July 16, 2025 • 48 mins
Superman is everywhere this summer, but today's bonus episode has nothing to do with James Gunn or David Corenswet. Let's go back to the beginning, when young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first conjured up the character. 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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This bonus episode was written by Jake Rossen and originally appeared as part of the Stealing Superman podcast. Go listen to that show and help us find Nic Cage's stolen comics!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm one of your hosts,
Jason English. We have something of a bonus episode today.
I took the kids to see Superman this weekend, and
on the way home, I was peppering them with Superman lore.
Some of that Laur I picked up naturally watching reruns
of the super Friends cartoon. Most of it I learned
(00:46):
from our good friend Jake Rosson, who wrote a show
for us called Stealing Superman a few years ago. Stealing
Superman was made by virtually the same crew that makes
Very Special Episodes. Jake wrote it, and he's written a
number of our episodes. Dana hosted, Josh and John and
Beheed edited and sound designed. Austin factchecked in this episode.
(01:08):
Zaren even did some of the voice acting. The show's
about a comic book hest that takes place at Nick
Cage's y two k New Year's Eve party, and then
the decade long quest to get them back. The episode
that we're sharing today doesn't require you to know any
of that, because it's Superman, the character's origin story, and
(01:28):
it felt timely this week. I'll go make my kids
listen to it, and if you want to dig into
the Nick Cage heist check out Stealing Superman.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
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
(02:03):
run by a man named Mitchell Siegel. 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's siblings five in all. Mitchell's shop has suits, shirts,
(02:23):
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
into his shop now, just before he starts closing.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Up, he welcomes, how can I help you, gentlemen?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
They don't answer, huh, that's a very nice, very shop.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Would you like to try it on?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Rabbit non stop, leave them.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Please, it's a robbery. One man has grabbed a suit
and is headed for the door. Mitchell begins to move
toward them, shouting there's two of them and only one
of him. They pry the suit from his grasp. Please
a suit that won't be easily replaced, that could earn
him money you won't have. The struggle is happening literally
(03:37):
and metaphorically all across the country. But even though Mitchell
is one of many here, he's all alone.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Please no, no.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
The men flee the store, leaving Mitchell on the floor.
He can't catch his breath and his chest is heavy.
Does 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,
(04:12):
for the rest of his life, his teenage son Jerry
will wish someone had been there to protect Mitchell, to
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
(04:34):
a robbery, a copy of Superman's first appearance being taken
from the home of Nicholas Cage. But Superman's story starts
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
(04:57):
thief ever set foot on Cage's property. For iHeartRadio, this
is Stealing Superman. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this
is episode six Another Planet. In nineteen thirty three, one
(05:24):
year after his father died, Jerry Siegel walked down from
his second floor shared bedroom at one hundred and six
twenty 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 pulps.
Those were the digesticized fiction collections with titles like Amazing
(05:47):
Stories and Private Detective that let the imaginations of their
authors 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 to
this kindling for his own imagination. Jerry wanted to be
(06:11):
a writer, a sci fi writer, just like the ones
he had admired in the pulps. Everyone knew it too.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I know. My mom told me the story where 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'd come over to 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
window and he'd see them coming up with the driveway,
(06:40):
and then he would go out to the door and
they say open the door, and he would say, wait,
I'm going to 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
of the window, but he wanted to pretend he had
x ray vision, and they didn't know what x ray
vision the Eagle was. So he hit all these ideas.
(07:02):
And this was even before Suberthman. You know, he was
coming with these different ideas.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well. I remember in the beginning, I didn't even know
that Superman was a great by a family member. When
I was really young. I remember what was watching the
Inventures of 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 says, she's
my cousin. Jerry. He created a Superman with his friend Joe,
(07:41):
and I was like shocked.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
In life, there are different kinds of fortune, good and
bad circumstances. Losing his father was a tragedy, but not
long before, Jerry Siegel had met someone who would change
his life, a classmate named Joe Schuster. The Joe Gary mentioned.
They had actually lived near each other for a few
(08:05):
years but didn't know it.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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 were not too far apart,
but there were different neighborhoods. And Joe went to Alexander
Hamilton Junior High and they had a newspaper there, the
Junior High. And my uncle was editor of that paper
(08:29):
as a ninth grader, and Joe was an illustrator and
he did comics for that paper. And this was in
the early nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
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 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,
(08:59):
an illustrator, self taught mostly from tracing other art, someone
who might feel more comfortable drawing 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.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
They had the same type of personalities, and they really
interered off. They both loved science fiction, and those days,
science fiction was relatively small compared to today, so it
was something that only a few people were interested in.
And they read the pol magazines like Amazing Stories, and
they loved 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
(09:42):
Jerry would write and Joe would illustrate.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
It's hard to explain how serendipitous this meeting was. Jerry
and Joe were even alphabetized in class close together. The
universe seemed to want to make certain they would meet.
Their skills complimented each other perfectly for what was at
the time a virtually unknown medium, the comic book. In
(10:07):
the nineteen thirties, comics usually referred to comic strips, the
sequential art published 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
(10:27):
form illustrated stories, beginning with nineteen thirty five's New Fun
Number One, which is 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.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
But Jerry and.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Joe weren't thinking of birthing a new medium. They were
high school kids having fun collaborating. Jerry conjured 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 Face. It was
(11:08):
about a maniacal scientist trying to craft an unstoppable monster
with powers of telepathy, super eyesight, and hearing 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
(11:28):
something new and different, something pop culture didn't even have
a word for yet. As they moved through 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.
