by Tom De Haven
Siegel and Shuster had never seen anything quite like their creation before, so maybe somebody else, somebody important, somebody in charge, would feel the same way and want to buy it.
Yeah, maybe.
As they had done with previous creations, the partners shopped around “Superman” to big and small newspaper syndicates (really, it was Jerry who kept samples in the mail; from the start it was Jerry with the drive and persistence). The package was always returned, with either no encouragement or outright disdain. Joe shrugged. (But probably his feelings were hurt.) Jerry fumed.
The decade of the 1930s was the Great Age of American newspaper funnies, of fiendishly addictive and nationally popular comic-strip masterpieces like Terry and the Pirates, Captain Easy, Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, and Li’l Abner, written and drawn either with skilled high panache or pleasing idiosyncrasy, or both. It “was a remarkably fertile period,” writes Brian Walker in The Comics Before 1945. “The funnies pages resembled a three-ring circus, with daredevils, clowns, jugglers, and animal acts all performing simultaneously. The syndicates released dozens of new features that exploited the full range of thematic possibilities and graphic techniques” (193).
Jerry Siegel’s concept may have had some merit—wish fulfillment always does—but according to syndicate editors his storytelling was ludicrous and jumpy, atrociously dialogued, and Joe Shuster’s artwork was poorly staged, inconsistent, scratchy. “Unprofessional” and “immature” were adjectives used often in rejection letters. Finally, the boys—boys! they were young men by then—ran out of places to send the damn thing.
Discouraged, they put “Superman” aside. They could figure out what to do with it later. In the meantime they’d lower their sights and revise their marketing strategy. If newspapers weren’t interested in what they could offer, maybe comic books—where “unprofessional” and “immature” were never disqualifying attributes—might be more welcoming.
They were.
“Whereas comic strips depended on newspapers to reach their market,” writes Ian Gordon in Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, “comic books were packaged as discrete products. The production and consumption of comic art independent of newspaper distribution transformed its market. Comic book publishers assumed they had a younger audience than those who purchased newspapers, and the initial content and marketing of comic books demonstrated this belief. Comic book creators were also young” (128).
Like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
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Before the sale of “Superman,” the team of Siegel and Shuster (a.k.a. Leger and Reuths whenever their own byline appeared too often in a single comic book) sold lesser work at rates of five and seven dollars an inked-and-lettered page, exclusively placing their output of single- and multiple-page stories (“Dr. Occult,” “Slam Bradley, “Federal Men,” “Radio Patrol”) with a fledgling company in New York City called National Allied Publishing.5 The founder and owner of the company, the first company to publish original material created expressly for comic books, as well as the one that went on to introduce Superman to the world, was a former professional soldier named Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, universally portrayed in various histories of American popular culture as an eccentric rogue with variously green or rust-colored teeth, as an affected Dickensian mountebank, an embellisher, a bald-faced liar, and a wretched businessman who let untold wealth slip through his fingers—ousted from his own company months before it struck gold publishing Superman.
In the earliest comics histories, those from the 1940s by Martin Sheridan and Coulton Waugh, Wheeler-Nicholson is not even mentioned; one J. S. Liebowitz gets all the credit for presenting Superman to the world. In later histories and encyclopedias, continuing into recent books by Gerard Jones and David Hajdu, the “Major” is portrayed at best as a minor player, a notorious early casualty of the heartbreak/cutthroat comics business, a vague legendary figure, and a synonym for cosmic bad luck. Any biographical material whose source was Wheeler-Nicholson himself has always been taken with a generous grain of salt; he “apparently” had been a cavalry officer who had “supposedly” chased Pancho Villa through Mexico. He spoke with a drawl, probably phony, and postured as the southern gentleman.
All of the standard comics histories agree that in 1924 Wheeler-Nicholson left the military under a cloud. Something to do with an imprudent letter he’d written. To President Warren G. Harding.
