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War,
Money, Booze, and Superheroes
Perhaps
it is an offshoot of Hollywood’s success in turning comic-book superheroes
into bankable screen stars, but major publishers seem to have fallen
in love with the men behind all those costumed characters. The last
few years have seen the publication of biographies of, among others,
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the dynamic duo who, in the early 1960s,
gave birth to an entire universe, whose inhabitants include the
Fantastic Four, the Hulk and the X-Men.
 Men
of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
by Gerard Jones takes a somewhat broader view. Rather than focusing
on just one creator, it sweeps across the decades and covers dozens
of men who helped define one of America’s few indigenous art forms.
Even so, the tale, as Jones tells it, has two centers of gravity
around which all else revolves.
One
is Jerry Siegel, half of the team who created Superman. The other
is Harry Donenfeld and Jack Lebowitz, the publishers who would give
Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation to the masses, in the process
setting the stage for their company to become part of a media empire.
Among
comics fans, Siegel and Shuster’s tale is well known. In the late
1930s, two kids from Cleveland created a character that made millions
of dollars for Donenfeld’s DC Comics and, much later, Time Warner.
According to this version of the story, Siegel and Shuster received
a pittance for their efforts, and it wasn’t until decades later
that DC, shamed by Siegel and Shuster’s plight, gave each a sizable
retirement package, which still represented a fraction of Superman’s
worth.
How
Siegel and Shuster got the shaft is part of the comic-book industry’s
oral history. The story, with various embellishments, circulated
for years before historians started to dig for the facts.
Jones
appears to have a gift for digging, and his account of the great
Superman controversy is more balanced than the received truth for
his efforts. It is probably true that Donenfeld and DC’s financial
wizard, Lebowitz, were cheating Siegel and Shuster out of royalties.
Lebowitz was a socialist in his youth, so it isn’t surprising that
his approach to business reflected the socialist stereotype of how
a capitalist should behave. Superman may have been looking out for
humanity, but his boss was Ebenezer Scrooge.
It
is also true, however, that Siegel and Shuster were poor guardians
of their own interests. Contrary to the urban legend, they were
not mere kids when they sold Superman to Donenfeld for the first
issue of Action Comics. They were in their 20s. But rather than
hire a lawyer, as his friends suggested, Siegel stubbornly handled
his own negotiations with Donenfeld and Lebowitz. Shuster, for his
part, always seems to have deferred to his more outgoing partner.
Other
young creators weren’t so foolish. Bob Kane, the creator of record
of Batman, did hire a lawyer, and he negotiated a deal with Lebowitz
that would make him wealthy and ensure that he would always be credited
as Batman’s creator. In fact, however, Kane was running his own
studio on the side. A writer named Bill Finger was as responsible
for creating Batman as Kane was, and it wasn’t long before Kane
handed the task of drawing Batman over to other artists.
William
Moulton Marsden, the creator of Wonder Woman, negotiated arguably
an even better deal than Kane’s. To this day, if DC should ever
cease publishing Wonder Woman comics, the rights to the character
would revert to Marsden’s estate.
By
the time Siegel and Shuster finally sued DC Comics for creating
Superboy, a character derived from their Superman, it was too late.
That suit and others to come failed to win Siegel and Shuster back
their Man of Steel.
Jones’
narrative is more sympathetic to Siegel and Shuster than this retelling
indicates. It is plain that his heart is with the two boys from
Ohio, even if the facts are more ambivalent.
Donenfeld
and Lebowitz’s story has received much less attention over the years.
In the 1920s, Donenfeld made his name as a publisher and distributor
of pulp magazines. His output included fiction magazines like Spicy
Mystery, Spicy Western and Spicy Detective, which hooked their mostly
male readers with lurid covers depicting damsels in distress, and
girlie magazines. The Spicy pulps eventually would lead Donenfeld
to cross paths with New York City’s protector of public virtue,
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who no doubt would be aghast to learn
that far racier fare is now on sale in the airport that bears his
name.