(11:51):
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 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.
(12:15):
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 a figure of hope, a
figure that began to emerge from a symphony of fiction.
They had both consumed the dark.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Offleas that's Coneculent Cripodet.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Investigating La port come.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Back, they decided their superpowered antagonist worked better as a protagonist.
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
(13:00):
hung over his forehead. He had speed and incredible powers.
It was an homage to strongmen of the era who
were famous for feats of strength.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Joe Schuster 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 bend steal on their bare hands and
break chains, and they'd wear these costumes that would be
they'd be like tights with swim trunks over the tights.
(13:35):
And okay, Joe would go to these county fairs where
they have these strong men and he would take his
art pad and he would illustrate or he would draw
these strong men. He would get ideas. Because Superman ended
up with kind of the costume with people joke it's
wearing his underpants on the outside, but really that is
what the strongmen used to have. They have these tights
and they'd have these boots, and they'd have the swim
(13:56):
trunks over that, and that's what he decided.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
To go with.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The S on his chest stood for Superman. It also
could have stood for Seagull and Schuster.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
It was a few years when they were in eleventh
grade is when they came up with the Superman idea.
It wasn't one hundred percent like it is Todayman. The
original one 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
(14:30):
called Detective Dan, which was really like the first real
comic book, because all the other comics were really comic
strips in newspapers, you know, they were syndicated. There weren't
no comic books originally. So they saw this and I
thought this would be really cool. This is what they
would like to do. So they contacted that publisher and
they 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
(14:51):
he was as Bear tested. Joe Schuster was so upset
that he destroyed everything except Jerry Siegal managed to say
the cover.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
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. Superman was strange, a weird amalgam of sci
(15:20):
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 had already published a few of
(15:42):
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 DC.
The company was gearing up to begin printing a new
anthology comic book title Action Comics, and to the point
(16:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
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 many other aspects of it,
including that he was not from Earth originally he was
from Earth, and how he came to Krypton and had
a different gravity and that would allow him to be
able to leap tall buildings of the single bound, and
so forth, because they wanted to make sure they could
justify how he could do all these things and lift
(16:50):
heavy objects because the weight on Earth was different, although
he couldn't fly in the beginning. But they kept getting rejections.
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, in
nineteen thirty eight, publisher agreed to publish it, and that
publisher later became known as DC Comics.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Harry Donenfeld, who 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 four years, eagerly accepted, and
so in April of nineteen thirty eight, the cover of
(17:32):
Action Comics number one depicted the debut of Superman 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.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
They said, Hey, we're going to publish it, and not
only that, we're going to give you a ten year contract,
guaranteed money, guaranteed salary to write and illustrate Superman. Well,
this was their dream come true. So they were excited
to agree to that DC and I'll call it DC
so so we know for the audience. They said, but
we read to sign you this ten year contract. We
must own the rights, not you, And they wanted to
(18:14):
make sure the Superman got published. So they agreed to that,
and they got a very small conversation for the writing.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Harry Donenfeld paid Jerry and Joe one hundred and thirty
dollars and in return, Jerry and Joe gave Harry everything
Superman to have and hold forever. The contract said forever, forever, forever.
(18:44):
How can you even measure the success of a genre
that didn't yet exist? When Action number one hit newstands,
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
(19:04):
knew it. DC 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.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
It stood out one because it was colorful, two because
of what it had on the cover. I mean, people
knew what comics were. They well, they didn't know what
comic books were. You now, they had started to show up.
They knew what comic strips were, so they recognized, you know,
that's what this was. But you have this strange picture
(19:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
That's Brad Rica. Brad wrote the definitive dual biography of
Jerry and Joe. It's called Superboys and it was published
in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
So yeah, I teached once, so I teach a class
and 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 lore
is 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,
(20:24):
and he looks like the villain because there's somebody's brand
new car and he's destroying it. And who has a
brand new car in the depression? 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 and it wasn't me. They said, no, that's
not why kids bought this book. And if you look
(20:46):
at the picture of the cover of Action Comics Want,
if you know kind of picture in your head, there's
Superman lifting the car and there's this guy on the
pottom 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. Somebody said, that's
(21:08):
why kids bought it, and the rest of the coustle
was like, why, what are you talking about they bought
it because of Superman s he's super cool.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
No matter the reason, Action Comics was a hit, Superman
became a regular feature, eclipsing any other character within its pages.
In nineteen thirty nine, he got his own title, and
he had come from all places, Cleveland, where Brad was from.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
When I got older and I realized, well, they did
come from Cleveland and they did create Superman here. The
question that kept nagging at me was, well, how'd 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
(21:55):
these different things together and have this magic to create
somebody who wears 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.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It was Brad who debunked one of the great Superman
creation myths that Jerry's father had been shot during that
clothing store robbery.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
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 scared or he just you know, didn't
(22:42):
know what to do. He over exerted 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. A Superman goes, well, they're weak
(23:04):
and what else could I do. It's also Clark Kent,
who's in one hand. Is this really meek, mild mannered
American journalist who feints 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 character who is not the
(23:26):
victim of crime but fights crime as this immortal superhero
forever in the comics and beyond. And it made me
see Superman as 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 this is the word.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
As a 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 we're
so exquisite that they don't have equals to this day.