Living in New York City in the early 1930s, Wheeler-Nicholson had contributed fiction to the hero pulps. Half-penny a word, penny a word, penny and a half. He could churn it out. Whatever was needed. Sea stories. Desert stories. War stories. Then one day, after a brief and unsuccessful stint as a syndicator of cut-rate newspaper features, he opened an office on Fourth Avenue in midtown Manhattan and declared himself a player in the nascent and wobbly comic book business. National Allied Publishing stenciled on the door.
Wheeler-Nicholson ordered up a certain number of pages of narrative comics (an adaptation of Ivanhoe and some further knockoffs of popular newspaper comics) from several art-and-production services, then put out an oversized—ten-by-fifteen-inch—original-material comic book called New Fun. Only the cover was printed four-color. Each of the one-page black-and-white or one-color comic strips inside came with a title banner— a “logo”—as if any reader, no matter how young, would believe those crude scratchings, those crowded and often misspelled words in the dialogue balloons, ever had been published previously in a Sunday newspaper.
Despite New Fun’s poor sales, Wheeler-Nicholson brought out a second title, New Comics. Creditors pestered him, contributors did too. Checks were, apparently, either rubber or never written. He changed the names of his two publications, to More Fun and New Adventure Comics, and reduced their size—to the standard seven by ten. They didn’t sell any better. Creditors hounded him now. He’d vanish for days at a time. He was said to own a big house in the ritzy northern suburbs, Whites Plains, Great Neck, Tarrytown. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Comic book historians always milk the drama in the next part of the story, and rightly so. The Major’s printer and distributor, unpaid for too long and fed up at last, finally went to court and got himself made Wheeler-Nicholson’s legal partner. This would be Harry Donenfeld, a short, animated, loudmouthed New York tough guy, a bootlegger back in the day, as ruthless as he was gregarious. After muscling in, he moved quickly to push the Major out. Wheeler-Nicholson launched a third title, Detective Comics (the first themed comic book and the one that introduced Batman in 1939), but that was it for him. He made plans to publish a fourth title, Action, but was gone—here’s your coat, don’t forget your beaver hat—before the first issue was slapped together, using Siegel and Shuster’s refitted “Superman” newspaper strip as the lead feature.
When it comes to Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, everything in popular and refereed comics scholarship pretty much corroborates everything else, and always much is made, and often a bit sneeringly, of the man’s unfortunately timed, and cringe-making, exit. If the Major had held on for just a few months more, he would’ve ended up rich. If. If he’d held on. But he hadn’t. Donenfeld got rid of him, and after that we don’t hear any more stories, entrepreneurial or otherwise, about Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. He died in 1968, a classic American Loser, footnote division, in the judgment of comic book history. But comic book history is notorious for a tendency to print the legend, and for reliance upon anecdotes rather than evidence; for cartoonish simplification. If it makes a good story, especially a gasper, it’s worth repeating. Thus: Major Wheeler-Nicholson, the goat.
For the past several years, though, a woman named Nicky Brown has been trying to give his story a bit more dimension, and earn the man some respect. Brown is the Major’s granddaughter. She never met him and didn’t become intimate with Wheeler-Nicholson’s extended family until adulthood. But because of all the stories she kept hearing from aunts, uncles, and cousins, particularly from the relatives who had known the Major, and realizing
how they so drastically contradicted so much of the so-called biographical details, Brown, in the late 1990s, began doing her own research.
In 2006, after Gerard Jones had recapped the usual Wheeler-Nicholson legend in Men of Tomorrow, his acclaimed history of the early comic book industry, Brown contacted him and offered him her clarifications, her refutations, a few of which appeared later in the paperback edition. Then Brown was irked in 2008 when David Hajdu again repeated the same old legends about the Major in The Ten-Cent Plague, which primarily deals with the furors over crime and horror comic books in the 1950s.
