True Left

How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture

On Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Birth of Superman

In a small attic bedroom in Cleveland, in the Jewish neighborhood of Glenville, Jerry Siegel tried to sleep. It wasn’t the summer heat that was keeping him awake nor his snoring older brother Leo snoozing noisily beside him. Twisting and turning, Jerry had a new idea for a story in his head. It involved a character like Samson, Hercules, and Moses all rolled into one—a new character that was an amalgamation of everything he had ever written or read. And he had read a lot.
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Jerry’s father, Mitchell, was a tailor who had come from Lithuania, fleeing anti-Semitism. He had run a secondhand clothing store in Cleveland. But three summers earlier, he had died of a heart attack after confronting a couple of shoplifters, leaving the family struggling in the midst of the Depression. He’d had $131 to his name when he died. Jerry’s older brother Harry got a job as a mailman to support them all. Thanks to magazines, like Amazing Stories, that Harry brought home, Jerry discovered a new genre called science fiction.

Amazing Stories, which made its debut in 1926, was the first American science fiction magazine, featuring such stories as “Armageddon 2419 AD,” which would eventually morph into Buck Rogers. With its disintegrating death rays and futuristic airships, early science fiction was a reaction to the technology that was sweeping the world and the inventions that were changing everyday life. Science fiction magazines would change Jerry’s life—though not for the better.

He became so obsessed with comic strips and pulp magazines that he ignored his actual schoolwork and was held back. One of his favorite books, Gladiator, told the tale of a man with superhuman strength who could run faster than a train and jump higher than a house. Another favorite character was Doc Savage, a pulp magazine hero whose first name was Clark and who was known as “The Man of Bronze.” Jerry tried his hand at creating his own comic strip takeoff on Tarzan called Goober the Mighty for his high school paper, the Torch, and won second place in the paper’s annual contest for a story called “Death of a Parallelogram.” But his grades were so awful he was eventually kicked off the newspaper.
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Joe and Jerry shared the same origin story, their parents having escaped the pogroms of Europe to live free in America years before Hitler’s rise to power. But Joe’s parents were so poor they made Jerry’s family look like the Rockefellers. Joe’s father, Julius Shusterowitz, had come from Russia with so little money that he couldn’t afford paper for his talented son to draw on.
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With his thick glasses, Joe was even nerdier, somehow, than Jerry. He was a rail-thin five foot two to Jerry’s chubby five foot six. The clichéd ninety-pound weakling who gets sand kicked in his face, Joe tried lifting weights and exercising, and even bought physical fitness magazines, but it was no use. He was invisible to the girls at Glenville High, just like Jerry. Joe, too, worked for the school paper and was into science fiction characters. Unlike Jerry, Joe could draw them. He had even won a drawing contest at the Torch. The boys had been introduced by Jerry’s cousin at the local public library, “like the right chemicals coming together,” Jerry would later say.

The first drawing of Joe’s that Jerry saw was one that Joe had saved from 1928, inspired by the new Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, which had blown both of their young, nerdy minds. The movie’s lesson—the worker being kept down by the demented, greedy capitalist—was perhaps lost on them, though it was a harbinger of things to come. They both loved the way Metropolis looked, its set designs and special effects, its vertical cityscapes and sky trains. Jerry instantly fell in love with Joe’s style when he saw his drawing, one of the few he ever saved from his childhood, a collection of futuristic skyscrapers and rocket ships that he called The City of the Future: 1980.

Together, they started a fanzine called Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. They typed it out on a regular typewriter and gave it a cover that looked like the first page of a high school term paper, copied on the school mimeograph machine and stapled together. The third issue of Science Fiction—dated January 1933—featured a story about a telepathic bald villain intent on world domination. It was called “The Reign of the Superman.” Hardly anyone read it.
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Superman, an illegal alien, had come millions of miles not to be featured on the front page of the Daily Star, but to save mankind from itself, its ugly awful self.

