagull
Schuester Society In two thousand and seven. My uncle was
on the board at that time. I was not. And
in two thousand and nine, two years later, they renovated
the home of Jerry Siegel, which was in pretty poor shape.
He had a typewriter in his attic bedroom where he
wrote so many of the stories, and so they wanted
to preserve the home, and with the help of author
(35:37):
Brad Meltzer, money was raised online and they raised over
a hundred thousand dollars but a hundred thousand dollars of
renovations in the home and they had a ribbon counting
ceremony in two thousand nine. It was a wonderful event.
In addition to that, Joe Schuster who illustrated it. This
home was nine blocks away and the home had already
been torn down years ago, so it was a new
home put there. But they put up a commemorative events
(35:58):
with the panels from Action Comics number one going all
the way around the fence, which is really really cool,
and so people drive by and they can see all
these panels of the comic from Action Comics number one.
And then in two thousand twelve, a Seagull Interstor Society
worked with Cleveland Hopkins Airport to put in a permanent
Superman exhibit which contains a datio Superman along with assign
(36:20):
this as welcome to Cleveland, where the legend began, and
everyone can see that as they go to the baggage
department at Cleveland Hopkins Airports. All's our society. In two
thousand thirteen, we work with the State of Ohio the legislature.
We put together a license plate with a Superman uh
S Sabney at the logo with the words truth, Justice
in American way. So anybody the know how can get
one of those license plates. And there's at the legal
(36:41):
a hundred thousand ohiolands have that license plate, including myself.
So those are some of the things that we have done,
and we're working at some other things right now too.
In a way, Jerry's home became a kind of shrine,
a place of cultural birth. It's also occupied by a
couple the Grays, who warmly welcome people make a pilgrimage
to pay their respects to Superman's co creator. It's the
(37:04):
best looking house on the block. You know you're in
the right place because there is a big s on
the wooden fence out front. For years some collectors arrived,
wondering if the rumors about Jerry leaving stacks of Action
number ones in the attic were true. After all, no
one knew they'd become cultural artifacts, prized like Maltese falcons.
(37:29):
Well where newsstands were typically they would have some comic books.
It could be a pharmacy, but it could be lots
of places. Really, it was ten cents to buy a
Superman comic, and who knew years later it would be
worth so valuable. Because what happened, people would buy it
and then the next one would come out so they
could throughout the old one. They wouldn't save it. No
one envisioned it would have some value to it. Author
(37:53):
Brad Meltzer traveled to the family home once along with
a journalist, and the current owners told him no one
had been in the attic in decades. He was seized
by the possibilities. Could there really be a small pile
of million dollar comics just sitting in this attic? So
he asked to go up, but there wasn't any easy
(38:13):
access to it. They promised they'd have their son take
a look. The Grays later phoned the reporter to state
that they had gone up and no, there was no
hidden treasure. Well, I suppose they'd say that regardless, wouldn't they. Well,
I can guarantee you there are no Superman actually Comics
number one in the house that the Grays occupy right
now in Cleveland, that I can tell you there's none
in there. Jerry himself saved many copies of Action Comics
(38:36):
Number one, and they had dozens of them. And his
daughter told me that what happened was well, him and
Joe both were financially devastated by losing their jobs, and
for years they had several things out. Joe worked for
the post office, and it was difficult for them. So
they ended up selling some of these Action Comic number
ones for money. So they get a hundred dollars maybe
(38:57):
for one, which was that's a pretty good return on
a ten s investment, you know. And then later they
may maybe they've got a few hundred dollars, you know,
and eventually they never left. I'm sure they never envisioned
it would be worth over a million dollars. The same
comic coveted by collectors and thieves who spend or steal millions,
once sold off for a few hundred dollars because Jerry
(39:18):
Siegal needed the money. It's a cutthroat media world out there,
with massive entities jocking for consumer dollars and comic book
properties treated like roadmaps to fortunes. Lost among all of
that maneuvering are the people responsible for creating these characters.
The Seagull family waged a legal battle for years against Warner,
(39:41):
arguing the estate was entitled to compensation and partial ownership
for the cultural pillars Superman had become. That fight seemingly
ended in with a court ruling that concluded years of
legal entanglement. Warner brothers would keep Superman in the Seagull
estate would get a settlement. So did d C steal Superman? No,
(40:07):
of course, not a deal was made, But what precedent
did Jerry and Joe have? Who could have anticipated what
Superman would become? The promise of making a living as
creators was intoxicating. What reason would either of them have
to ever lay down at night and imagine a world
(40:29):
where Superman was earning millions in toys and movies and comics,
while Joe would later be so downtrodden. He was awakened
by a cop on a park bench and taken for
a warm meal. Superman seemed to enrich everyone around him
except the two men who brought him to life. Not theft,
(40:52):
but something was taken. Today, living comic writers and artists
often see there were are co opted for movies or
streaming shows, but checks rarely make their way to their mailboxes.
