Notes on Jerry and Joe – Episode 4

The main sources for the episode included:

• Brad Ricca, Super Boys – The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Creators of Superman (2013, St. Martin’s Press)
• Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow – Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004, Basic Books)
• Helene Stapinski and Bonnie Siegler, The American Way – A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman and Marilyn Monroe (2023, Simon & Schuster)
• Detective Comics, Inc. v. Bruns Publications, Inc., 111 F.2d 432 (2d Cir. 1940)
• Dwight R. Decker, “The Reich Strikes Back”, Amazing Heroes, November 1, 1987
• Jules Feiffer, The Comic Book Heroes, (1965, Dial Press)
• Jerry Siegel, Creation of a Superhero (unpublished autobiography, circa 1980)
• John Kobler, “Up, up, and awa-ay! The Rise of Superman Inc.”, Saturday Evening Post, June 21, 1941
• Tom Andrae, Geoffrey Blum and Gary Coddington, “Of Superman and kids with dreams” (interview with Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Joanne Siegel), Nemo, The Classic Comics Library, April 1983

Jerry Siegel’s home movie of the 1940 Superman Day at the New York World’s Fair can be found on YouTube.

The correspondence quoted comes from the material included as evidence in the Siegel family’s suit to regain the rights to Superman in the early 2000s.

The English translation of Das Schwarze Korps‘ article about Jerry Siegel and Superman from April 1940 comes from Dwight Decker’s own translation for his 1987 Amazing Heroes article. I simply found it more conversational, and the less academic approach than many translations I saw I think felt closer to how a propaganda newspaper would phrase things.

Everything from the Superman comic book I mentioned has been reprinted by DC Comics in its amazing Superman The Golden Age series of books, which collects every Superman comic book story in chronological order of publication. Sterling Books’ reprints of the Superman daily and Sunday Newspaper strips are also well worth a look.

Yet again, I must beg you, dear reader, to check out and even subscribe to Daniel Best‘s bibliography of Jerry Siegel on Substack. His listing for 1938 turns up some great material that was too late for inclusion in the episode, like Jerry trying to enlist Jack Liebowitz in a scheme Jerry dreamed up of a correspondence school on joke writing (Jack did not publish How to be Funny, a book which Jerry even went to the trouble of copyrighting). The listing for 1939 turns up the fact that Jerry had his (and Joe’s) contract amended so he was paid for the additional (non-Superman) features he wrote, like Slam Bradley and Spy (and later The Spectre, Robotman and others) separately, which effectively meant that Jerry made more money than Joe, who only drew Superman by this point.