Siegel and Shuster’s big break came in 1938 when they sold their first Superman comic to Action Comics for $130 for 13 pages. Jerry himself served as the model for Superman and his future wife, Joanne, was the model for Lois Lane when Joe Shuster first drew them in 1935 at the Siegel home in Glenville.
He wrote it down and the next morning when Shuster came over, he told him all about his new character-Superman.
According to Jerry Siegel, it all came down to one fateful night in 1932 when he couldn’t sleep “when all of a sudden” the idea of a strong man the likes of Hercules and Samson came to his mind. Siegel was the creative brains behind the Superman character and Shuster brought his vision to life with his impressive character designs. Was it fate or an intervention from Kryptonians that brought the Shuster family from Toronto to Cleveland in 1924? Whichever it was, it was certainly to pop culture’s benefit that the two young men who were, as The Saturday Evening Post once wrote, “two small, shy, nervous, myopic lads who can barely cope with ordinary body-building contraptions … the puniest kids in school picked on and bullied by their huskier classmates.” It was said that their mutual love of science fiction started their now-famous friendship, which isn’t hard to believe. During one of our conservations on the road she asked, “Did you know Superman is from Cleveland?” Of course I did! I think it’s one the first things that every Clevelander is taught, especially since my grandmother grew up only two miles from Jerry Siegel’s house on Kimberly Avenue. The pair used Superman to defeat Hitler, the Luftwaffe, and his army in a special comic released in 1940 (before the US entered WWII) about how their hero would end the war, including punching the Nazi leader in the face.Ī few weeks ago, I was driving home from the West Side Market with a friend who is new to the area. As both were the sons of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution, they sympathized strongly with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Is the cartoon with Superman and Hitler? Since Siegel and Shuster were Jewish, they used Superman as a tool to oppose Hitler and Nazism. By Robyn Marcs, Grants Manager at the Western Reserve Historical Society
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