How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture

[DGUtley]

How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture - On Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman

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In a small attic bedroom in Cleveland, in the Jewish neighborhood of Glenville, Jerry Siegel tried to sleep. It wasn’t the summer heat that was keeping him awake nor his snoring older brother Leo snoozing noisily beside him. Twisting and turning, Jerry had a new idea for a story in his head. It involved a character like Samson, Hercules, and Moses all rolled into one—a new character that was an amalgamation of everything he had ever written or read. And he had read a lot.
Jerry, a nerd with glasses, had had few friends at Glenville High—ignored not just by the girls but the boys, too. He had been bullied for years, kids taunting him with rhymes like “Siegel, Seagull, bird of an eagle. Fly, seagull! Let’s see you fly!” He had actually tried to fly once, jumping off the garage, holding an umbrella. But the umbrella turned inside out, and Jerry hit the ground—hard.

Now, on that summer night when he couldn’t sleep, Jerry, twenty-one and unemployed, finally got up, put on his glasses, slipped into the bathroom so as not to wake his brother, and started writing. He went back to bed, then threw off the covers after a couple of hours and wrote some more. By dawn, he had a complete script. He got dressed and, story in hand, took the porch steps at a gallop.

Jerry ran ten blocks through his neighborhood, past the wooden houses with their neat lawns and big porches, over to the cracked sidewalks of his best friend Joe’s street. Huffing and puffing, Jerry arrived at the dilapidated two-story Maple Apartments that Joe and the Shuster family called home. “Joe, you gotta draw this,” he said, waking him up, thrusting the script beneath his blinking eyes.
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https://lithub.com/how-two-jewish-ki...=pocket-newtab

[stephenpe]

I discovered comics when I was about 8. Fell in love with SPidermna but I would read any super hero type. Then I discovered SciFi. Life was complete when technology brought them to life on movie screens. I thought the Superman movie with Christopher Reeve captured Clark Kent and most of it perfectly. The first Spiderman movies were great to me, also. Now just make Tarzan exactly like ERB wrote him.
Thanks for the link. Wonderful story.

[Admiral Ackbar]

The Jewish people know media and finance. There is no doubt about that.

[Standing Wolf]

... He became so obsessed with comic strips and pulp magazines that he ignored his actual schoolwork and was held back. One of his favorite books, Gladiator, told the tale of a man with superhuman strength who could run faster than a train and jump higher than a house. Another favorite character was Doc Savage, a pulp magazine hero whose first name was Clark and who was known as “The Man of Bronze.” ...

Philip Wylie's 'Gladiator' (1930) features a character who is the result of prenatal experimentation by his scientist father, and was really not much of a hero. An insatiable womanizer, he was pretty much a super-powered jerk generally.



Another Wylie story, 'The Savage Gentleman' (1932), which I just got around to reading the other day, involves a man who takes his infant son to a tropical island and trains him to be a perfect physical specimen - pretty much the basic outline of Doc Savage's origin story, which appeared in the pulp magazines a year later.

Superman owes more to Doc Savage than just their shared first name and the fact that one was The Man of Bronze and the other The Man of Steel. Doc Savage also had an Arctic getaway called the Fortress of Solitude, and preferred to capture or disable the bad guys rather than kill them.



https://theconversation.com/meet-doc...%20all%20costs.

[Standing Wolf]

Though he has no super powers, at least one costumed hero did precede The Man of Steel by two years: Lee Falk's 'The Phantom'.