Superman toys began filling up shelves, model kits and statues
(24:11):
and decoda 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 had dreamt up.
(24:33):
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 belonged to d C
(24:57):
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 DC counted
their money. In nineteen forty, a lone subsidiary company, Superman Inc.
(25:20):
Made one point five million dollars. Jerry and Joe didn't.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
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 Donald Feld had just lost out
a contract on the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger
was hugely popular. Everyone was jealous of the Lone Ranger
because it all came out of one person that every time,
(25:47):
you know, you would license the Lone Ranger, but you
would hear it on the radio, you'd watch the cereals,
you'd read the pulps and the whatever you had to
pay this guy, just like Disney with Mickey Mouse. And
I think donald Feld really liked that because when he
finally lost his contract he was printing Lone Ranger magazines.
I think he kind of was looking for a character
that he could do that with, And again that's just
(26:09):
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 transmedia empire.
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,
(26:30):
they work on Superman for ten years, and they make
a lot of money, and they ask 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
moved to new houses and they're kind of what I
call Cleveland famous around town and even bigger than that too.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And then Jerry went off to war. Joe couldn't serve
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
(27:13):
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.
While stationed in Hawaii, Jerry contributed to Stars and Stripes,
a periodical distributed to soldiers. His writing experience largely kept
(27:35):
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.
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
(27:58):
could be pulped for the war effort. There's no telling
how many thousands, or even millions of comics were destroyed
the 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
(28:21):
Jerry returned home he was still fighting another, the one
with d C. He and Joe felt they'd been 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,
(28:43):
a juvenile version of the character the two had created
and DC had published without obtaining the copyright to the character.
The two ultimately settled for one hundred thousand dollars sinsing
DC had the resources for a long legal fight. As
a result, Jerry and Joe were persona non grata at
(29:03):
d C, and that infuriated both men, but Jerry especially,
and he tended to act on his emotions, which led
to another story Brad was able to debunk.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
And there were other stories too. There was one that
took me forever to track down that he put on
a Superman cape and was going to jump off a
building in Midtown because he was so upset with the
way he'd been treated. And I found out that that
story was wrong, even though you know, there are tons
of comics professionals to this day who will swear to
its accuracy. Well, that was Jerry Siegel, it wasn't. It
(29:39):
was 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 DC 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
lot of that. I think you said it's kind of
extra legal, but kind of going on in the relationship
(30:02):
between him and DC.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And then things got very personal when DC sold the
television rights to Superman in nineteen fifty. Jerry and Joe
felt slighted now the character in their view, their character
was being beamed into millions of households and conquering another
new medium, and they didn't get a penny for it.
(30:26):
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 C, alleging their employees at
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
(30:49):
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,
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
(31:13):
more so his eyesight, which had long been an issue
for him, kept getting worse. At one point, he took
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.
(31:36):
In Joe's drawings of these scenarios, the men looked very
much like Clark Kent, and the women looked remarkably like
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
(32:00):
the drawings unsigned, and they weren't identified as his until
decades later. In the late nineteen fifties, Jerry went back
to d C 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,
(32:21):
but the arrangement didn't last long, and by the nineteen
sixties 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. He and Joe had relinquished
the rights not once, but twice. A court sided with
(32:42):
d C. If the relationship was fractured, it suffered permanent injury.
When 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 Seal in nineteen seventy five. Jerry wrote an
(33:05):
open letter in which he litterally cursed the production. So
I WRT was He at the idea of DC profiting
from the character while he and Joe struggled to make
ends meet. He hoped He wrote that the movie quote
super bombs.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
Yeah, And it was that movie because there's stories of
he passed once on New York Street and this is
years before he passed his wife and him past George Reeds,
and he said, Jerry froze and he like 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
(33:47):
just couldn't deal with it. But then it was that
movie because they announced in the magazines, there's gonna be
this big 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 Jorell. And
that's what put Jerry over the edge.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Carlin Brando was to play Superman's father, joor L. With
Brando being the most respected living actor at the time,
he was paid handsomely 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
(34:30):
that went to an actor who seemed slightly disinterested in
the role and suggested to 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
(34:54):
their initial one hundred and thirty dollars payment and work
for higher fees. After three 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
(35:16):
indelible characters in modern culture. But there was another concession,
one that was probably as 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
(35:41):
see pages from Action Comics number one, priceless pages stuck
on an outdoor fence, and in a testament to the
respect do Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, no one tries
to pry them off or deface them. The pages are
oversized and fasimiles, not the real thing, but they're there
(36:01):
in tribute to what these two Clevelanders, really just two
teenage boys contributed to 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 Siegel and Shuster Society,
(36:25):
a nonprofit devoted to keeping their roles as pioneers alive
in the eyes of the public. Here's Gary Kaplan in.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Two thousand and seven, journalists for the Cleveland Plain Dealer
his name is Mike Sanjakomo, wrote a story. It was
a full page story asking why doesn't the city of
Cleveland celebrate that Superman was created in Cleveland. This sort
brought a lot of attention, and so a group of
people got together, some businessmen, some college professors, and they
(36:54):
formed the Seagull and schusterra Society in two thousand and seven.
