Who is Joe Shuster
Joe Shuster drew the first superhero. With his writing partner Jerry Siegel, he created Superman, and the design he settled on in 1938, the red-and-blue costume, the chest shield, the cape, the figure caught mid-leap, is still recognizably the character today. Born in 1914, the same year as Siegel, Shuster is the visual half of the partnership that invented the form. His story is also the harshest version of the credit tragedy: he lost the rights, lost his eyesight, and nearly lost the recognition before it was restored.
Superman's debut: Action Comics #1
[Superman](/characters/superman/) debuted in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), drawn by Shuster over [Jerry Siegel](/creators/jerry-siegel/)'s script. The two Cleveland friends had developed the character for years before selling it. Shuster's art was not technically slick, but it was clear, kinetic, and instantly legible, exactly what a brand-new kind of hero needed to land with readers.Designing the superhero
Shuster's design work is the part that outlived everything else. The skintight primary-color costume, the emblem on the chest, the cape, the heroic proportions, the iconography of "superhero" as a visual category starts with his Superman. He also designed [Lois Lane](/characters/lois-lane/) and the early look of Metropolis. Every superhero artist since has worked inside conventions he helped set.Beyond Superman: almost nothing
Here the partnership splits unevenly. [Siegel](/creators/jerry-siegel/) created other lasting characters on his own, the Spectre chief among them. Shuster did not. His one independent creation was Funnyman (1948), a comedy superhero built with Siegel that ran six issues and failed, and even there Shuster mostly did layouts while other hands finished the art. After that his solo work was anonymous and for-hire: horror and crime stories, uncredited Charlton work, and illustrations for the underground fetish series Nights of Horror.That absence is itself the point. Shuster designed the most influential figure in comics and then created nothing else that stuck, partly because his eyesight was failing and partly because his talent was inseparable from the one character. He was Superman’s artist in a way that left little room for a second act.
Loss and recognition
The $130 rights sale cost Shuster more than money over time. As the lawsuits failed and the work dried up, his eyesight deteriorated to legal blindness and his finances collapsed; by the 1970s he was reportedly doing menial labor. The 1978 campaign around the Superman film restored the "created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" credit and secured pensions for both men. Shuster died in 1992.Joe Shuster’s Impact on Comics
If Siegel wrote the first superhero, Shuster drew the picture every later superhero is a variation on. Design is authorship, and Superman’s visual identity, stable for nearly ninety years, is among the most successful character designs ever made. Shuster’s life is also the starkest reminder of what the early industry took from its creators: the man who drew the most famous figure in comics ended up blind and broke, credited only at the very end. Action Comics #1 remains the most valuable comic book in existence.
