Stop Jewhooing Superman

James Gunn’s summer blockbuster Superman arrived in theaters July 11 to great fanfare. It stars the half-Jewish actor David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan, an honorary tribe member for her role as Midge in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The movie revitalized the long-held belief, especially among American Jewry, that Superman is secretly Jewish. Even the American Jewish Historical Society endorsed this viewpoint. But should he be seen that way and what was the intent of his creator?¹

Jewhooing Superman, or the “revealing” of his Jewish origins, fascinates scholars, enthusiasts, and fans. This activity, named after the 1997 website jewhoo.com, which exposed celebrities’ Jewishness without their consent and without respect for their religious self-identification, belies the personal history and own words of Superman’s Jewish creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Instead of religion and ethnoracial identity, their appetite for American popular culture and science fiction better explains Superman’s development.²

Moses and Immigration

Many emphasize Superman’s origin story as proof of a hidden Jewishness. The narrative, they contend, retells Moses’ survival in allegory because the infant Superman escaped the planet of Krypton in a spaceship and sailed the cosmos to earth for safety. Kryptonians’ were, nevertheless, not slaves and there was no pharaoh figure intent on murdering the first-born males on Krypton. Unlike Superman, Moses rejected his adopted family and returned to his people and lead them from bondage in Egypt until settling in the promised land after wandering for forty years. Superman’s migration is “the story of Exodus … without any Exodus ever taking place,” religious studies scholar Martin Lund observes to dispel the Jewish analogy. Moreover, Siegel never mentioned Moses as motivation in interviews or in his unpublished 1978 memoir.³

The water and basket motif of the royal child sent to and raised by rustic parents was common in mythology around the world as Otto Rank shows in his work. Superman’s journey to a new world, facing trials and challenges, and gift of magical flight realizes enough key stages to qualify for Joseph Campbell’s concept of the “Monomyth,” better known as the “Hero’s Journey.”⁴

Advocates stress that Superman’s interstellar journey limns Jewish emigration from Europe to America. But this favored interpretation does not reflect his creators’ reality. Siegel was born in America and Shuster in Canada with no memory of or known wistfulness for the Old World their parents had left. It was the third generation in the postwar period, sociologist Herbert J. Gans argues, that develops “a nostalgic allegiance to the culture of the immigrant generation, or that of the old country.”⁵

Superman’s author simply inverted the blueprint of a marvelous hero battling foes in outer space. “It occurred to me,” Siegel writes in his autobiography, “why not have a comics hero’s astounding adventures take place right here on Earth … in cities similar to those we are familiar with.”⁶

Shuster praised his creative partner’s innovation to Nemo: The Classic Comics Library in 1983. “Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.”⁷

No deeper message to Superman’s alien origin existed. Superman’s creators found inspiration in science fiction.

Superman’s immigrant attribution dissolves under scrutiny. The Kent family adopted the alien refugee who absorbed their rural, agrarian, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant character. This “stranger” experienced none of the adversity or othering actual immigrants did because the Kent family raised him with the privileged identity. “Superman’s childhood is not infused with any sense of foreignness,” Lund correctly remarks. Siegel and Shuster’s champion had no foreign accent to overcome and never toiled as a laborer or factory worker, common immigrant jobs, but worked as investigative reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. He is “an immigrant … by default.”

“If Superman is an immigrant, he is an immigrant who proves that he, and by extension his creators and those like them, could leave the Old World behind.” The New Republic editor Leon Weiseltier agreed with Lund saying, “If Superman is an American Jewish fantasy, it’s the fantasy of escaping from identity.”⁸

Siegel drew from popular entertainment rather than from Judaism. Superman’s genesis parallelled that of another comic strip and movie hero, Tarzan. As cartoonist Jules Feiffer explained, “A shipwrecked son of an English lord, the baby Tarzan is washed up on African shores to be rescued and raised by nurturing apes who teach him their ways, inspiring him to protect the helpless.”⁹

This explanation is more convincing given Siegel’s fascination with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ wilderness warrior. Siegel created the cartoon “Goober the Mighty” in 1931 for his high school newspaper the Glenville Torch. He remembers in his memoir the strongman raised by a lion as a “whacky take-off of Tarzan.”¹⁰

Siegel and Shuster siphoned ideas from American popular culture inspired by the frontier. It was this literary motif, whether earthly or cosmic, that forged Superman’s narrative core.

