Look up in the sky! its a bird, its a plane, its the start of the Golden Age.

“The Reign of the Superman” in the fanzine Science Fiction vol. 1, #3 (June 1933)).

To talk about the Golden Age of Comics you must start with the two men who pioneered “the Age of spandex”

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

Joe Shuster was born on July 10th, 1914 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio as Jerome Siegel on October 17th, 1914.

Joe Shuster’s family would move to Cleveland, Ohio when he was 9. He would later befriend Jerry Siegel around 1931. Both of them attended the same High School, and they both had the same love of science fiction stories.It was shortly after the two met, they began working on comics.Together they created a bald telepathic villain hellbent on dominating the entire world. He appeared in the short story “The Reign of the Superman” from Science Fiction #3, a science fiction fanzine that Siegel published in 1933.

Siegel re-wrote the character in 1933 as a hero, bearing little or no resemblance to his villainous namesake, and began a six-year quest to find a publisher.

Titling the story “The Superman“, Siegel and Shuster offered it to Consolidated Book publishing, who had published the 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 burned all pages of the story, the cover surviving only because Siegel rescued it from the fire. Siegel and Shuster each compared this character to Slam Bradley, an adventurer the pair had created for Detective Comics #1

By 1934 the pair had once more re-envisioned the character. He became more of a hero in the tradition sense, inspired by such characters as Samson and Hercules, who would right the wrongs of Siegel and Shuster’s times, fighting for social justice and against tyranny. It was at this stage the costume was introduced,

Siegel later recalling that they created a “kind of costume and let’s give him a big S on his chest, and a cape, make him as colorful as we can and as distinctive as we can.” The design was based in part on the costumes worn by characters in outer space settings published in pulp magazines, as well as comic strips such as Flash Gordon, and also partly suggested by the traditional circus strong-man outfit. However, the cape has been noted as being markedly different from the Victorian tradition. This third version of the character was given extraordinary abilities, although this time of a physical nature as opposed to the mental abilities of the villainous Superman.

The locale and the hero’s civilian names were inspired by the movies, Shuster said in 1983. “Jerry created all the names. We were great movie fans, and were inspired a lot by the actors and actresses we saw. As for Clark Kent, he combined the names of Clark Gable and Kent Taylor. And

Metropolis, the city in which Superman operated, came from the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, 1927.

Although they were by now selling material to comic book publishers, notably Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson’s National Allied Publishing, the pair decided to feature this character in a comic strip format, rather than in the longer comic book story format that was establishing itself at this time. They offered it to both Max Gaines, who passed, and to United Feature Syndicate, who expressed interest initially but finally rejected the strip in a letter dated February 18, 1937. However, in what historian Les Daniels describes as “an incredibly convoluted turn of events”, Max Gaines ended up positioning the strip as the lead feature in Wheeler-Nicholson’s new publication, Action Comics. Vin Sullivan, editor of the new book, wrote to the pair requesting that the comic strips be refashioned to suit the comic book format, requesting “eight panels a page”.

However Siegel and Shuster ignored this, utilizing their own experience and ideas to create page layouts, with Siegel also identifying the image used for the cover of Action Comics #1 (June 1938), Superman’s first appearance.

side note: Gary Engle described the golden age of heroes ( Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend.) The pants-over-tights outfit was soon established as the basis for many future superhero outfits.

The Golden Age Explodes

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