Joe Shuster

Joseph "Joe" Shuster (July 10, 1914 – July 30, 1992) was a Canadian-American comic book artist. He was best known for co-creating the DC Comics character Superman, with writer Jerry Siegel, first published in Action Comics #1 (June 1938).

Shuster was involved in a number of legal battles concerning the ownership of the Superman character, eventually gaining recognition for his part in its creation. His comic book career after Superman was relatively unsuccessful, and by the mid-1970s Shuster had left the field completely due to partial blindness.

He and Siegel were inducted into both the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2005, the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association instituted the Joe Shuster Awards, named to honor the Canada-born artist.

Early life and career
Joseph Shuster was born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family. His father, Julius, an immigrant from Rotterdam, had a tailor shop in Toronto's garment district. His mother, Ida, had come from Kiev in Ukraine. His family, including his sister, Jean, lived on Bathurst, Oxford, and Borden Streets, and Shuster attended Ryerson and Lansdowne Public Schools. One cousin is comedian Frank Shuster of the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster.

As a youngster, Shuster worked as a newspaper boy for the Toronto Daily Star, The family barely made ends meet, and the budding young artist would scrounge for paper, which the family could not afford. He recalled in 1992, "I would go from store to store in Toronto and pick up whatever they threw out. One day, I was lucky enough to find a bunch of wallpaper rolls that were unused and left over from some job. The backs were blank, naturally. So it was a goldmine for me, and I went home with every roll I could carry. I kept using that wallpaper for a long time."

Sometime in 1924, when Shuster was 9 or 10, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There Shuster attended Glenville High School and befriended his later collaborator, writer Jerry Siegel, with whom he began publishing a science fiction fanzine called Science Fiction. Siegel described his friendship with the similarly shy and bespectacled Shuster: "When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together."

The duo broke into comics at Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications, the future DC Comics, working on the landmark New Fun — the first comic-book series to consist solely of original material rather than using any reprinted Newspaper comic strips — debuting with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" and the Supernatural crime-fighter strip Doctor Occult, both in New Fun #6 (Oct. 1935). In a 1992 interview, in which he used the fledgling publisher's future name, he said the two sample strips were not the ones eventually published: "One was drawn on brown wrapping paper and the other was drawn on the back of wallpaper from Toronto. And DC approved them, just like that! It’s incredible! But DC did say, 'We like your ideas, we like your scripts and we like your drawings. But please, copy over the stories in pen and ink on good paper.' So I got my mother and father to lend me the money to go out and buy some decent paper, the first drawing paper I ever had, in order to submit these stories properly to DC Comics."

Creation of Superman
Siegel and Shuster created a bald telepathic villain, bent on dominating the world, as the title character in the short story "The Reign of the Superman", published in Siegel's 1933 fanzine Science Fiction #3. The character was not successful, and Siegel eventually devised the more familiar version of the character. Shuster modeled the hero on Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and his bespectacled alter ego, Clark Kent, on a combination of Harold Lloyd and Shuster himself, with the name "Clark Kent" derived from movie stars Clark Gable and Kent Taylor. Lois Lane was modelled on Joanne Carter, who later became Siegel's wife.

Siegel and Shuster then began a six-year quest to find a publisher. Titling it The Superman, Siegel and Shuster offered it to Consolidated Book Publishing, who had published a 48-page black-and-white comic book entitled Detective Dan: Secret Operative No. 48. Although the duo received an encouraging letter, Consolidated never again published comic books. Shuster took this to heart and, by varying accounts, either burned every page of the story, with the cover surviving only because Siegel saved it from the fire, or he tore the story to shreds, with only two cover sketches remaining. Siegel and Shuster each compared this character to Slam Bradley, an adventurer the pair had created for Detective Comics #1 (May 1939). In 1938, after that proposal had languished among others at More Fun Comics — published by National Allied Publications, the primary precursor of DC Comics — editor Vin Sullivan chose it as the cover feature for National's Action Comics #1 (June 1938). The following year, Siegel & Shuster initiated the syndicated Superman comic strip.

As part of the deal which saw Superman published in Action Comics, Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to the company in return for $130 and a contract to supply the publisher with material.

