Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 41
Young Jewish writers and artists who were
desperate to work for advertising firms and major
publishers, found every door shut on them by an
institutionalised anti-Semitism that permeated
their chosen industries… headed towards their
last and only real hope: comic books.
It led to a new movement to create (cheaper) brand new content to fill these 64-page
‘comic books’. Despite the medium’s massive growth throughout the next half-decade, though, it was only in April 1938
that the comic book truly came of age.
The Dawn of the Supermen
As the Great Depression forced young
people to go out and make whatever money they could for their families, young
Jewish writers and artists, who were desperate to work for advertising firms and
major publishers, found every door shut
on them by an institutionalised anti-Semitism that permeated their chosen industries. Locked out of the big leagues, they
were forced to rely on their own ingenuity, and headed towards their last and
only real hope: comic books.
Comic books were still seen as the lowest of all art forms; a cheap laughing stock
that hadn’t yet come close to shedding its
reputation as nothing more than a novelty
product and the lonely, unwanted cousin
of newspaper comic-strips. But, it was one
place that these young, hungry (in both
senses of the word) writers and artists
could be all but guaranteed to find work.
In the same way that it took the Beatles
to knock the doors down for the British
Invasion of the 1960s and the seismic
shift in popular music that came with it,
it took two nerdy Jewish teenagers to do
the same for the comic book. Clevelandnative Jerry Siegel and Toronto-born Joe
Shuster met when they were just 16 years
old, and bonded over their mutual love
for science fiction and the pulps. They
were no doubt further united by their
common backgrounds as children of Jewish immigrants.
Together, the duo created science fiction fan magazines and even contributed
a new character, Slam Bradley, to the first
issue of Detective Comics in 1937 – the
comic book that would soon give DC
Comics its name (and be home to Batman
for 75 years and counting). And then...
well, and then they created Superman.
Making his first appearance in Action
Comics #1, Superman was a character that
Siegel and Shuster had been refining for
years, and, along with being by far the duo’s
biggest creation, he was also pretty clearly
their most personal. Though the Man of
Steel draws heavily from a rich tradition of
heroic supermen, from Samson to Hercules,
as well as everything from the circus strongmen of the time to pulp heroes like Doc
Savage, his most obvious roots lie in the
lives and culture of his two creators.
On an obviously conscious level, Superman is a reflection of Siegel and Shuster’s
experiences as Jewish immigrants; a saviour for the downtrodden and disadvantaged on the one hand and the ultimate
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