Sometimes you can create something so big and immersive that
you can't get out from its shadow. Gary wants Jerry
(41:16):
and Joe to avoid that fate. Joe died in two Jerry.
The Society raises money and promotes events to make sure
their memory remains a constant, that every time Superman bursts
through a wall, that fans will remember. The s can
stand for Segel and Schuster. And you know, Jerry's father
(41:40):
died during a botched robbery, and I think he thought
of his father a lot when he wanted to create somebody,
have somebody who would defend the defenseless, and he thought
of his father, I'm sure. And he made a bulletproof too.
But I think for that reason, with Siegel and Schuster
left behind, is much more than a comic book. There
is so much history thin the pages of Action Comics.
(42:01):
Number one superficially it's an object and one to be
coveted among the millionaire collectors of the world. But look
past the panels and you'll see a story about a
grieving son who coped with the loss of his father
by giving the world what everyone needs, a hero. What
you're buying isn't scarcity, but a representation of hope. Well.
(42:27):
I can't put a price on it. I think the
market decides the price like anything. But even if it
was only worth a dollar, I would want it, you know,
because it's historical and it means a lot to my family,
and it started the entire superhero genre. This one comic.
It all started with that, and now we have all
these superheroes everywhere and they're more popular than ever. And
(42:48):
during Joe made it happened, and I'm very proud of them.
The value of the world is, I would say, is huge.
I mean he's known all over the world. You could
go to visit cities in Tokyo and Paris and so worth,
and you see people walking out around with T shirts
with a Superman s chield on it all over the world.
Even in Ukraina they were showing people defending Ukraini and
(43:10):
somewhere wearing Superman T shirts because they thought like Superman
for that moment trying to defend the defense is just
like Jerry wanted Superman to defend the defense. So the
significance is tremendous. Here's brad Rika. Yeah, I've thought about
this a lot and other people too. It's it's a
really strange, almost unique kind of American artifact Action One
(43:34):
because it's like this almost holy relic because it's worth
so much money, but it's also this holy relic because
of what's in it, because it's the first appearance of Superman.
I mean, that's why it's in the Smithsonian, not because
it's worth millions of dollars. You know, everyone who's ever
seen an Action comics one, you have this moment where
(43:57):
it's like this is it, and then people that effect
really touched one or help it's the same thing. I'm like,
oh wait, this is just a comic, just paper and staples.
But it's something more too. It's so strange to think
of a thief stealing of all things Action one, right,
because it's the it's the superhero, it's the fight against crime,
(44:19):
and someone's trying to take that away. The thing with
Action one it has no physical value, right, but it's
kind of all that symbolic value. I mean it's valuable
because it's rare, certainly, but there's a lot of things
that are rare that aren't worth millions of dollars. I mean,
it's just Superman. It's the first superhero, and you know,
(44:42):
I think it gets more valuable with time because we
start to realize how more important that is to our
history than maybe we first thought. Was that on the
mind of the thief who took it from Nicholas Cage,
the they were really stealing someone's idealized version of Superman,
(45:04):
that they were robbing him of the innocence that the
character was supposed to be projecting. The thing about Superman, too,
is it's so it's it's Superman. It's the good guy,
you know. I mean, what do you do if you
steal it and you're just like looking at it every
night and Superman's right on the cover, just saying, you know,
why don't you steam lee? That's the wrong thing to do.
(45:26):
You can't like Superman and steal action one, No, you
probably can't. That would probably be the first thing you'd
want to ask anyone who surfaced with the comic why
why do it? But after eleven years, it didn't seem
like that day was ever going to come, that Superman
(45:46):
would be forever defeated by the Cage Party robber. But
then one day, Cages comic book dealer Stephen Fishler got
a call and an invitation to meet the two most
bizarre our characters of this entire story. The individual who
walked in behind me holding the Mandola folder is now
(46:08):
sitting in this office, and the Minola folder is now open,
and there's the book on like a little aprilic pedestal,
and we sit down. Yeah, that's an original action one
that's next time on Stealing Superman. Stealing Superman is written
(46:31):
by Jake Rawson, sound design and score by Jonathan Washington,
Additional production support by Josh Fisher. Original music by Aaron Kaufman,
Mixing and mastering by Baheed Fraser. Research and fact checking
by Jake Rawson and Austin Thompson, with production support from
Lulu Philip. Additional voices by Ruthie Stevens and Zarin Burnett.
(46:56):
Show logo by Lucy Quentinian. Our executive producer is Jason
English and I'm your host Danish worts. If you're enjoying
this show, check out Haileywood and Noble Blood and give
us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing
Superman is a production of I Heart Radio.
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