Joe Shuster, the Brilliant Canadian Artist of “Superman”

Pencil in hand, Joe Shuster enjoyed drawing and sketching as a young boy. Born in Toronto, Ontario on July 10, 1914, Joseph Shuster’s parents Julius and Ida Shuster, were hard-working but poor immigrants from the Netherlands and the Ukraine. He had one sister, Joan, according to Absolute Astronomy, and was a cousin of Frank Shuster. (Frank grew up to become half of the famous Canadian comedy team, Wayne and Shuster.) Helping out, Joe had a newspaper route delivering the Toronto Daily Star.

The Shuster family moved to Cleveland, Ohio when Joe was 10 years old. He attended the Glenville High School as a teenager and met Jerry Siegel in class. Joe earned a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art and took night courses in art to hone his skills. After school hours, he worked at a sign painting shop.

Joe Shuster Set New Standards

Combining their individual talents into a creative duet, Jerry wrote storylines and Joe produced art for comic books. Publishing their work in science fiction magazines and in DC-National, the cartooning pair created “Super-Man” in 1933, a character that was on the villainous side of evil rather than the good. The anti-hero didn’t fly with the publishers. Joe continued to draw comic books such as Spy, Radio Squad and Slam Bradley. Altering the comic book standards from the standard newspaper strip-style, Joe broke up the pages, using fewer panels, fashioning angles and even whole splash pages to entertain the readers.

It was the Great Depression era and the public was ready for a hero. Jerry Siegel turned their first comic book character from a villain into a crime-fighter in 1934, with Joe Shuster creating the handsome, brave, leading muscle man in blue tights and with a red, fluttering cape. He also drew Superman’s meek alter-ego Clark Kent with thick-lens glasses, his pretty love interest Lois Lane, and other significant characters. Joe’s memories of Toronto helped him envision the settings of Metropolis, said the Associated Press on CTV, and initially named Clark Kent’s newspaper The Daily Star after the Toronto Daily Star. The editor changed the title to The Daily Planet.

Superman Copyright to Publisher

It took four years to catch the interest of publishers and then Superman soared into popularity under the DC’s Action Comics title. The policy of the early comic book business was that the publishers held the rights to creations. Joe and Jerry sold their first Superman pages – all 13 of them – for $130 plus a waiver giving the publisher all rights.

Superman Magazine, Superman comic strips, and Superman Sundays in newspapers kept the innovative creators busy. Though still a young man, Joe was having vision difficulties, enough to hinder his drawing abilities. He hired several assistants to help with the tremendous workload and the urgent deadlines imposed from Superman’s burgeoning fame.

Shuster and Siegel Sued for Royalties

Working on a ten-year contract, drawing and writing the Superman comic franchise was profitable for the two creators. Superman was fast becoming the biggest comic book hero of his time. Joe and Jerry wanted their fair piece of the pie from the publishers and sued for royalties in 1947. Since they had originally signed away the copyright in good faith, they lost the court case. National Allied Publications settled with them for $94,000 but fired them, dropping the men from participating in their own creation; in a crushing blow, their by-line was also dropped.

After losing the legal battle, Joe nearly evaporated from the comics arena. He drew the unsuccessful “Funnyman” comic for a while, then, it is thought, Joe drew horror comics for a while and produced freelance and pop art. By 1976, he was living in a nursing home in California, destitute and legally blind. The year before, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster began a campaign to regain some income from their valuable creation. The Superman movie was about to take new audiences by storm. Warner Brothers, then the owner of the DC Comics property, reinstated the creators’ by-lines and gave each man $20,000 a year plus medical benefits for the rest of their lives. (The amount was increased to $30,000 in the 1990s.) Fortune and fame was to elude the inventors of one of the most recognizable and lucrative characters in comics history.

Cover of the first Action Comic featuring Superman’s debut, June 1938. Character created by Canadian Joe Shuster. Wikimedia Commons

Joe Shuster Awards

Just after his 78th birthday, Joseph Shuster died on July 30, 1992. His cartooning work “was very polished and illustrative, and his style itself became a model for many artists in the comic book industry during the thirties,” commented Comic-Art & Graffix Gallery. In the same year that he died, Joe was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. In 2005, the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame was introduced to acknowledge the fine work of Canadian cartoonists, writers and publishers. The late Joe Shuster was made the first member. A Canadian postage stamp was issued on October 2, 1995 commemorating Shuster’s Superman, and Shuster was remembered in a “Heritage Minute” on Canadian television.

Jerry Siegel continued to write scripts for the comic book industry, penning horrors, romances, and the more famous comics of The Phantom and Mandrake. He later wrote X-Men and the Human Torch. Jerry died in January 1996 at age 81. His widow and daughter have continued the battle to regain copyright of Superman.

Canadian Cartoonist Changed the World

Superman boldly cleared the road for other comics crusaders donned in colourful garb and heralding amazing powers to save the world. And to think, it was an imaginative, talented Canadian kid from Toronto and his innovative friend from Cleveland that really changed the world.

Source:

The Encyclopedia of American Comics from 1897 to the Present, edited by Ron Goulart, published by Promised Land Productions, New York 1990. Pp 331-332, 351-353.