The Creator of Superman, ripped off by DC, was forced to draw bondage comics in the 50s

Updated 2 years ago

What a sad tale. Joe Shuster, the co-creator of the Superman comic, after having had Superman taken from him, slowly grew blind and fell on hard times by the late 50s and was forced to draw nudie bondage. This was only discovered in 2009 by comparing art styles to a newly found old porno trove.

To make matters even worse, a group of Brooklyn thugs repeated the bondage style they read about in the comic, such as kissing feet and whipping, when they went out and murdered people.

Finally, think also on the sad irony of the Jew who created a Jewish inspired Superman, Kal-El, but was penniless within 2 decades, while Germany was on the rise again with the Marshall Plan.

What a sad ending for the creator of the symbol of American might. This also happened to many comic book creators in the early days, who were regarded as contractors. Comics were always an iffy business, with many publishers coming and going. But back then, the pool was much much deeper – half of the American population read comics. Compare this to today, where creators have far more rights, but comics are much more of a niche media!

But maybe Shuster was just ahead of his time. As Chris Gavaler notes in his blog,
“He was paid $100 for each of Nights of Horrors issue, for a total of $1800. Less than twenty years earlier, his bosses at DC had written him a check for $130, which he split with his partner Jerry Siegel. That was in exchange for the permanent, multi-million dollar rights to Superman. Shuster drew an average of six illustrations for each Nights of Horror. That’s a page rate of just over $16. He and Siegel were splitting $10 a page back in 1938. DC grudgingly raised it $15 when the Action Comics spin-off Superman sold 900,000 copies the following year. Nights of Horror boasted a print run of only 1,000, including the 2,650 backlog confiscated in a book store police raid.
By any accounting system, Nights of Horror was a far more financially ethical employer than DC.”