Samson and Strongmen

Besides relying on Moses to Jewhoo Superman, adherents of Superman’s hidden Jewish identity point to the Biblical strongman Samson. Lund reminds us that “these figures have long been common in Western culture in general, and thus their possible uses in pop culture must be considered beyond merely pointing to a parallel, based on superficial similarities.”¹¹

In his memoir, Siegel mentions Samson and the Superman No. 4 (Spring 1940) cover art where Superman destroys temple pillars. Action Comics No. 7 (December 1938) and other early adventures announce that Superman possesses “THE STRENGTH OF A DOZEN SAMSONS!” These are, nonetheless, false positives for the Jewish thesis.¹²

A fascination with muscular men accounts for Siegel’s words. He discusses Samson in context of other strongmen like Burrough’s Tarzan and John Carter and the mythical Hercules in his autobiography. Siegel even shared this non-Jewish motivation back in 1941 to The Saturday Evening Post: “I conceive[d] a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I ever heard tell of rolled into one.” He repeated this sentiment in July 1946 for Coronet. Superman is, Siegel said, “A combination Samson, Hercules and Atlas plus the morals of Sir Galahad.” Lund conveys the issue of assigning Jewishness to Superman, “The mention of Samson here alone makes Superman no more a Jewish character than the other mentions make him a Greek or Arthurian one.”¹³

Shuster even referenced Samson and Hercules in Nemo as inspiration for the first version of Superman, a villain. “The Reign of the Superman,” Siegel and Shuster’s January 1933 short story published in the third issue of their mimeographed fanzine Science Fiction: The Advanced Guard of Future Civilization, chronicles Bill Dunn’s transformation from breadline outcast to superior being intent on world domination. This connection continued with the third iteration of Superman published in Action Comics No. 1 (June 1938). Shuster explained, “I had classical heroes and strongmen in mind, and this shows in the footwear. In the third version Superman wore sandals laced halfway up the calf. You can still see this on the cover of Action #1, though they were covered over in red to look like boots when the comic was printed.”¹⁴

The physical culture of the period also influenced Superman’s artist. Shuster tried a protein diet, Lionel Strongfort’s mail-order methods, and weightlifting in Barney Kofron’s Cleveland gym to change his physique, The Saturday Evening Post reported. Shuster told Nemo that he bought bodybuilding magazines from secondhand stores. Entertainers like Charles Atlas, Sandow, and Harry Houdini loomed large in the culture and promoted the power and authority of the Euro-American white male body. The idea that Siegmund Breitbart, a Yiddish-speaking strongman from Poland, inspired Superman is speculation.¹⁵

Superman’s escapades feature direct and indirect references to Greek heroes and gods such as Hercules, Adonis, Mercury, and Apollo. These include Action Comics Nos. 28 and 58, Superman Nos. 20, 26, and 28, and World’s Finest Comics Nos. 19, 23, and 28. Greco-Roman figures are visible; Jewish characters are absent. Mainstream America permitted WASP and ancient heroes in their fantasy. “Siegel and Shuster’s … lack of Jewish representation” in Superman, as Lund fittingly asserts, “was likely a conscious evasion of anything that could be deleterious to Jewish acculturation or feed American anti-Semitism.”¹⁶

Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator spotlights the name Samson and is a more likely inspiration than the Book of Judges. In Wylie’s book, biology professor Abednego Danner tests his superhuman serum on a pregnant cat before his gestating wife. He names the kitten, who cannonballs through a wall like Superman later does, Samson. Dr. Danner compares his son’s strength to that of Samson and Hercules. Hugo Danner even pulls down the stone fort he built as a child in the mountains of Colorado and later imagines demolishing German edifices to end World War I and the US Capitol Building like Samson at the Philistines’ Temple of Dagon.¹⁷

Superman’s wondrous deeds derive from Gladiator, where the natural and modern worlds meet. Dr. Danner compares his son’s powers to those of ants and grasshoppers. “‘Did you ever watch an ant carry many times its weight? Or see a grasshopper jump fifty times its length?’” Hugo Danner, frightened of his new abilities, told his father: “‘I can jump higher’n a house. I can run faster’n a train. I can pull up big trees an’ push ’em over.’” Siegel narrates and Shuster visualizes these two examples of insect power in the first issues of Action Comics and Superman to explain Superman’s abilities to lift tremendous weights, leap over buildings, and outrun express trains.¹⁸

Siegel’s bosses knew about his pilfering. Jack S. Liebowitz’s March 1939 letter to Siegel indicated that Alfred A. Knopf’s attorney found that Superman’s feats “of running faster than a train and knocking out six men at one time and knocking over a train … are brought out in the book Gladiator.” Harry Donenfeld’s undated screed from the 1950s to Siegel is striking. “According to your own circulated statements, you plagiarized Superman from the writings of Philip Wylie. Inasmuch as you openly and brazenly confess to such purloining, it seems to me that Philip Wylie should receive from you the thousands of dollars [my company] paid you for your creation.”¹⁹

Jewishness, Krypton, and Kryptonite

Defenders of the Hebraic theory attest that Superman is a coded angel. The Festschrift Superman at Fifty! quotes Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley saying that Superman’s cape symbolizes wings.²⁰

Siegel, however, provided a different reasoning in his autobiography. He recalls suggesting to Shuster “that Superman wear a cape … that … would whip around when the character was in action” to give “the impression of more speed.” Siegel further explains that “this would add more colorful hyper drama to the movements of Superman, especially when he was leaping or flying.” Superman’s cloak pays homage to Siegel’s “favorite performer” Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. who donned the garment as Zorro.²¹

Shuster repeated the King of Hollywood’s impact in Nemo. “Fairbanks would swing on ropes very much like Superman flying—or like Tarzan on a vine.” Shuster agreed with Siegel that the cape provided “the feeling of action” when Superman “was flying or jumping or leaping—a flowing cape would give it movement. It really helped, and it was very easy to draw.”²²

Jewhooers shout that Superman’s Kryptonian surname signals one of the Hebrew names of God. Yet, the House of El idea is a misnomer. George Lowther, who wrote for, narrated, and later directed the Superman radio show, changed the Kryptonian family name “L” from the newspaper comics to the phonetic “el” in his 1942 novel The Adventures of Superman. This “is why I’ve never put any credence into the argument that Siegel intended Superman to be a Jewish avatar,” Tom De Haven sounds in his Superman book Our Hero. “All you can really argue is that George Lowther possibly meant Superman to be a Jewish avatar, and so what, right?”²³

There was no Hebrew origin for Superman’s father’s name. As Superman’s author explains, “The name Jor-L was an anagram of my name: Jerome Siegel.” (The source of Superman’s Kryptonian name Kal-L and his mother’s Lora go unstated in his chronicle.) Siegel first used the name Jor-L in New Adventure Comics No. 12 (January 1937) for his space lawman strip the “Federal Men of Tomorrow.” His penchant for the twelfth letter of the English alphabet expanded to alliteration. Consider Superman’s love interests and archenemy: Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris, Lyla Lerrol, and Lex Luthor. David Mamet illustrates this connection in his 1989 book Some Freaks. Larry Tye expands the list of LLs in his 2013 biography Superman.²⁴

