Joe Shuster

Joseph Shuster (; July 10, 1914 – July 30, 1992), professionally known simply as Joe Shuster, was a Canadian-American comic book artist best known for co-creating the DC Comics character Superman, with Jerry Siegel, in ''Action Comics'' #1 (cover-dated June 1938).

Shuster was involved in a number of legal battles over ownership of the Superman character. 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 to a Jewish family. His father, Julius Shuster (originally Shuster owich), an immigrant from Rotterdam, had a tailor shop in Toronto's garment district. His mother, Ida (Katharske), had come from Kyiv in Ukraine. His family, including his sister, Jean, lived on Bathurst, Oxford, and Borden Streets, and Shuster attended Ryerson and Lansdowne Public Schools. One of his cousins was comedian Frank Shuster of the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster.. . He also had a brother named Frank.

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,

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:

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 story was not successful, and the character was not used again.

Eventually, Siegel re-used the name ''The Superman'' for a new character that became one of the most famous superheroes of all time. Shuster modelled the hero on Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and modelled 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 modeled on Joanne Carter, a model hired by Shuster. (She later married co-creator Jerry Siegel in 1948.) Siegel and Shuster's origins as children of Jewish immigrants is also thought to have influenced their work. Timothy Aaron Pevey 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.Pevey, Timothy Aaron " (3.14 Mb). April 10, 2007 URN: etd-04172007-133407

Siegel and Shuster then began a six-year quest to find a publisher. Titling the character ''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'' #48. Siegel and Shuster each compared this character to Slam Bradley, an adventurer the pair had created for ''Detective Comics'' #1 (March 1937).Daniels (1998)
p. 18
. Although the duo received an encouraging letter, Consolidated never again published comic books. Shuster was distraught over the rejection, and, by varying accounts, either burned every page of the story, with the cover surviving only because Siegel saved it from the fire,Daniels (1998)
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or he tore the story to shreds, with only two cover sketches remaining.

In 1938, the proposal was languishing among others at ''More Fun Comics'', published by National Allied Publications, the primary precursor of DC Comics. Editor Vin Sullivan