“He was a nerd,” recalled his cousin Irv Fine.
Born in 1914, Jerry Siegel grew up in Cleveland, in the Jewish enclave of Glenville. A myopic daydreamer, he spent his free time watching Douglas Fairbanks movies and drawing pictures and seemed on track to go to college or art school. But in 1925 his father was murdered in a robbery that was never solved. The family fell on hard times, college was out of the question, and Siegel withdrew into the fantastic world of science fiction, or “scientifiction,” as he and his fellow fans called it.
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Siegel and Shuster drew up some sample strips and started submitting “The Superman” to the big-time Chicago syndicates, hoping their creation would someday run alongside Dick Tracy or The Phantom in newspapers. But competition was stiff: in the mid-30s Chicago alone boasted cartoonists Chester Gould, Frank King, and Russell Keaton. The national market was dominated by giants like George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and Roy Crane.
Harry Donenfeld, cofounder of National Comics–now DC Comics–was raised on the Lower East Side among hoods like Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, men he bragged were his friends. His partner, Jack Liebowitz, grew up the son of labor organizers fighting for reform in the days of the Triangle factory fire and Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Throughout the 1920s they built a publishing and distribution business that put out everything from Margaret Sanger’s birth control pamphlets to pulp detective and sci-fi magazines to governor Franklin Roosevelt’s political material to soft-core nudie titles like La Paree and Spicy Stories.
Jones makes it clear he thinks a crime was committed, but also observes that Jerry Siegel didn’t exactly help his own cause. He knew he was being robbed and became increasingly angry, but could never sit down eye to eye with Donenfeld and Liebowitz and demand a square deal. He had too much adolescent pride to ask for help, claiming “I don’t need a lawyer,” and whenever he did bring the subject up, the publishers just assured him that he and Shuster would always be taken care of.
Describing the world of Harry Donenfeld, Jones frequently adopts a pulp style himself, an attempt at Nick Tosches or James Ellroy patter. “What a glorious boozy dream they must have been, those years of Superman’s rise,” he writes. When Donenfeld, now a millionaire, moves his mistress into the Waldorf-Astoria, Jones describes their new love nest as “the twin peaks of the hustler made good, the great tits of the bitch goddess of Manhattan herself.”