My uncle was on the board at that time.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I was not.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
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 addic bedroom
where were he wrote so many of the stories, and
so they wanted to preserve the home, and with the
help of author Brad Meltzer, money was raised online and
they raised over one hundred thousand dollars. They put one
hundred thousand dollars the renovations in the home, and they
(37:20):
had a ribon cutting ceremony in two thousand and nine.
It was a wonderful event. In addition to that, Joe Schuster,
who illustrated it. His home was nine blocks away and
a home had already been torn down years ago, so
it was a new home put there. But they put
up a commemorative events 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
(37:40):
they can see all these panels of the comic Action
Comics number one. And then in twenty twelve, a Seagull
and Shuster Society worked with Cleveland Hopkins Airport to put
in a permanent Superman exhibit which contains a statue Superman
along with assigned that says welcome to Cleveland, where the
legend began, and everyone can see that as they go
to the baggage department at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Also our society.
(38:03):
In twenty thirteen, we worked with the State of Ohio
the legislate. We put together a license plate with a
Superman s Sagna the logo with the words truth, Justice
in American way, So anybody in Ohio can get one
of those license plates. And at the leave of one
hundred thousand Ohioans have that license plate, including myself. So
those are some of the things that we have done,
and we're working out some other things right now too.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
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 making a pilgrimage to
pay their respects to Superman's co creator. It's the best
looking house on the block. You know you're in the
right place because there is a big s on the
(38:46):
wood 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've become cultural artifacts, prized like Maltese falcons.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Well where newstands 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
would throw out the old one. They wouldn't save it.
No one envisioned they would have some value to it.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Author Brad Meltzer traveled to the family home once along
with the 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
(39:49):
easy 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.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Well, I can guarantee you there are no Superman actually
comic number one in the huse that the Grays occupy
right now in Cleveland, and I can tell you there's
none in there. Jerry himself saved many copies of Action
Comics 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 did several things out. Joe worked
(40:24):
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 one hundred dollars
maybe for one which was that's a pretty good return
on a ten cent investment, you know. And then later
and maybe they got a few hundred dollars, you know,
and eventually they didn't have any left. I'm sure they
never envisioned they would be worth over a million dollars.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
The same comic coveted by collectors and thieves who spend
or steal millions, once sold off for a few hundred
dollars because Jerry Siegel needed the money. It's a cutthroat
media world out there, with massive entities jocking for consumer
dollars and comic book properties treated like road maps to fortunes.
(41:07):
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, arguing the estate was entitled
to compensation and partial ownership for the cultural pillar Superman
had become. That fight seemingly ended in twenty thirteen with
(41:29):
a court ruling that concluded years of legal entanglement. Warner
brothers would keep Superman, the Seagull estate would get a settlement.
So did DC steal Superman? No, of course, not a
deal was made, But what precedent did Jerry and Joe
have who could have anticipated what Superman would become the
(41:55):
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 where Superman earning millions
in toys and movies and comics, while Joe would later
be so downtrodden he was awakened by a cop on
(42:16):
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, but something was taken. Today,
living comic writers and artists often see their work co
(42:36):
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 and Joe to avoid that fate.
Joe died in nineteen twenty two, Jerry nineteen ninety two.
(42:59):
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 SEAgel and Shuster.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
And you know Jerry's father 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 him bulletproof too for that think, for
that reason, what.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Siegel and Schuster left behind is much more than a
comic book. There is so much history within the pages
of Action Comics 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
(43:51):
his father by giving the world what everyone needs, a hero.
What you're buying isn't scarcity, but a representation of hope.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Well, 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 they 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
(44:24):
than ever. And Jerry and Joe made it happen, 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 forth, and you see people
walking out around with T shirts with a Superman s
shield on it all over the world. Even in Ukraine
(44:44):
they were showing people defending Ukraine and some were wearing
Superman T shirts because they felt like Superman for that moment,
trying to defend the defensives, just like Jerry wanted Superman
to defend the defenses. So the significance is tremendous.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Here's brad Rica.
Speaker 5 (45:00):
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and other people too.
It's a really strange, almost unique kind of American artifact
Action one 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,
(45:24):
not because it's worth millions of dollars. You know, everyone
who's ever seen an action comics one, you have this
moment where it's like, this is it, and then people
that have actually touched one are held but 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
(45:44):
so strange to think of a thief stealing of all
things Action won, right, because it's the it's the superhero,
it's the fight against crime, 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.
(46:07):
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, 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.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Was that on the mind of the thief who took
it from Nicholas Cage, that they were really stealing someone's
idealized version of Superman, that they were robbing him of
the innocent that the character was supposed to be projecting.
Speaker 5 (46:46):
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, why did you steal Lee? That's the wrong
thing to do. You can't like Superman and steal action one.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
No, you prob we 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 would be forever defeated by the Cage Party robber.
(47:26):
But then one day, Cage's comic book dealer, Steven Fischler,
got a call and an invitation to meet the two
most bizarre characters of this entire story.
Speaker 4 (47:40):
The individual who walked in behind me holding the Manila
folder is now sitting in this office, and the Manila
folder is now open. Then there's the book on like
a little aprilic pedestale, and we sit down. Yeah, that's
an original action one.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
That's next time on Stealing Superman. Stealing Superman is written
by Jake Rowson, 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
(48:22):
by Jake Rosson and Austin Thompson, with production support from
Lulu Philip. Additional voices by Ruthie Stevens and Zarin Burnett.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonian. Our executive producer is Jason
English and I'm your host Danish Wartz. If you're enjoying
this show, check out Haleywood and Noble Blood and give
(48:44):
us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing
Superman is a production of iHeartRadio
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm one of your hosts,
Jason English. We have something of a bonus episode today.
