The men behind Superman

We all know who Superman is. If you're younger than 75, you don't even remember a time when he didn't exist. With the possible exception of Mickey Mouse, the indestructible and incorruptible Man of Steel is surely the most famous fictional character ever created in cartoon form.

The two nerds from Cleveland who created Superman are not nearly as famous as he is, but they're not exactly obscure, either. Since the mid-1970s, when the national news media took notice of their plight, it's been well known that Jerry Siegel (the writer) and Joe Shuster (the illustrator) naïvely sold their rights to the character for next to nothing - and that their fight for a bigger piece of the action has led to a series of victories and has continued even after both men died in the 1990s.

A lot has been written about Superman over the years, but until now there has never been an entire book devoted to the lives of Siegel and Shuster. Reading Brad Ricca's Super Boys, the first such book, suggests a reason for that: Superman aside (and admittedly that's a very big aside), Siegel and Shuster are not that absorbing a subject.

Mr Ricca, who teaches at Case Western Reserve University, clearly knows a lot about comic books and has done his homework. He gives an admirably thorough account of Siegel and Shuster's long struggle to get their creation published; their decision to sell the rights for $130 in 1938; and their much longer struggle to get a fair shake, or at least a fairer one, from National Comics (now DC), the corporate behemoth that Superman built and that is now owned by Time Warner. He has unearthed everything from the short stories Siegel wrote for his high school newspaper to the kinky illustrations Shuster was reduced to doing for sleazy magazines in the mid-1950s, just a few years after he and Siegel were separated from Superman and fired by National.

What he has not done is make the case for Siegel and Shuster as more than one-hit wonders. That they came up with the first bona fide superhero, thus helping to change popular culture and sowing the seeds of a multimillion-dollar industry, is a remarkable accomplishment, which Mr Ricca recounts grippingly. But was it more than a lucky accident?

The author acknowledges that "sooner or later someone else would have done it", and that Superman had many antecedents. What made Siegel and Shuster's creation special, he argues, is the strange triangle they created: Superman, the mysterious and powerful outsider; his alter ego, Clark Kent, the quintessential schlemiel; and Lois Lane, the beauty who yearns for Superman but disdains Clark. "The added register of that character having to hide his true identity under a bold lie - so as to fool a girl - defined not only the genre, but its readers as well," he writes.

Siegel had an active if largely anonymous second life as a comic-book writer in the 1950s and beyond, including an unheralded return to Superman, but neither he nor Shuster ever again created anything remotely comparable. Siegel (without Shuster) did have some success at National with the Spectre, a ghostly avenger with otherworldly powers, who lasted several years and was later sporadically revived by various writers. But that was it. The last hero the two created together, shortly after National let them go, was Funnyman, who had an inspired premise - he "used comedy gags to defeat his enemies" - and a short life. "In some cases," Mr Ricca writes dryly, "the jokes were just not that good," and reading between the lines I suspect he's being kind.

There is certainly drama in the story of how two sons of Jewish immigrants, awkward high school outcasts who loved science fiction and didn't know how to talk to girls, found the formula for turning their fantasies and frustrations into comic-book gold, then watched helplessly as most of that gold went to other people. But there isn't necessarily a book's worth.

Presumably to amp up the drama, Mr Ricca often pretends to know things he could not possibly know about what Siegel, Shuster and others thought, felt, knew or did ("Jerry went up to his solitary room, silently furious"; "Weird, he thought, even as the chills reached his fingertips"). In the book's jarring climax, he argues that pretty much every aspect of the original Superman mythos was taken directly from Jerry Siegel's life. That's a risky claim to make about any work of fiction, even a comic book.

And in what seems like an effort to amp up the literary cachet too, Super Boys has a subtitle ("The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster - the Creators of Superman") that evokes The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the celebrated Michael Chabon novel based in part on Siegel and Shuster, although probably at least as much on Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America. Alas, Brad Ricca is no Michael Chabon, and despite his dogged accumulation of detail and his endearingly geeky love for his subjects, Super Boys demonstrates persuasively that truth is not always more entertaining than fiction.

SUPER BOYS
The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster - the Creators of Superman
Brad Ricca
St Martin's Press; 423 pages; $27.99

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