Brown, for one thing, disputes the notion that the Major was a fop. “He was very conservative in his manners and behavior,” she told me. “He was very European in his attitudes. To the young kids who worked for him drawing comic books, he probably seemed ridiculous.” Which accounts, possibly, for some of the macabre detailing in those firsthand accounts of daily life at National Allied Publishing; the kids who worked for the Major probably mistook his scuffed shapeless felt fedora for a beaver hat; and his habit of draping his coat over his shoulders, Brown believes, may have spawned the stories that he wore a Victorian cape. He did use a long cigarette holder, though.
A lot of what happened around the time Wheeler-Nicholson lost control of his company is still murky, including details of how he ended up being cut out of things so completely, but Brown has verified a lot of the stories about her grandfather’s precomics days. He actually had gone in hot pursuit of Pancho Villa. Not only did it actually happen, but it happened while Wheeler-Nicholson commanded Troop K of the 9th Cavalry’s African-American Buffalo Soldiers. What do you know! Somebody should make a movie. He also soldiered in the Philippines, fighting Moro rebels, and later worked as a military intelligence liaison in the Japanese embassy in Siberia. He married a Swedish aristocrat in Paris. (Maybe not at the top of the Eiffel Tower, though.)
And he was definitely a southerner. Born in Tennessee, 1890.
Brown is convinced that her grandfather’s involvement with the publication of the first Superman story is far greater than previously thought. Her father, the Major’s son, recalled the strip being discussed around the dinner table during the period when Action Comics was in the planning stage. The Major “didn’t claim to create Superman,” Brown told me, “but he was a publisher and an editor, and like any good publisher and editor he had his input.”
After Harry Donenfeld grabbed National Allied Comics, Wheeler-Nicholson went back to full-time writing, adventure fiction for men’s magazines and scholarly books on military strategy. He wouldn’t talk about Superman, about losing Superman, that subject was taboo. But naturally it was a big source of family lore and understood by all as a great personal tragedy. “If you lose a plumbing business,” said Brown, “that’s one thing. If you lose Superman, that’s big.”
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Although initially he had had grave misgivings—who was going to lay out a Depression dime to read anything so preposterous? —
Harry Donenfeld soon came to relish his elevated new status as the man who owned and published Superman. To protect his property, writes Ian Gordon, Donenfeld “registered [Superman’s] image, name and the title logo as trademarks. Trademark protection gave Superman a legal identity as a business symbol, an asset of property, above and beyond that of a fictional character. That status guaranteed [the company’s] ownership and control of Superman for all time since trademark protection, unlike copyright, can be renewed perpetually” (Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 133).
Known previously as a rackets-connected magazine distributor and the rascally publisher of smutty pulps like Spicy Detective and Gay Paree, Harry Donenfeld was now admired as one smart cookie. Superman’s boss. He started calling himself as much in nightclubs and hotel bars, and whenever he gave a luncheon talk. Superman’s boss. That’s who Harry Donenfeld was. That’s who he was now.
Donenfeld had a business associate named Jack Liebowitz, Liebowitz the accountant—tall and lanky with an anchovies mustache and a supercilious manner. Had he been a character actor in motion pictures, Liebowitz could have played either the insufferably oily East Coast snob who loses the girl to a loose-limbed regular guy from the heartland, or a dangerous gentleman gambler in the mode and manner of John Carradine. When he was younger he’d kept the books for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He’d also been a committed Socialist. Well, that was then. Blame it on his youth.
Shortly after Liebowitz quit his job with the union, he’d gone to work for Harry Donenfeld, who was running several companies that he owned or partly owned—a printing company, a distribution company, two or three small publishing companies— and trying to keep from going broke. Liebowitz made a smooth, steady, undemonstrative contrast to Donenfeld’s motormouthed spontaneity. He insisted that Harry pay his bills on time, and that Harry’s customers pay theirs. He made himself indispensable.