However,
peddling porn was the least of Donenfeld’s transgressions. If you
wanted to make anything of yourself during Prohibition in New York
City, you almost had to be tied to the mob, and Donenfeld was. It
was a perfectly rational arrangement when you think about it: Magazine
publishers purchased their paper from mills in Canada. Whiskey and
other spirits slipped across the boarder from Canada. It only made
sense to hide whiskey shipments amid the rolls of paper Donenfeld
needed for his publishing business and grease a few palms to make
sure nobody looked closely at the cargo containers. Then as today,
border security was mostly a nice theory.
With
the repeal of Prohibition, Donenfeld’s mob ties became more of a
liability than an asset, especially as far as Lebowitz was concerned.
Fortunately, there was this new thing called the comic book that
held promise, and there were these guys from Cleveland who were
shopping around this strip about a man in tights who could bend
steel with his bare hands.
No
one could have predicted the overnight success of Superman. Soon
other pulp publishers were entering the game. They needed their
own superheroes, and they needed them fast and cheap. They subcontracted
work out to studios like the one run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger,
which was the birthplace of the jungle queen Sheena and Eisner’s
The Spirit. Even Siegel and Shuster were forced to hire help and
open a studio to keep up with their workload.
Most
of these young artists were Jewish, and with the exception of Siegel
and Shuster, most lived in New York. There were a few exceptions,
like Jack Cole, the troubled young artist from Pennsylvania who
created Plastic Man and, in the process, turned out some of the
most joyously bizarre comics of the 1940s. Cole would eventually
leave comics and become one of Hugh Hefner’s favorite cartoonists
at Playboy before taking his own life for reasons that will remain
a mystery.
If
you were a poor Jewish kid in New York and you had grown up reading
pulp adventure magazines, the new superhero comics offered a way
out the Lower East Side and into the Bronx, and then out of the
Bronx and into the suburbs. Kane, Eisner and future DC Comics editors
Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz all hailed from the Bronx, from
the neighborhoods that, decades later, Lee and Steve Ditko would
designate as Spider-Man’s home turf.
By
2003, Jewish contributions to the comics industry were the subject
of magazine articles and art exhibits. Arie Kaplan’s article, "How
the Jews created the Comic Book Industry" appeared in Reform
Judaism, and Kane’s top ghost artist, Jerry Robinson, mounted an
exhibition on superheroes at Atlanta’s William Breman Jewish Heritage
Museum.
As
the 1930s gave way to the 1940s, the comics were spoiling for war
with Hitler’s Germany. Donenfeld and Lebowitz were careful to keep
their characters out of the war in Europe before Pearl Harbor. They
knew most Americans opposed getting dragged into another of the
Old World’s wars and didn’t want to alienate their readers. But
other publishers were itching for a fight.
The
first to enter the fray was Lev Gleason, an avowed communist and
the publisher of Crime Does Not Pay and Daredevil. The first issue
of Daredevil, depicting its title hero and others fighting a giant
Hitler, hit newsstands in the late spring of 1941, just as Hitler
was turning on his ally Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.
After
Pearl Harbor, however, everyone got into the act. The most popular
superhero of the war years wasn’t Superman but Captain Marvel. His
comics circulated in the millions, in large part to GIs happy to
see the Big Red Cheese, as he was known, fight the Axis. His younger
counterpart, Captain Marvel Jr., even fought a Nazi supervillain,
Captain Nazi. (No superhero, it seems, was ever an enlisted man.)
After
World War II, Jones’ narrative skips along. He takes us from the
collapse of superhero comics in the 1950s, when horror and romance
comics were all the rage, to the rebirth of superheroes in the 1960s,
when Marvel Comics gave America heroes for the Baby Boom generation
— heroes with angst. Oddly, he glosses over Schwartz’s contributions
to reviving the genre, which included overseeing the revival of
heroes like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman, all
reconfigured for the Space Age.
 Marvel’s
early heroes are all products of the Cold War. The Fantastic Four
gained their powers while trying to beat the Russians into space,
and Bruce Banner became the Hulk thanks to an act of Soviet sabotage.
Still, when the war went hot in the jungles of Vietnam, they sat
it out. There wouldn’t be a comic book showing Spider-Man landing
a punch on Ho Chi Minh’s chin.
February
19, 2005
Franklin
Harris [send him e-mail]
is a columnist and online editor for The
Decatur (Ala.) Daily. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.
Copyright
© 2005 LewRockwell.com
Franklin
Harris Archives
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