Siegel and Shuster's status as children of Jewish immigrants is also thought to have influenced their work. Timothy Aaron Pevey has argued that they crafted "an immigrant figure whose desire was to fit into American culture as an American", something which Pevey feels taps into an important aspect of American identity.

When Superman first appeared, Superman's alter ego Clark Kent worked for the Daily Star newspaper, named by Shuster after the Toronto Daily Star, his old employer in Toronto. Shuster said he modeled the cityscape of Superman's home city, Metropolis, on that of his old hometown. When the comic strip received international distribution, the company permanently changed the name to the Daily Planet.

Legal issues
Shuster became famous as the co-creator of one of the most well-known and commercially successful fictional characters of the 20th century. National Allied Publications claimed copyright to his and Siegel's work, and when the company refused to compensate them to the degree they believed appropriate, Siegel and Shuster, in 1946, near the end of their 10-year contract to produce Superman stories, sued National over rights to the characters. They ultimately accepted $94,000 to stop pursuing the claim after a court ruled that National had validly purchased the rights to Superman when it bought the first Superman story. But after this bitter legal wrangling, National cropped Shuster and Siegel's byline. In 1947, the team rejoined editor Sullivan, by then the founder and publisher of the comic-book company Magazine Enterprises where they created the short-lived comical crime-fighter Funnyman. While Siegel continued to write comics for a variety of publishers, Shuster largely dropped out of sight.

Later career
Shuster continued to draw comics after the failure of Funnyman, although exactly what he drew is uncertain. Comic historian Ted White wrote that Shuster continued to draw horror stories into the 1950s. In 2009, comics historian Craig Yoe said Shuster was one of the anonymous illustrators for Nights of Horror, an underground sadomasochistic fetish comic-book series. This was based on character similarities, and comparison of the artistic style between the illustrations and those of the cast of the Superman comics.

In 1964, when Shuster was living on Long Island with his elderly mother, he was reported to be earning his living as a freelance cartoonist; he was also "trying to paint pop art — serious comic strips — and hope[d] eventually to promote a one-man show in some chic Manhattan gallery". At one point, his worsening eyesight prevented him from drawing, and he worked as a deliveryman in order to earn a living. Jerry Robinson claimed Shuster had delivered a package to the DC building, embarrassing the employees. He was summoned to the CEO, given one hundred dollars, and told to buy a new coat and find another job. By 1976, Shuster was almost blind and living in a California nursing home.

In 1967, when the Superman copyright came up for renewal, Siegel launched a second lawsuit, which also proved unsuccessful.

In 1975, Siegel launched a publicity campaign, in which Shuster participated, protesting DC Comics' treatment of him and Shuster. In the face of a great deal of negative publicity over their handling of the affair (and due to the upcoming Superman movie), DC's parent company Warner Communications reinstated the byline dropped more than thirty years earlier and granted the pair a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year plus health benefits. The first issue with the restored credit was Superman #302 (August 1976).

Death
Shuster died July 30, 1992 in at his West Los Angeles home of congestive heart failure and hypertension. He was 78.

Awards and honors

 * In 1985, DC Comics named Shuster as one of the honorees in the company's 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great.
 * In 1992, Shuster was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.
 * In 2005, Shuster was inducted into the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame for his contributions to comic books.
 * The Joe Shuster Awards, started in 2005, were named in honor of the Canadian-born Shuster, and honor achievements in the field of comic book publishing by Canadian creators, publishers and retailers.
 * In Shuster's home town of Toronto, the street Joe Shuster Way is named in his honor.

Charlton

 * Crime and Justice #20–21 (1954)
 * Hot Rods and Racing Cars #20 (1955)
 * Space Adventures #11–13 (1954)
 * Strange Suspense Stories #19, 21–22 (1954)
 * This Magazine is Haunted #18–20 (1954)

DC

 * Action Comics #1–24 (1938–40)
 * Adventure Comics #32–41, 103–109 (1938–46)
 * Detective Comics #1–32 (1937–39)
 * More Fun Comics (diverse stories): #10–48; (Superboy): #101–105, 107 (1936–46)
 * New Comics (then, New Adventure Comics) #2–31 (1936–38)
 * New York's World Fair #1–2 (1939)
 * Superman #1–4 (1939–40)