If you don't want to help me, there's no obligation. So if any of you want to help me, I'd appreciate the help. But I am going to see to it that this gets fixed, and I am not going to stop until it does. I got myself a cup of coffee and I walked out to the front of my studio, and I kind of announced: 'Guys, anybody in the studio who wants to read this letter can read this letter. I mean, I stood in my studio, and after I read it, I was quiet. It was almost as if I had cast the question out into the cosmos and it came to me in this letter. Q: After asking this question for so long, what was it like having the answers literally delivered to you in the form of Siegel's letter?Ī: Stunning.

I'm like, 'Really, is this some big deal? Are they dead? What the hell's going on?'

And the more I would ask, the more of a cold shoulder I got. So when I worked at DC Comics and I made friends with guys in the production room, I would casually ask, 'What happened with these guys that created Superman?' And I would get the cold shoulder. I saw their names, and then they suddenly disappeared and I didn't understand. He is the number one guy, so of course I was curious, and I also grew up reading comic books just like everybody else. He is the number one iconic fantasy literature hero. He's more iconic, he's more well-known by people in the world than Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Why was their story so important to you?Ī: Because they had created Superman, probably the most iconic character in American literature. Q: In the episode, you talk about how you routinely asked what had happened to Siegel and Shuster well before you got involved with them. Eventually, National took over and just hired Shuster's assistants themselves, guys like Paul Cassidy and Leo Nowak.Comic book artist Neal Adams talks about the fight to right the wrongs against Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. And sure enough, Shuster had to soon employ a number of artists to help him with the artwork on their various Superman features (they were doing two comic books, one of them a giant all-Superman anthology series, plus a daily comic strip). If they then wanted to spend that money to hire other creators, that was their business. The way that National Comics (now DC) treated Superman with regards to Siegel and Shuster is that they acted as if Siegel and Shuster were their own distinct company producing Superman stories that National would then publish upon paying Siegel and Shuster a goodly chunk of money. He could do it) while Joe Shuster could not. However, between the two of them, Siegel could easily keep up with the demand for new Superman stories (well, I'm sure 'easy' is a stretch, but you know what I mean. Creating Superman stories was now by far their number one priority and they were paid quite well for it. Once Superman hit big, though, it changed things a lot.

Jerry siegel and artist joe shuster