Who is Jerry Siegel
Jerry Siegel wrote the first superhero. With his artist partner Joe Shuster, he created Superman, and in doing so invented the entire genre that the rest of this archive documents. The two were teenage friends from Cleveland who spent years developing the character before anyone would buy it. When someone finally did, they sold all rights for $130 and spent the rest of their lives fighting over that deal. Born in 1914, Siegel is both the founder of the form and its first cautionary tale about credit.
Superman's debut: Action Comics #1
[Superman](/characters/superman/) debuted in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), written by Siegel and drawn by [Joe Shuster](/creators/joe-shuster/). The two had been refining the concept since the early 1930s, shopping it as a newspaper strip and getting turned down repeatedly before DC bought it for the new Action Comics anthology. The character was an immediate sensation and effectively created the superhero market overnight.The terms became infamous. To get published, Siegel and Shuster signed away all rights to Superman for $130, around $65 apiece. The character would go on to earn fortunes for its publisher; almost none of it reached its creators for decades.
The Superman mythos
Siegel didn't just write one character. He built the template: the dual identity, the costume over street clothes, the powers, the self-appointed mission. He also created the supporting world, [Lois Lane](/characters/lois-lane/), the [Daily Planet](/lore/daily-planet/), [Lex Luthor](/characters/lex-luthor/), most of which arrived in Superman's first few years and became standard equipment for every hero who followed.Beyond Superman: the Spectre
Siegel created characters Shuster had no hand in, which makes the partnership less symmetrical than the shared credit suggests. The most durable is the Spectre, a murdered detective resurrected as a vengeful ghost, whom Siegel wrote with artist Bernard Baily in More Fun Comics #52 (February 1940). The pairing tells its own story: DC gave the strip to Baily rather than Shuster because Shuster was already swamped with Superman. Siegel also co-created Robotman and, with artist Hal Sherman, the Star-Spangled Kid, all without his usual partner.The Spectre outlasted most Golden Age heroes and remains a fixture of the DC universe, which makes Siegel one of the rare creators with a second genuinely lasting character to his name.
The fight for credit
Siegel and Shuster sued DC in 1947 to reclaim Superman. They lost the character but won the rights to Superboy, and in retaliation DC removed their creator credit and cut them out of the work. A second suit in the 1960s failed entirely. Recognition finally came in 1978: with the big-budget Superman film approaching and the press sympathetic, Warner restored the "created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" credit and granted the pair pensions and health coverage. Siegel died in 1996.Jerry Siegel’s Impact on Comics
Siegel is the origin point of the medium this site is about. Before Action Comics #1 there were adventure-strip heroes and pulp vigilantes; after it there was the superhero, a specific, durable, endlessly repeatable form, and he wrote the first one. His story is also the template for every creator-credit fight that followed, from Bill Finger to Jack Kirby: the person who made the thing, and the long road to being named for it. Action Comics #1 is the most valuable comic book in existence.