Appointed by Donenfeld as the publisher of the newly renamed National Comics, Liebowitz (who probably had masterminded the Wheeler-Nicholson putsch) took charge knowing little if anything about the product. A careful man, a cautious man, after the first issue of Action Comics was sent to the printer, he’d instructed Sullivan, the editor, to replace Superman on subsequent covers with commercially safer pulp-influenced images like parachutists, big-game hunters, Canadian Mounties, and giant gorillas. But then, in the fall of 1938, a survey of news dealers revealed that it was Superman, no question, that was moving Action Comics, and that kids showed up after school asking for “the magazine with Superman in it.” From then on, Action’s covers belonged exclusively to Superman.
Soon after Vincent Sullivan had purchased the first story, Jack Liebowitz informed Siegel and Shuster that it was “customary for all our contributors to release all rights to us. This is the businesslike way of doing things.” He treated them both like hicks, always called them “boys,” but once Superman became a hot property, Liebowitz offered the creators ten-year contracts at a steep increase in their page rate—thirty-five dollars, highest, by far, in the business. And promised them five percent of all revenues, his arithmetic.
As sales figures for Action Comics crept steadily toward the half-million mark, Liebowitz gave Superman his own comic book, the first devoted to a single character. Superman number 1 was cover-dated Summer 1939 but published and distributed in late April.
Between the spring of 1938 and the following spring, between Action 1 and Superman 1, Germany invaded Austria, Japan’s motorized army crunched through China, Franco and the Falangists mopped up in Spain. The so-called second depression worsened throughout the United States, and Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds, his Mercury Theatre’s Halloween radio prank that caused legendary hysteria. People were jumpy. Another world war was brewing. Mothers glanced uneasily at their young sons, reading Superman comics, and saw them marching off in uniforms.
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Of all the thousands of characters dwelling in Superman’s universe, only Lois Lane has been present from the start, entering in the forty-seventh panel of the first story published in Action Comics number 1. There she sits behind her big city-room typewriter wearing an orange plaid dress and looking formidable and haughty. Standing slump-shouldered at her desk, Clark Kent asks, “W-what do you say to a—er—date tonight, Lois?” Her reply sets the tone that’ll stick around for decades: “I suppose I’ll give you a break … for a change.”
I suppose I’ll give you a break … for a change.
In the next panel, Lois and Clark are dancing cheek to cheek in a “roadhouse” straight out of Dashiell Hammett. Playing his best mope, Clark asks her why she keeps avoiding him at the office. “Please, Clark!” she says. “I’ve been scribbling ‘sob stories’ all day long. Don’t ask me to dish out another.” Siegel not only steps on and underscores Lois’s sarcasm but suggests the reason for it. She’s not a working reporter but a sob sister, a lonely-hearts columnist. Obviously, Lois Lane feels that she is made for better things. (By the ve
ry next Superman story, she’s already introducing herself as a reporter and acting the role. Seems as though Jerry Siegel had second thoughts about what he wanted Lois to be, or else his editor did.)
Also at the roadhouse is a table of beefy generic thugs, and when one of them ogles Lois and tells Clark to scram, a caption explains, “Reluctantly Kent adheres to his role of a weakling.” Telling choice of adverb, there: reluctantly. The word that kicks the series into full throttle, introducing readers to the emotional, the social, even the sexual, downside of being Superman. Till this point—and granted, it’s only fifty panels into the first story— Superman has taken gleeful pleasure in his absurd disguise; it’s a hoot to fool people, he’s like some neighborhood kid on Halloween. Now he’s discovering it can be a pain in the neck. And maybe— probably—truly embarrassing.
Clark gives Lois up without a fight (“Dance with the fellow and then we’ll leave right away”), whereupon she hauls off and slaps the bullying Butch Matson, then storms from the club. Outside, she ducks into a taxi, calling Clark “a spineless, unbearable coward!” His first mortification of millions.
Matson, meanwhile, is ticked off. Blustering that he’ll “show that skirt” she can’t make a fool of him (the way she did Clark), he and his cronies pile into their sedan, overtake the taxi and kidnap Lois.6
