Joe Shuster

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Shuster was born in Toronto in 1914, too poor to afford drawing paper, so he wandered from store to store collecting whatever scraps merchants threw out. One day he found a cache of unused wallpaper rolls, their blank backs an unexpected treasure, and he carried home every one he could hold. That same boy, working as a newspaper delivery kid for the Toronto Daily Star, would go on to give the world one of the most recognizable figures ever put on a printed page. How did a child of Jewish immigrant parents, scrounging for paper in a garment-district neighborhood, become the artist behind Superman? And once he achieved that, why did the rest of his life look so different from the myth he helped create?

• 2. Paper and Cleveland

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  Julius Shuster, Joe's father, had emigrated from Rotterdam and ran a tailor shop in Toronto's garment district. Joe's mother, Ida, had come from Kiev, in what is now Ukraine. The family moved through several addresses on Bathurst, Oxford, and Borden Streets before Julius was recorded at 48 Major Street in 1922 and at 101 Oxford Street the following two years. Joe attended Ryerson and Lansdowne Public Schools, where his comic-book-obsessed imagination had no obvious outlet. His cousin was Frank Shuster, half of the celebrated Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster, but Joe's gifts ran toward the visual rather than the verbal.

  Sometime in 1924, when Joe was nine or ten, the family relocated to Cleveland, Ohio. There, at Glenville High School, he met Jerry Siegel, a writer who was, by Siegel's own description, similarly shy and bespectacled. Siegel remembered the moment their partnership clicked: "When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together." The two began publishing a science fiction fanzine called Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. That fanzine, produced on next to nothing, was the laboratory where Superman would eventually be born.

• 3. Building the Man of Steel

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  Siegel's fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization published a short story in its third issue, in 1932, featuring a bald telepathic villain bent on world domination called "The Reign of the Superman". The story failed, and the character was shelved. The following year, Siegel recycled the name and reimagined the figure entirely, turning him from a menace into a hero.

  Shuster made specific choices about who Superman would look like. He modeled the hero's physical bearing on the actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Clark Kent, Superman's nearsighted alter ego, blended the actor Harold Lloyd with Shuster himself, and the name "Clark Kent" stitched together the first name of Clark Gable with the surname of Kent Taylor. Lois Lane was modeled on Joanne Carter, a model Shuster hired directly. She later married Siegel in 1948.

  Scholars have noted that Siegel and Shuster's backgrounds as children of Jewish immigrants may have shaped the character's appeal. Timothy Aaron Pevey argued they crafted "an immigrant figure whose desire was to fit into American culture as an American," tapping into something Pevey sees as central to American identity. Neither Shuster nor Siegel ever said so themselves.

  Superman's fictional home, Metropolis, was modeled on Toronto's cityscape, a private tribute to the city where Shuster grew up. Clark Kent's newspaper employer, the Daily Star, was named after the Toronto Daily Star, where young Joe had delivered papers as a boy. When the Superman comic strip reached international distribution, the publisher changed the name permanently to the Daily Planet.

• 4. The Long Road to Publication

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  Getting Superman into print took four years and a string of rejections. Siegel and Shuster pitched the character to Consolidated Book Publishing, which had previously produced a 48-page black-and-white title called Detective Dan: Secret Operative #48. Consolidated sent an encouraging letter but never published comics again. Shuster was devastated. Accounts differ on exactly what he did next: some say he burned nearly every page of the story, with only the cover surviving because Siegel pulled it from the fire; others say he tore the pages to shreds, leaving only two cover sketches intact.

  By 1938, the proposal was sitting mostly ignored at More Fun Comics, part of National Allied Publications, the company that would eventually become DC Comics. Editor Vin Sullivan chose it as the cover feature for Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938. Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to the character for $130 and a contract to supply the publisher with material. The very first issue would anchor one of the longest-running characters in the history of popular culture.

  The rights deal had been struck during a period of financial strain for the publisher. Founder Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson had entered a corporate arrangement with Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz called Detective Comics, Inc., and it was under that label that Action Comics #1 appeared. A series of mergers and name changes eventually produced National Periodical Publications, and then, in 1977, the formal adoption of DC Comics as the company's official name, though that nickname had been in use since 1940.

• 5. Rights, Lawsuits, and Loss

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  Near the end of Siegel and Shuster's ten-year contract, in 1946, the two men sued Detective Comics, Inc. to have the contract annulled and reclaim ownership of Superman. The New York State Supreme Court ruled against them the following year, finding the publisher had validly purchased all rights when it acquired the first Superman story. A subsequent interlocutory judgment found that rights to Superboy, however, belonged to Siegel. Detective Comics Inc. paid Siegel and Shuster $94,000 for the Superboy rights along with their written acknowledgment that Superman belonged to the publisher.

  Afterward, the company stripped Siegel and Shuster's byline from Superman stories. In 1967, when the Superman copyright came up for renewal, Siegel filed a second lawsuit. It also failed. By 1975, Siegel launched a public campaign protesting DC's treatment of both men. Jerry Robinson, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, joined the effort alongside comic-book artist Neal Adams.

  By 1976, Shuster was nearly blind and living in a California nursing home. A combination of sustained negative publicity and the prospect of an upcoming Superman film pushed DC's parent company, Warner Communications, to act. The company restored the byline that had been stripped more than thirty years earlier, beginning with Superman #302 in August 1976. It also granted Siegel and Shuster a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year, later raised to $30,000, plus health benefits.

• 6. Hidden Work, Hard Years

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  After the failure of Funnyman, a short-lived comical crime-fighter Shuster co-created with Siegel and editor Vin Sullivan at Magazine Enterprises in 1947, his career lost its footing. Comic historian Ted White reported that Shuster continued drawing horror stories into the 1950s, though the full scope of what he produced during this period remains uncertain.

  The most startling chapter of his later career came to light only in 2004, when writer Gerard Jones revealed that Shuster had been the anonymous illustrator of Nights of Horror, an underground sadomasochistic fetish paperback series. The books had attracted serious attention in 1954, when they were cited in the trial of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. Psychiatric expert and anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham alleged that the gang's leader had read the books and that the books bore responsibility for his crimes. New York banned and seized the series, and the case reached the Supreme Court. The artist was never publicly identified at the time. Comics historian Craig Yoe backed Jones's identification in 2009, pointing to close similarities between the illustration style in Nights of Horror and the look of Shuster's Superman cast.

  In 1964, Shuster was living on Long Island with his elderly mother and reported to be earning a living through freelance cartooning. He had also been experimenting with pop art and, according to press accounts of the time, hoping to mount a one-man show in a Manhattan gallery. As his eyesight deteriorated further, drawing became impossible and he worked as a deliveryman. Jerry Robinson later recounted that Shuster had once delivered a package to the DC building itself, an encounter that reportedly embarrassed DC employees. Shuster was brought before the company's chief executive, given one hundred dollars, and told to find another job.

• 7. Legacy

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  Shuster died on the 30th of July, 1992, at his home in West Los Angeles, of congestive heart failure and hypertension. He was 78. At the time of his death he carried nearly $20,000 in personal debt; DC Comics agreed to pay it off in exchange for an agreement from his heirs not to challenge the company's ownership of Superman.

  The honors came steadily, many of them arriving late. DC had named him one of the honorees in its 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great in 1985. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992, the same year he died, and into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2005, the Joe Shuster Awards were established to recognize achievements in Canadian comic book publishing, naming the prize after the Toronto-born artist. A street in Toronto, Joe Shuster Way, bears his name, and in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood, where he and Siegel first became friends, Amor Avenue was renamed Joe Shuster Lane.