Jerry Siegel
Jerome (Jerry) Siegel (October 17, 1914 - January 28, 1996) was the co-creator of Superman, the first of the great comic book heroes and one of the most recognizable fictional characters from the 20th century.
Related Topics:
October 17 - 1914 - January 28 - 1996 - Superman - Comic book
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The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of six children. His father Mitchell was a sign painter who opened a haberdashery and encouraged his son's artistic inclinations. Tragically, his father was shot and killed in his store by a thief when Jerry Siegel was still in junior high school.
Related Topics:
Lithuania - Cleveland, Ohio - Haberdashery
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Siegel was a fan of movies, comic strips, and especially of science fiction pulp fiction. He became active in what would become known as fandom, corresponding with other science fiction fans, including a young Jack Williamson. In 1929 he published what may have been the first science fiction fanzine, Cosmic Stories, which he produced with a manual typewriter and advertised in the classified section of Science Wonder Stories. He published several other booklets over the next few years.
Related Topics:
Science fiction - Pulp fiction - Fandom - Jack Williamson - 1929 - Fanzine - Science Wonder Stories
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Siegel attended Glenville High School and worked for its weekly student newspaper, The Torch. Siegel was a shy, not particularly popular student, but he achieved a bit of fame among his peers for his popular Tarzan parody, "Goober the Mighty". At Glenville he befriended his later collaborator Joe Shuster.
Related Topics:
Glenville High School - Tarzan - Joe Shuster
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He and Shuster created Superman, inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Fleischer Studio's Popeye cartoons, the pulp magazine hero Doc Savage, and Philip Wylie's 1930 novel Gladiator, and used the character in short stories and a 1933 comic strip. In 1938 they managed to sell it to DC Comics, which put Superman on the cover of the first issue of Action Comics in June.
Related Topics:
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan - Fleischer Studio - Popeye - Pulp magazine - Doc Savage - Philip Wylie - 1930 - 1933 - 1938 - DC Comics - Action Comics
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In 1946 the pair sued DC over rights to Superman, and after a two-year fight relinquished claim to the character in return for about $100,000. That severed their relationships with DC for a decade. Siegel became comic art director for Ziff-Davis Company in the early 1950s, and later returned to DC to write uncredited Superman stories in 1959. When he sued DC over the Superman rights again in 1963 he ended his relationship with the hero he'd created.
Related Topics:
1946 - Ziff-Davis - 1959 - 1963
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Siegel's later work would appear anonymously in Marvel Comics and Archie Comics. In 1968 he worked for Western Publishing, for which he wrote (along with Carl Barks) stories of the Junior Woodchucks' comic book and in 1972 he worked for Mondadori Editore on the Italian comic book Topolino, the local Disney's publication.
Related Topics:
Marvel Comics - Archie Comics - 1968 - Western Publishing - Carl Barks - Junior Woodchucks - Comic book - 1972 - Italian - Disney
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In 1975, Siegel launched a public-relations campaign to protest DC Comics' treatment of him and Shuster; ultimately Warner Communications, DC's parent company, awarded Siegel and Shuster $35,000 a year each for the rest of their lives and guaranteed that all comics, TV episodes, films and (later) video games starring Superman (including the popular Smallville show) would be required to state that Superman was "created by Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster."
Related Topics:
1975 - Warner Communications
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In 1986, Siegel was invited to write an "imaginary" final story for Superman, following the pivotal Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline and the miniseries Man of Steel, which reintroduced Superman. Siegel declined.
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In 2005, Seigel was posthumously awarded the Bill Finger Award For Excellence In Comic Book Writing.
Related Topics:
2005 - Bill Finger Award For Excellence In Comic Book Writing
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(Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books 2004).
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Latest news on jerry siegel
Fans Save Superman House
Superman fans raised $100,000 to save the dilapidated Cleveland house where the Man of Steel was dreamed up by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster more than 70 years ago, the Reuters news service reported.
May 30, 1898: Krypton Discovered, Decades Before Superman Arrives
1898: Two British researchers discover the element krypton. It's real, but it would inspire fantastic fiction. William Ramsay, a Scot, and his student Morris Travers, an Englishman, were searching for gases in the helium family. They boiled a sample of liquefied air until they got rid of the water, oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon. Then they placed the residue in a Plücker tube connected to an induction coil. It produced a spectrum with bright yellow and green lines. Because they had suspected its presence, but had to look for it by removing all that other stuff, Ramsay and Travers gave the element with atomic number 36 the name krypton, from the Greek kryptos for hidden (think cryptography or encryption). Within weeks, the scientifically dynamic duo had detected a duet of other noble gases: neon and xenon. Ramsay was already responsible for discovering helium (with Lord Rayleigh) in 1894 and argon in 1895, giving him ownership of nearly an entire column of the periodic table. (The noble gases used to be called the inert gases, but they have been found to be slightly reactive, forming compounds such as krypton difluoride and xenon tetroxide.) King Edward VII made Ramsay a Knight Commander of the Order of Bath in 1902. Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Krypton has a variety of uses today: in flashes for high-speed photography, in fluorescent lights in combination with argon, and to make so-called neon signs that have a greenish-yellow light. (Neon itself glows red.) Between 1960 and 1983, the meter was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red radiation of the krypton 86 isotope. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in Action Comics No. 1 (published June 1938), they named their superhero's home planet after the chemical element discovered 40 years earlier. Retellings of Superman's origins place his arrival on Earth around the time of World War I, a mere 20 years after Ramsay and Traver's discovery of krypton. Siegel and Shuster may have been inspired by the element's cryptic name, its ghastly glow or perhaps just its sound, like George Eastman favoring the strength of the letter K. Regardless, Superman and his legion of fans have made the fictional planet Krypton far better known than the real element. The fictional mineral kryptonite, which threatens Superman's strength and vitality, even has a real-life counterpart, almost. Mining researchers in Jadar, Serbia, in 2007 unearthed some sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide and learned that's what's written on a case of rock containing kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. "The new mineral does not contain fluorine," a mineralogist told the BBC, "and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite." But the miners named it jadarite, because the mineral does not contain the element krypton, and internationally accepted rules of nomenclature thus prevented it from being named kryptonite. Spoilsports. Then again, doesn't Jadar sound like the name of one of Superman's cousins or something on the planet Krypton? Source: Various
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