Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman by Thomas Andrae

It also describes how the invention of Superman might have been inspired by a Jewish vaudeville strongman from the 1920s named Siegmund Breitbart, who was billed as a 'Superman of Strength. The video above consists of interviews with Mel Gordon and Thomas Andrae, the co-authors of Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero from the Creators of Superman. You can read all about it in Craig Yoe's book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster.) (Joe Shuster went on to illustrate seedy little bondage booklets, barely scratching out a living. Siegel and Shuster tried to keep it going as a newspaper strip, but gave up after a year.

It ran for six issues and went out of business. He was a dead ringer for Danny Kaye, one of my favorite comedians. Buy eBook Siegel and Shusters Funnyman by Andrae, Thomas/Gordon, Mel/Siegel, Jerry published by Feral House Inc. This book tells the back story of the unsuccessful strip and Siegel and Shuster's ambition to have their funny Jewish superhero trump Superman.Feral House has a great new book coming out about Funnyman, an unusual and short-lived comic book series created by Superman's Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.įunnyman was a clown-like superhero who used gags, pranks and Yiddishisms to defeat his humor-deficient enemies. All the turmoil and personal disasters in Siegel and Shuster's postwar life percolated into the comic strip. But when the naive duo launched their new comic character Funnyman in 1947, it failed miserably. Their contract with the DC publishers was soon heralded as the most foolish agreement in the history of American popular culture.Īfter toiling on workman's wages for a decade, Siegel and Shuster struggled to come up with a new superhero, one that would right their wrongs and prove that justice, fair-play, and zany craftsmanship was the true American way and would lead to ultimate victory. Siegel and Shusters Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero, from the Creators of Superman is written by Thomas Andrae Mel Gordon and published by Feral House. Not only did they lose the ownership of the Superman character, they also agreed to write and illustrate it for ten years at ten dollars per page. Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, sold the rights to their amazing and astonishingly lucrative comic book superhero to Detective Comics for $130 in 1938. Included are complete comic-book stories and daily and Sunday newspaper panels from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creative fiasco.

Here is a kaleidoscopic analysis of Jewish humor as seen through Funnyman, a little-known super-heroic invention by the creators of Superman.

Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman by Thomas Andrae