Notes on Jerry and Joe – Episode 3

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)
• Grant Geissman, The History of EC Comics, (2025, Taschen)
• Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, “Letters to the Batcave – 45th anniversary edition”, Detective Comics issue 512 (March, 1982)
• Jerry Siegel, Creation of a Superhero (unpublished autobiography, circa 1980)
• Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, DC Comics Before Superman – Major Malcolm Wheeler Nicholson’s Pulp Comics (2018, Hermes Press)
• Ted White, “The Spawn of M.C. Gaines” in All In Color For a Dime (edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, 1965, Dial Press)
• 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

The correspondence quoted comes from both the material included as evidence in the Siegel family’s suit to regain the rights to Superman in the early 2000s and used in the 1947 Westchester County Supreme Court of New York suit, Siegel and Shuster v. National Comics.

The entirety of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Popular Comics pitch was published in 1984 in a two-issue series, Siegel and Shuster: Dateline 1930s by Eclipse Publishing.

I was able to get access to scans of microfilms of Dr. Occult in New Fun Comics and More Fun Comics, and Slam Bradley in Detective Comics.

Once again, I have to hype Daniel Best’s fantastic bibliography of Jerry Siegel, which is being published even as this podcast is being dropped, so I haven’t been able to fully utilize the materials and discoveries he’s made. 1938 is here. It’s a paid subscription, but well worth the money (Daniel also blogs about a lot of other cool pop culture things)

Occasionally in the making of this podcast, your humble servant develops… certain opinions on certain things that cannot be substantiated but I feel them in my bones. The artist of the cover of Action Comics 1 is one of those things. Last summer I did a lengthy Bluesky thread about how I think it was Jerry and Joe’s editor (and early DC cover artist) Vin Sullivan.