I took the kids to see Superman this weekend, and
on the way home, I was peppering them with Superman lore.
Some of that Laur I picked up naturally watching reruns
of the super Friends cartoon. Most of it I learned
(00:46):
from our good friend Jake Rosson, who wrote a show
for us called Stealing Superman a few years ago. Stealing
Superman was made by virtually the same crew that makes
Very Special Episodes. Jake wrote it, and he's written a
number of our episodes. Dana hosted, Josh and John and
Beheed edited and sound designed. Austin factchecked in this episode.
(01:08):
Zaren even did some of the voice acting. The show's
about a comic book hest that takes place at Nick
Cage's y two k New Year's Eve party, and then
the decade long quest to get them back. The episode
that we're sharing today doesn't require you to know any
of that, because it's Superman, the character's origin story, and
(01:28):
it felt timely this week. I'll go make my kids
listen to it, and if you want to dig into
the Nick Cage heist check out Stealing Superman.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
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
(02:03):
run by a man named Mitchell Siegel. 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's siblings five in all. Mitchell's shop has suits, shirts,
(02:23):
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
into his shop now, just before he starts closing.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Up, he welcomes, how can I help you, gentlemen?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
They don't answer, huh, that's a very nice, very shop.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Would you like to try it on?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Rabbit non stop, leave them.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Please, it's a robbery. One man has grabbed a suit
and is headed for the door. Mitchell begins to move
toward them, shouting there's two of them and only one
of him. They pry the suit from his grasp. Please
a suit that won't be easily replaced, that could earn
him money you won't have. The struggle is happening literally
(03:37):
and metaphorically all across the country. But even though Mitchell
is one of many here, he's all alone.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Please no, no.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
The men flee the store, leaving Mitchell on the floor.
He can't catch his breath and his chest is heavy.
Does 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,
(04:12):
for the rest of his life, his teenage son Jerry
will wish someone had been there to protect Mitchell, to
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
(04:34):
a robbery, a copy of Superman's first appearance being taken
from the home of Nicholas Cage. But Superman's story starts
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
(04:57):
thief ever set foot on Cage's property. For iHeartRadio, this
is Stealing Superman. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this
is episode six Another Planet. In nineteen thirty three, one
(05:24):
year after his father died, Jerry Siegel walked down from
his second floor shared bedroom at one hundred and six
twenty 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 pulps.
Those were the digesticized fiction collections with titles like Amazing
(05:47):
Stories and Private Detective that let the imaginations of their
authors 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 to
this kindling for his own imagination. Jerry wanted to be
(06:11):
a writer, a sci fi writer, just like the ones
he had admired in the pulps. Everyone knew it too.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I know. My mom told me the story where 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'd come over to 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
window and he'd see them coming up with the driveway,
(06:40):
and then he would go out to the door and
they say open the door, and he would say, wait,
I'm going to 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
of the window, but he wanted to pretend he had
x ray vision, and they didn't know what x ray
vision the Eagle was. So he hit all these ideas.
(07:02):
And this was even before Suberthman. You know, he was
coming with these different ideas.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well. I remember in the beginning, I didn't even know
that Superman was a great by a family member. When
I was really young. I remember what was watching the
Inventures of 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 says, she's
my cousin. Jerry. He created a Superman with his friend Joe,
(07:41):
and I was like shocked.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
In life, there are different kinds of fortune, good and
bad circumstances. Losing his father was a tragedy, but not
long before, Jerry Siegel had met someone who would change
his life, a classmate named Joe Schuster. The Joe Gary mentioned.
They had actually lived near each other for a few
(08:05):
years but didn't know it.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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 were not too far apart,
but there were different neighborhoods. And Joe went to Alexander
Hamilton Junior High and they had a newspaper there, the
Junior High. And my uncle was editor of that paper
(08:29):
as a ninth grader, and Joe was an illustrator and
he did comics for that paper. And this was in
the early nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
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 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,
(08:59):
an illustrator, self taught mostly from tracing other art, someone
who might feel more comfortable drawing 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.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
They had the same type of personalities, and they really
interered off. They both loved science fiction, and those days,
science fiction was relatively small compared to today, so it
was something that only a few people were interested in.
And they read the pol magazines like Amazing Stories, and
they loved 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
(09:42):
Jerry would write and Joe would illustrate.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
It's hard to explain how serendipitous this meeting was. Jerry
and Joe were even alphabetized in class close together. The
universe seemed to want to make certain they would meet.
Their skills complimented each other perfectly for what was at
the time a virtually unknown medium, the comic book. In
(10:07):
the nineteen thirties, comics usually referred to comic strips, the
sequential art published 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
(10:27):
form illustrated stories, beginning with nineteen thirty five's New Fun
Number One, which is 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.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
But Jerry and.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Joe weren't thinking of birthing a new medium. They were
high school kids having fun collaborating. Jerry conjured 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 Face. It was
(11:08):
about a maniacal scientist trying to craft an unstoppable monster
with powers of telepathy, super eyesight, and hearing 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
(11:28):
something new and different, something pop culture didn't even have
a word for yet. As they moved through 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.
(11:51):
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 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.