Jerry and Joe tried pitching comic strips to magazines and newspaper syndication editors, but were rejected again and again. They tried creating a new version of the Superman, a hero—with hair, this time—whose bulletproof physique and fantastic strength are bestowed upon him by a scientist. And that June of 1933, there was a glimmer of interest from Consolidated Book Publishers, a Chicago company known mostly for putting out encyclopedias and Bibles. But the editors at Consolidated changed their minds about the Superman by August.
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Jerry suggested Joe put an S on Superman’s chest—not just for Superman’s name, but for Shuster and Siegel—and a cape on his back that would whip around, one of the few ways for Joe to show dramatic motion.

Superman would be an alien with super strength whose real name was Kal-El (“Voice of God” in Hebrew). Kal-El came to Earth as an abandoned baby, much like Moses in the Old Testament, just as his planet, Krypton, was destroyed. Like Jerry, his father would die while he was still young. Kal-El would be adopted by a couple of Gentiles and renamed Clark Kent, a name Jerry took from Clark Gable and B-movie actor Kent Taylor. By day, Superman was a mild-mannered goy with glasses ( just like Jerry’s and Joe’s). He would live, naturally, in a city called Metropolis.
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This new-and-improved Superman could hurtle a twentystory building and run faster than an express train, but he wasn’t bent on world domination like Hitler’s model. Just the opposite. He was here to save us all.

Superman, an illegal alien, had come millions of miles not to be featured on the front page of the Daily Star, but to save mankind from itself, its ugly awful self. And by the looks of things in Europe, and the bleak Depression in America, the world could use some serious saving.

Entire article: https://lithub.com/how-two-jewish-kids-in-1930s-cleveland-altered-the-course-of-american-pop-culture/

Anyone here surprised two Old Testament loving Westerners\Jews would invent a "hero" such as Superman?:



See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/antropocentricism-the-most-dangerous-ideology-in-the-world/msg532/#msg532



But wait, are the Superman comic strips actually racist?:

Race and Resistance in American Popular Culture and Cinema

Racism in American Superhero Comics, 1938-1945 (Superman, Captain America) – A Short Documentary Film About Racism in Comics

Following up on the last podcast –Captain America’s Racist Sidekick– I created this short documentary film.  The eight minute video explores racism in comics.  Even before World War II broke out, racist attitudes and anti-Asian prejudices were pronounced in the comic book world – from Superman to Captain America and The Spirit, racism in comics helped to define the early American Superhero genre.  This film is a follow-up to my other lectures and articles exploring the link between classic comic books and American history. To discover more about gender at the dawn of the superhero age, you might want to read my articles “Superman: Action Comics #1 and Gender Politics” which was published by The Comics Grid...

Entire article: http://www.darrenreidhistory.co.uk/racism-in-comics/



See also:  http://aryanism.net/blog/aryan-sanctuary/our-enemies-concede-that-jews-are-white/
                 http://aryanism.net/blog/aryan-sanctuary/the-one-headline-i-have-been-waiting-for-all-these-years/

In comparison to Hitler and Aryan National Socialism, neither being concerned with the creation of a scientific Judeo\Western "Superman" as Jews\Westerners themselves are:

The new claimants: A youth creating for itself a new state. A new species of man.... — Konrad Heiden

No one in the Third Reich ever claimed that this "new species of man" to be created was a "Superman", simply a human modeled after the founders of civilization, the Aryan.

See also:  https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/national-socialism-is-revolutionary-not-reactionary/

If Jews really cared about saving humanity from itself they would have agreed that the number one error of humanity to this date has been that the Neolithic Revolution was not absolute and was not forced upon the entirety of humanity at the dawn of civilization across the board. For starters, if Jews agreed to such a diagnosis of humanity and it's present condition, they would need to give-up on words such as "gentile" and "goy" to define and separate non-Jews from Jews themselves firstly, would they not?