Siegel, Jerry
Entry updated 7 April 2025. Tagged: Author, Comics, Fan.
(1914-1996) US author and sf fan who in late 1929 or early 1930 founded and issued what may have been the first sf Fanzine or proto-Amateur Magazine (which see), Cosmic Stories; of the typewritten carbon copies circulated among friends in Cleveland, Ohio, none is known to have survived and its historical status is uncertain. In October 1932, with the illustrator Joe Shuster, he issued the unquestionable Amateur Magazine or fiction Fanzine Science Fiction, one of the earliest occasions on which the term was used in a title; this ran for five issues, publishing stories by Raymond A Palmer and others. In the same year Siegel published a story, Guests of the Earth (1932 chap) as by Hugh Langley, in which Aliens from Venus seemingly land in America; it turns out to be a hoax, though the iron capsule they travel in is sufficiently advanced for the story to count as sf.
Also with Shuster he created the Comics character Superman, loosely inspired by Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), which had been reviewed by Siegel in Science Fiction. They spent years trying to sell the idea to publishers; Superman's eventual debut was in Action Comics for June 1938. Unfortunately, National Allied Comics (see DC Comics) bought their idea outright, a sweat-shop practice insisted upon by comics publishers until recently; Siegel's relations with the firm were tempestuous (though by the end of his career with DC he had scripted 788 stories for various comics), and the long saga of the team's attempts to gain acknowledgement and a small cut of DC's huge Superman-based income has become a famous salutary fable.
Siegel was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1991, along with Shuster, and both entered the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993; they jointly received a special committee award from the 2014 Worldcon whose Retro Hugos honoured work published in 1938. [JC]
see also: New Fun.
Jerome Siegel
born Cleveland, Ohio: 17 October 1914
died Los Angeles, California: 28 January 1996
works
- Guests of the Earth (Cleveland, Ohio: Fantastic Fiction Publications, 1932) as by Hugh Langley [chap: mimeographed, stapled, printed one side of paper only: afterword by Forrest J Ackerman: pb/nonpictorial]
further reading
- Gerard Jones. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2004) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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