(12:15):
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 a figure of hope, a
figure that began to emerge from a symphony of fiction.
They had both consumed the dark.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Offleas that's Coneculent Cripodet.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
Investigating La port come.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Back, they decided their superpowered antagonist worked better as a protagonist.
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
(13:00):
hung over his forehead. He had speed and incredible powers.
It was an homage to strongmen of the era who
were famous for feats of strength.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Joe Schuster 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 bend steal on their bare hands and
break chains, and they'd wear these costumes that would be
they'd be like tights with swim trunks over the tights.
(13:35):
And okay, Joe would go to these county fairs where
they have these strong men and he would take his
art pad and he would illustrate or he would draw
these strong men. He would get ideas. Because Superman ended
up with kind of the costume with people joke it's
wearing his underpants on the outside, but really that is
what the strongmen used to have. They have these tights
and they'd have these boots, and they'd have the swim
(13:56):
trunks over that, and that's what he decided.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
To go with.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The S on his chest stood for Superman. It also
could have stood for Seagull and Schuster.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
It was a few years when they were in eleventh
grade is when they came up with the Superman idea.
It wasn't one hundred percent like it is Todayman. The
original one 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
(14:30):
called Detective Dan, which was really like the first real
comic book, because all the other comics were really comic
strips in newspapers, you know, they were syndicated. There weren't
no comic books originally. So they saw this and I
thought this would be really cool. This is what they
would like to do. So they contacted that publisher and
they 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
(14:51):
he was as Bear tested. Joe Schuster was so upset
that he destroyed everything except Jerry Siegal managed to say
the cover.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
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. Superman was strange, a weird amalgam of sci
(15:20):
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 had already published a few of
(15:42):
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 DC.
The company was gearing up to begin printing a new
anthology comic book title Action Comics, and to the point
(16:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
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 many other aspects of it,
including that he was not from Earth originally he was
from Earth, and how he came to Krypton and had
a different gravity and that would allow him to be
able to leap tall buildings of the single bound, and
so forth, because they wanted to make sure they could
justify how he could do all these things and lift
(16:50):
heavy objects because the weight on Earth was different, although
he couldn't fly in the beginning. But they kept getting rejections.
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, in
nineteen thirty eight, publisher agreed to publish it, and that
publisher later became known as DC Comics.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Harry Donenfeld, who 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 four years, eagerly accepted, and
so in April of nineteen thirty eight, the cover of
(17:32):
Action Comics number one depicted the debut of Superman 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.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
They said, Hey, we're going to publish it, and not
only that, we're going to give you a ten year contract,
guaranteed money, guaranteed salary to write and illustrate Superman. Well,
this was their dream come true. So they were excited
to agree to that DC and I'll call it DC
so so we know for the audience. They said, but
we read to sign you this ten year contract. We
must own the rights, not you, And they wanted to
(18:14):
make sure the Superman got published. So they agreed to that,
and they got a very small conversation for the writing.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Harry Donenfeld paid Jerry and Joe one hundred and thirty
dollars and in return, Jerry and Joe gave Harry everything
Superman to have and hold forever. The contract said forever, forever, forever.
(18:44):
How can you even measure the success of a genre
that didn't yet exist? When Action number one hit newstands,
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
(19:04):
knew it. DC 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.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
It stood out one because it was colorful, two because
of what it had on the cover. I mean, people
knew what comics were. They well, they didn't know what
comic books were. You now, they had started to show up.
They knew what comic strips were, so they recognized, you know,
that's what this was. But you have this strange picture
(19:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
That's Brad Rica. Brad wrote the definitive dual biography of
Jerry and Joe. It's called Superboys and it was published
in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
So yeah, I teached once, so I teach a class
and 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 lore
is 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,
(20:24):
and he looks like the villain because there's somebody's brand
new car and he's destroying it. And who has a
brand new car in the depression? 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 and it wasn't me. They said, no, that's
not why kids bought this book. And if you look
(20:46):
at the picture of the cover of Action Comics Want,
if you know kind of picture in your head, there's
Superman lifting the car and there's this guy on the
pottom 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. Somebody said, that's
(21:08):
why kids bought it, and the rest of the coustle
was like, why, what are you talking about they bought
it because of Superman s he's super cool.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
No matter the reason, Action Comics was a hit, Superman
became a regular feature, eclipsing any other character within its pages.
In nineteen thirty nine, he got his own title, and
he had come from all places, Cleveland, where Brad was from.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
When I got older and I realized, well, they did
come from Cleveland and they did create Superman here. The
question that kept nagging at me was, well, how'd 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
(21:55):
these different things together and have this magic to create
somebody who wears 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.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It was Brad who debunked one of the great Superman
creation myths that Jerry's father had been shot during that
clothing store robbery.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
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 scared or he just you know, didn't
(22:42):
know what to do. He over exerted 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. A Superman goes, well, they're weak
(23:04):
and what else could I do. It's also Clark Kent,
who's in one hand. Is this really meek, mild mannered
American journalist who feints 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 character who is not the
(23:26):
victim of crime but fights crime as this immortal superhero
forever in the comics and beyond. And it made me
see Superman as 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 this is the word.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
As a 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 we're
so exquisite that they don't have equals to this day.
Superman toys began filling up shelves, model kits and statues
(24:11):
and decoda 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 had dreamt up.
