Superman was imagined in 1933 by Jerry Siegel, nineteen, penciled by his pal Joe Shuster, same age, and published in their fanzine, Science Fiction . The two kids realy though they had found the idea of the century. They expected to see their work published as comic strip in a big daily paper. They soon had to meet reality. They tried with all american papers and everywhere they where sent back by a kick in the bottom. A guy who leaped over buildings and lifted cars? Who would be intersted in such nonsenses? Who? Nobody but Sheldon Mayer.

The future creator of Sugar and Spike, didn't succeed in making his bosses of EC comics accept the character, but he could give it to one of their competitors, Harry Donenfeld, who was looking in emergency for anything in order to fill up the new title of the National Periodical (company which would latter be known as DC), Action Comics, whose number 1 would came in october... 1938. Yes. Five years hd passed.

And this kind of publishing was no more than a makeshift, comic books, then, were despisted, they made no money. First comic books were gived away with packs of washing. Nobody could expect that this was on the brink to change because Superman would make one and half million copies of Action Comics sold each month.



When Superman burst onto the scene sixty years ago there had never been a character quite like him, and he remains unique today. The innumerable imitators who followed in his wake have acknowledged his primacy by taking on the title of super hero, but Superman did more than start the trend that came to define the American comic book.

His influence spread throughout all known media as he became a star of animated cartoons, radio, recordings, books, motion pictures, and television, while his image appeared on products ranging from puzzles to peanut butter. He is perhaps the first fictional character to have been so successfully promoted as a universal icon, yet he also continues to remain a publishing phenomenon whose adventures appear in no less than five monthly comics magazines.

This triumphant mixture of marketing and imagination, familiar all around the world and re-created for generation after generation, began humbly with an infant art form in search of a subject, and two teenagers with an improbable idea.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both born in 1914, first met around 1931 when they were students at Glenville High School in Cleveland. Shuster, a native of Toronto, had recently moved into the neighborhood, and Siegel sought him out after hearing that the new arrival was an artist. Joe and I were tremendous science fiction fans, recalled Siegel. Their friendship was forged out of a shared enthusiasm for the first magazines to publish the genre regularly, including Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. They were also interested in films, particularly those that showcased the swashbuckling exploits of silent screen star Douglas Fairbanks. In addition, they were fascinated by the newspaper comic strips of the day.

At the time that we became interested in the comics field, Siegel said, the two outstanding adventure strips were Buck Rogers and Tarzan. Drawn by Dick Calkins and Harold Foster, respectively, these two features had introduced new elements of fantasy into the field when they first appeared in 1929. Comic books were still almost unheard of, so Shuster clipped and saved the colorful Sunday pages drawn by his favorite artists.
Conventional wisdom held that such interest in the more lurid aspects of the day's pop culture did not bode well for two poor boys living in the depths of a disastrous economic depression, but the pair clung to the hope that such escapism might also provide them with an actual avenue of escape from the gray realities of daily life. When no money could be found to heat the Shuster apartment, Joe had to wear gloves while drawing. Jerry's after-school job as a delivery boy brought in four dollars a week to help keep his family afloat.


Most of the boys' energy was directed toward work on their school paper. Joe drew humorous cartoon features for the Glenville Torch, and most of Jerry's prose had a similarly comedic slant. Among his contributions was a series of short stories, illustrated by Joe, about Goober the Mighty. This character was a parody of Tarzan, and the mockery indicated a certain amount of ambivalence about the idea of aggressive, muscular heroes. In a fit of superhuman energy, Siegel wrote of Goober, he snapped a twig between two great hands. Still, these tales from 1931 represent the first time the team toyed with the idea of a powerful protagonist. When they returned to the theme again, the superman they created would be a villain.


Outside their worlds of fantasy, Siegel and Shuster were classic nerds: bespectacled, unathletic, shy around girls. It's hardly surprising, then, that many of their dreams centered around omnipotence. While Shuster applied himself to lifting weights, Siegel began envisioning a man of limitless might. Given his unarticulated agenda of creating a modern myth that would both embody adolescent angst and offer a palliative for its pains, it's hardly surprising that it took Siegel several years to come up with the final version of Superman.

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