The Judeocentric position relies on Feiffer’s “The Minsk Theory of Krypton.” Feiffer’s 1996 obituary for Siegel testified that Krypton’s fate was symbolic of Jewish plight. “It wasn’t Krypton that Superman really came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw.” Proponents expanded Krypton’s annihilation to a metaphor for Nazi eradication of Jewish people and their homelands in Europe.²⁵

This, too, is ahistorical. Siegel devised the Superman concept between 1932 and 1934, years before Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, World War II, and the Holocaust. Lund addresses these issues and more in his 2016 rebuttal Re-Constructing the Man of Steel.²⁶

The Holocaust parable for Krypton is uncorroborated. Consider De Haven’s words on the matter. “Whether [Superman editor] Mort Weisinger and his virtually all-Jewish cadre of creative talent were consciously using the Krypton adventures of the late 1950s and early 1960s as metaphors for the European Holocaust of the 1940s is anybody’s guess (they never said, not that anyone ever asked).”²⁷

Krypton’s origins belong to science fiction. Siegel seized the name from the periodic table’s noble gasses and likely copied Burroughs, who named one of the Martian kingdoms Helium. Blending fantasy and eugenics, Superman No. 1 (Summer 1939) describes Kryptonians as an evolved super race. Shuster draws a futuristic city; Krypton is not the Jewish shtetl or ghetto.²⁸

Superman’s Jewhooers cite Kryptonite as confirmation for the Jewish assimilation thesis. Kal-El weakens the closer he gets to his alien origins. Kryptonite’s debilitating effects therefore function as a metaphor for his writers’ and editors’ ambivalence toward their immigrant roots.

Historian Gary Gerstle explains it best in American Crucible. “Exposure is a constant worry … because it will increase his vulnerability to his enemies, who have learned that Kryptonite strips him of his superhuman powers.” Fragments of Superman’s home planet play with alienage in a clever way by dismantling his Anglo-Saxon façade. “Superman’s immigrant story is,” according to Gerstle, “a triumphant saga of a Nordic Americanization, although it carries a harsh warning about the consequences of having one’s real alien identity uncovered.”²⁹

A Cold War interpretation is more plausible. The Superman radio series introduced Kryptonite in 1943 but only explored it two years later with the Atom Man sequence. Kryptonite entered the comic books in Superman No. 61 (November 1949). It gained importance in Superman lore after atomic bomb detonation. Weisinger expanded the green meteorite into an assortment of colors starting in 1958 to reflect atomic anxieties. Kryptonite is essentially radiation poisoning for Superman.³⁰

The origins of Kryptonite date back to an unpublished story Siegel wrote in 1940 that expresses no Jewish symbolism. K-Metal depletes Superman of his powers but bestows humans that touch the glowing green meteorite with “tremendous strength.” It was a science fiction plot device for Superman reveal his true identity to his love interest Lois Lane.

Popular historian Gerard Jones suggests that Siegel’s “marital bliss” with his first wife Bella, however temporary, may have inspired the storyline. Superman’s publisher, nonetheless, nixed the adventure because it presented Superman and Lane as partners, effectively suspending the love triangle premise key to the mythology. “Never meddle with a proven success,” Tye declares. Siegel and Shuster biographer Brad Ricca notes that “it makes sense that a higher-up realized this would change Superman’s status quo too drastically.”³¹

For Siegel, the Kryptonian backstory was apparently an afterthought. He reveals in his memoir that the newspaper syndicate requested two weeks of strips describing Krypton and its destruction for Superman’s 1939 debut in the dailies. Siegel reduced the cataclysm to a single panel in the first issues of Action Comics and Superman. He returned to the plot device in Superman No. 141 (November 1960). The inaugural episode of the 1940 Superman radio show produced by Robert Maxwell and Allen Ducovny provides far more detail and drama before the planet “explodes into millions of glowing fragments.”³²