(24:33):
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 belonged to d C
(24:57):
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 DC counted
their money. In nineteen forty, a lone subsidiary company, Superman Inc.
(25:20):
Made one point five million dollars. Jerry and Joe didn't.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
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 Donald Feld had just lost out
a contract on the Lone Ranger, and the Lone Ranger
was hugely popular. Everyone was jealous of the Lone Ranger
because it all came out of one person that every time,
(25:47):
you know, you would license the Lone Ranger, but you
would hear it on the radio, you'd watch the cereals,
you'd read the pulps and the whatever you had to
pay this guy, just like Disney with Mickey Mouse. And
I think donald Feld really liked that because when he
finally lost his contract he was printing Lone Ranger magazines.
I think he kind of was looking for a character
that he could do that with, And again that's just
(26:09):
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 transmedia empire.
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,
(26:30):
they work on Superman for ten years, and they make
a lot of money, and they ask 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
moved to new houses and they're kind of what I
call Cleveland famous around town and even bigger than that too.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And then Jerry went off to war. Joe couldn't serve
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
(27:13):
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.
While stationed in Hawaii, Jerry contributed to Stars and Stripes,
a periodical distributed to soldiers. His writing experience largely kept
(27:35):
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.
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
(27:58):
could be pulped for the war effort. There's no telling
how many thousands, or even millions of comics were destroyed
the 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
(28:21):
Jerry returned home he was still fighting another, the one
with d C. He and Joe felt they'd been 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,
(28:43):
a juvenile version of the character the two had created
and DC had published without obtaining the copyright to the character.
The two ultimately settled for one hundred thousand dollars sinsing
DC had the resources for a long legal fight. As
a result, Jerry and Joe were persona non grata at
(29:03):
d C, and that infuriated both men, but Jerry especially,
and he tended to act on his emotions, which led
to another story Brad was able to debunk.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
And there were other stories too. There was one that
took me forever to track down that he put on
a Superman cape and was going to jump off a
building in Midtown because he was so upset with the
way he'd been treated. And I found out that that
story was wrong, even though you know, there are tons
of comics professionals to this day who will swear to
its accuracy. Well, that was Jerry Siegel, it wasn't. It
(29:39):
was 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 DC 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
lot of that. I think you said it's kind of
extra legal, but kind of going on in the relationship
(30:02):
between him and DC.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And then things got very personal when DC sold the
television rights to Superman in nineteen fifty. Jerry and Joe
felt slighted now the character in their view, their character
was being beamed into millions of households and conquering another
new medium, and they didn't get a penny for it.
(30:26):
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 C, alleging their employees at
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
(30:49):
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,
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
(31:13):
more so his eyesight, which had long been an issue
for him, kept getting worse. At one point, he took
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.
(31:36):
In Joe's drawings of these scenarios, the men looked very
much like Clark Kent, and the women looked remarkably like
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
(32:00):
the drawings unsigned, and they weren't identified as his until
decades later. In the late nineteen fifties, Jerry went back
to d C 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,
(32:21):
but the arrangement didn't last long, and by the nineteen
sixties 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. He and Joe had relinquished
the rights not once, but twice. A court sided with
(32:42):
d C. If the relationship was fractured, it suffered permanent injury.
When 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 Seal in nineteen seventy five. Jerry wrote an
(33:05):
open letter in which he litterally cursed the production. So
I WRT was He at the idea of DC profiting
from the character while he and Joe struggled to make
ends meet. He hoped He wrote that the movie quote
super bombs.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
Yeah, And it was that movie because there's stories of
he passed once on New York Street and this is
years before he passed his wife and him past George Reeds,
and he said, Jerry froze and he like 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
(33:47):
just couldn't deal with it. But then it was that
movie because they announced in the magazines, there's gonna be
this big 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 Jorell. And
that's what put Jerry over the edge.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Carlin Brando was to play Superman's father, joor L. With
Brando being the most respected living actor at the time,
he was paid handsomely 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
(34:30):
that went to an actor who seemed slightly disinterested in
the role and suggested to 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
(34:54):
their initial one hundred and thirty dollars payment and work
for higher fees. After three 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
(35:16):
indelible characters in modern culture. But there was another concession,
one that was probably as 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
(35:41):
see pages from Action Comics number one, priceless pages stuck
on an outdoor fence, and in a testament to the
respect do Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, no one tries
to pry them off or deface them. The pages are
oversized and fasimiles, not the real thing, but they're there
(36:01):
in tribute to what these two Clevelanders, really just two
teenage boys contributed to 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 Siegel and Shuster Society,
(36:25):
a nonprofit devoted to keeping their roles as pioneers alive
in the eyes of the public. Here's Gary Kaplan in.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Two thousand and seven, journalists for the Cleveland Plain Dealer
his name is Mike Sanjakomo, wrote a story. It was
a full page story asking why doesn't the city of
Cleveland celebrate that Superman was created in Cleveland. This sort
brought a lot of attention, and so a group of
people got together, some businessmen, some college professors, and they
(36:54):
formed the Seagull and schusterra Society in two thousand and seven.
My uncle was on the board at that time.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I was not.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
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 addic bedroom
where were he wrote so many of the stories, and
so they wanted to preserve the home, and with the
help of author Brad Meltzer, money was raised online and
they raised over one hundred thousand dollars. They put one
hundred thousand dollars the renovations in the home, and they
(37:20):
had a ribon cutting ceremony in two thousand and nine.
It was a wonderful event. In addition to that, Joe Schuster,
who illustrated it. His home was nine blocks away and
a home had already been torn down years ago, so
it was a new home put there. But they put
up a commemorative events 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
(37:40):
they can see all these panels of the comic Action
Comics number one. And then in twenty twelve, a Seagull
and Shuster Society worked with Cleveland Hopkins Airport to put
in a permanent Superman exhibit which contains a statue Superman
along with assigned that says welcome to Cleveland, where the
legend began, and everyone can see that as they go
to the baggage department at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Also our society.
(38:03):
In twenty thirteen, we worked with the State of Ohio
the legislate. We put together a license plate with a
Superman s Sagna the logo with the words truth, Justice
in American way, So anybody in Ohio can get one
of those license plates. And at the leave of one
hundred thousand Ohioans have that license plate, including myself. So
those are some of the things that we have done,
and we're working out some other things right now too.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
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 making a pilgrimage to
pay their respects to Superman's co creator. It's the best
looking house on the block. You know you're in the
right place because there is a big s on the
(38:46):
wood 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've become cultural artifacts, prized like Maltese falcons.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Well where newstands 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
would throw out the old one. They wouldn't save it.
No one envisioned they would have some value to it.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Author Brad Meltzer traveled to the family home once along
with the 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
(39:49):
easy 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.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Well, I can guarantee you there are no Superman actually
comic number one in the huse that the Grays occupy
right now in Cleveland, and I can tell you there's
none in there. Jerry himself saved many copies of Action
Comics 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 did several things out. Joe worked
(40:24):
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 one hundred dollars
maybe for one which was that's a pretty good return
on a ten cent investment, you know. And then later
and maybe they got a few hundred dollars, you know,
and eventually they didn't have any left. I'm sure they
never envisioned they would be worth over a million dollars.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
The same comic coveted by collectors and thieves who spend
or steal millions, once sold off for a few hundred
dollars because Jerry Siegel needed the money. It's a cutthroat
media world out there, with massive entities jocking for consumer
dollars and comic book properties treated like road maps to fortunes.
(41:07):
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, arguing the estate was entitled
to compensation and partial ownership for the cultural pillar Superman
had become. That fight seemingly ended in twenty thirteen with
(41:29):
a court ruling that concluded years of legal entanglement. Warner
brothers would keep Superman, the Seagull estate would get a settlement.
So did DC steal Superman? No, of course, not a
deal was made, But what precedent did Jerry and Joe
have who could have anticipated what Superman would become the
(41:55):
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 where Superman earning millions
in toys and movies and comics, while Joe would later
be so downtrodden he was awakened by a cop on
(42:16):
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, but something was taken. Today,
living comic writers and artists often see their work co
(42:36):
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 and Joe to avoid that fate.
Joe died in nineteen twenty two, Jerry nineteen ninety two.
(42:59):
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 SEAgel and Shuster.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
And you know Jerry's father 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 him bulletproof too for that think, for
that reason, what.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Siegel and Schuster left behind is much more than a
comic book. There is so much history within the pages
of Action Comics 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
(43:51):
his father by giving the world what everyone needs, a hero.
What you're buying isn't scarcity, but a representation of hope.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Well, 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 they 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
(44:24):
than ever. And Jerry and Joe made it happen, 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 forth, and you see people
walking out around with T shirts with a Superman s
shield on it all over the world. Even in Ukraine
(44:44):
they were showing people defending Ukraine and some were wearing
Superman T shirts because they felt like Superman for that moment,
trying to defend the defensives, just like Jerry wanted Superman
to defend the defenses. So the significance is tremendous.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Here's brad Rica.
Speaker 5 (45:00):
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and other people too.
It's a really strange, almost unique kind of American artifact
Action one 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,
(45:24):
not because it's worth millions of dollars. You know, everyone
who's ever seen an action comics one, you have this
moment where it's like, this is it, and then people
that have actually touched one are held but 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
(45:44):
so strange to think of a thief stealing of all
things Action won, right, because it's the it's the superhero,
it's the fight against crime, 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.
(46:07):
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, 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.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Was that on the mind of the thief who took
it from Nicholas Cage, that they were really stealing someone's
idealized version of Superman, that they were robbing him of
the innocent that the character was supposed to be projecting.
Speaker 5 (46:46):
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, why did you steal Lee? That's the wrong
thing to do. You can't like Superman and steal action one.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
No, you prob we 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 would be forever defeated by the Cage Party robber.
(47:26):
But then one day, Cage's comic book dealer, Steven Fischler,
got a call and an invitation to meet the two
most bizarre characters of this entire story.
Speaker 4 (47:40):
The individual who walked in behind me holding the Manila
folder is now sitting in this office, and the Manila
folder is now open. Then there's the book on like
a little aprilic pedestale, and we sit down. Yeah, that's
an original action one.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
That's next time on Stealing Superman. Stealing Superman is written
by Jake Rowson, 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
(48:22):
by Jake Rosson and Austin Thompson, with production support from
Lulu Philip. Additional voices by Ruthie Stevens and Zarin Burnett.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonian. Our executive producer is Jason
English and I'm your host Danish Wartz. If you're enjoying
this show, check out Haleywood and Noble Blood and give
(48:44):
us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing
Superman is a production of iHeartRadio
Host
Jamie Loftus
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