JUSTICE
(PART 1): HOW MITCHELL SIEGEL'S MURDER GAVE THE WORLD ITS GREATEST
HERO
by Stuart
Max Perelmuter, Guest Contributor
Posted: March 14,
2006
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| Jerry Siegel |
Joe Shuster |
The murder of Mitchell Siegel will never be solved. Still, the
greater mystery in regards to pop culture concerns the effect of
this senseless killing on his young son, Jerry. How deep was Jerry's
sense of outrage when he dedicated his life to truth and justice in
co-creating the world's most legendary fictional hero?
Jerry's life revolved around school — where students mocked and
ridiculed him — and home where his worrying mother babied him1.
His solace came only from books, trashy pulps and magazines (ironic
but necessary that the inventor of the modern comic book would have
none to read as a child). Only his father, on weekends and nights
home early from his haberdashery, provided any tolerable human
contact; someone to ask about his interests and take him to a
picture — usually "Zorro" starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
2
But Mitchell was under no illusion: His son was weird. Mitchell
and his wife Sarah had two sons prior to Jerry and knew boys to be
athletic, outgoing, and hard-working. Even their three daughters had
worked in the family store and played outside. 3
But Jerry was friendless, jobless, and had no interest in
extracurricular activities. He was not particularly good in school,
like so many other introverted second generation Americans — in
fact he and his cohort, Joe Shuster, were forced to repeat their
final years of high school while their classmates went on to college
and jobs, though it is safe to say that they were not missed by
their peers, and the feeling was mutual. 4
It's clear from his later work that Jerry admired, even idolized,
physical prowess — speed, strength, certainly leaping abilities
— yet he never strove to compete athletically or to sculpt his
body — whereas tiny Joe would spend hours in the weight room to
look more like his drawings. 5 Surely, the
boy who would prevail through years of publishing company rejections
was not afraid of failing at new endeavors. 6
Jerry stayed off the football field, not for fear, but due to an
innate sense of identity — he wasn't an athlete or a student, he
was a science fiction expert, a writer! And his sense of self came
front and center when he first became aware of his father's
displeasure with him.
Mitchell, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, was proud of the life
that he had built in America; proud of his family. He was genuinely
loving and supportive to all of them, including the one who read
trash all day long. But with his enigmatic youngest son, the pride
was misplaced. With no sports, no friends, and most importantly no
job, what was there to take pride in?
Wishing to please his father, Jerry set out to make the family
some money. It never occurred to Jerry to alter himself, to betray
his true self, to get a job in the store as his siblings had done.
Jerry would please his father, but he would do it on his own
terms: telling stories.
His teachers had recognized a talent in him, but could not
comprehend why he would write such tripe, this new "scientifiction."
They urged him toward a more conventional, broadly appealing
direction. Again, the thought of changing himself never seemed
feasible, and he wrote more of those "silly" stories.
He wrote the stories tirelessly, day and night, and used a
variety of pseudonyms in order to create the illusion that his
pamphlet was filled with the work of several authors. He cut class
in order to make mimeograph copies on school equipment and soon was
ready for business. He peddled before, during, and after school to
anyone who crossed his path. But nobody was buying. 7
The passion and creativity that lay behind the stories were not
accessible to people's basic sensibilities. In his "Cosmic
Stories," 8 young Jerry's creativity
presented itself with a flourish, but the governing humanity that
inspires the reader's empathy was conspicuously absent. From a
marketing stand point, a severely disliked salesman never helps move
merchandise either.
 However,
that humanity would not be absent long and Jerry would soon have
little trouble selling his stories, but he would never have the
chance to prove his worth to his father. When Mitchell was found
murdered one night in his haberdashery, Jerry — just a teenager
— lost more than his best and only friend. 9
He lost the force behind his drive for success. But just as the
death of Thomas Wayne was to be an inspiration to his son, Bruce,
this murder was not the end for Mitchell Siegel's son, but a new
beginning.
Jerry continued writing and he did so with a frenzy of
productivity that could only be fueled by his nightmares. If he
could not bring justice to his father, he would create a world where
justice was wrought with a heavy fist. He and Joe Shuster — an
equally disliked Jewish Canadian immigrant who quickly became
Jerry's best friend and illustrator — created a world of good and
evil, with no room for grey area. 10 For
in addition to a profound sense of self, the murder of his father
had, with a single stroke, painted a detailed moral code. It was a
code to live by, a code to write stories by and a code with which
the masses found empathy. After all, how does one argue with truth
and justice?
After "Action Comics" gave the world Superman in 1938,
Mitchell's influence on Jerry's work grew. Though Jerry's stories
could border on silly, and he took great pride in the gags, his
themes deepened at a determined pace that comes when one is faced
with the impossible task of pleasing a ghost. Superman began as a
fun loving vigilante, showing off and toying with society's
underbelly. Toward the end of his first tenure with DC in the
mid-'40s. the wildly popular Max Fleischer cartoons were nothing
more than formulaic spectacle, and the years immediately following
Siegel's departure were a comical caricature of his prior work. 11
But while Jerry's stories frequently flared with absurdity, many
also delved deeper into politics, poverty and domestic abuse. 12
His insistence that Superman fight Nazis was greeted by DC with
skepticism; too political for a mainstream, family friendly
periodical. But to Jerry, this horrendous injustice was too
important to ignore. He eventually won out — one of the few
battles with DC where he came out the victor — and whenever he
crushed the Nazis like steel in his bare hands, Superman always
yielded the credit to "our nation's real secret weapon, the
unflagging courage of her men." 13
At the age of 24 Jerry gave the children of the world a desire to
do good. It was a desire that had lain dormant in Jerry himself as a
child, but drove him through his entire adult life as he struggled
to win approval from a man long dead. But without a doubt, Mitchell
would have been pleased to see how his son used the sensibilities
— unlocked by his sudden and tragic death — to create Superman,
Earth's greatest champion of justice.
Bibliography
More
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FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW SUPERMAN
XMEN 3
PICS
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