Religious Self-Identification

Siegel never admitted to imbuing his champion with Jewishness. His late second wife Joanne confirmed this in a 1996 interview for The Jewish Week but conceded the possibility of unconscious influence, and Siegel’s daughter Laura acquiesced to the same at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023 when the inevitable question of Jewish subtext arose. Siegel himself proclaimed in Nemo that he and Shuster “practically lived in movie theaters.” Superman’s Jewhooers continually ignore the pair’s message of popular entertainment influences.³³

The extent to which Siegel embraced his Jewish roots is debatable. Cousin Jerry Fine told Jones, “I don’t think he ever went to the synagogue in his life.” Siegel uses the word “Jewish” once in his chronicle to refer to the Nazi response to Superman’s manhandling of Hitler in the 1940 comic for Look magazine. He does not self-identify as Jewish or discuss his mother’s and older brother’s role in Cleveland’s Jewish community—only that the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps named him a tribe member. Threatening to sock Hitler in the jaw and rejecting Aryan racial supremacy does not make Superman Jewish. It is true that Siegel cites “oppressed jews in Nazi Germany” in his 1975 press release and the persecution and murder of “jews and others” by the totalitarian regime as inspiration in his 1978 memoir, but it is revisionism that contradicts his own chronology of Superman’s creation. Siegel’s presumed hostility toward Hitler via a 1932 joke in the Glenville Torch about the two playing “a wild game of pinochle” and the popularity of Nazism in 1930s Cleveland also does not demonstrate causality.³⁴

Judaizing Superman hangs on the flimsy idea that his “Jewish creators automatically created Jewish material.” It is a reclamation project of “ethnic pride” and a “myth-based heritage fabrication” reminiscent of 1960s ethnic revival literature and movies that projects the postwar period and “post-Holocaust knowledge and concerns” into the past. Superman’s Jewhooers enjoin the public to believe that Siegel and Shuster infused Superman with their Jewishness, and it was the “primary determining factor in their creative lives.” What Siegel and Shuster’s “Jewishness meant for” them at the time, as Lund articulates, “was not necessarily the same as it means for their Jewish interpreters today.”³⁵

None of the examples marshaled by Jewhooers prove that Superman is Jewish. These creative interpretations, articulated as “evidence” and devoid of historical context, disregard the affinities and statements of Superman’s creators. Finding Jewishness in the character, who is not even human, illustrates a confirmation bias and reluctance to entertain more persuasive explanations. This perspective dominates the scholarly and popular landscape and imposes an ahistorical view on the past. It is time to stop Jewhooing Superman.

1. For some early examples of the Superman is Jewish thesis, see Ann Rinaldi, “‘Superman’ Helps Us Remember How It Was,” The Indianapolis Star, March 6, 1979, 8; James K. Brower, “The Hebrew Origins of Superman,” Biblical Archaeology Review 5, no. 3 (May/June 1979), 22–6; Dennis Dooley, “Superman: An Immigrant Who Really Made It,” Moment (June 1988), 51–2; Jeff Salamon, “Up, Up, and Oy Vay!: The Further Adventures of Supermensch,” The Village Voice, August 4, 1992, 86–8; Eric J. Greenberg, “Did Superman Have Biblical Roots?,” The Jewish Week, February 9, 1996, 41, 56; David Peterson, “Superman has Jewish roots, rabbi agrees,” Star Tribune, Minneapolis Edition, September 14, 1996, B10; Jules Feiffer, “Jerry Siegel: The Minsk Theory of Krypton,” The New York Times Magazine, December 29, 1996, 14–5. ↩︎
2. Susan A. Glenn, “In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity,” Jewish Social Studies 8, nos. 2/3 (Winter/Spring, 2002), 139–52. ↩︎
3. Martin Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish–Comics Connection (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 75–7. ↩︎
4. Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology, trans. F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1914); Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, third ed. (Novato: New World Library, 2008), 23, 27–30, 210–1, 343n36; John Bucher, email message to author, July 29, 2025. ↩︎
5. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 167, 184; Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” in On The Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman, eds. Herbert J. Gans, et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 1979), 204. ