Comics for Film, Games, and Animation

CHAPTER 8

“Look! Up in the Sky!”

Comics Take Flight, 1938–1941

The story of Siegel and Shuster’s creation of Superman is one of the great tragedies of the Golden Age. In it, we find lain bare the double-dealing and shuttered bright-eyed optimism that beleaguered the industry in its nascent stages. The young creative duo sold Superman to Donnenfeld and DC for a whopping sum of $130.

What Siegel and Shuster brought to the world stage for that $130 was an encapsulation of the ideals and wish fulfillment fantasies of a generation of youths raised on pulps, comic strips, and the harsh realities of the Great Depression. It was a generation yearning for a hero, a black-and-white ideal of good and evil, not the shades of gray found in the pulps. The ...