War, Money, Booze, and Superheroes

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 u2014 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.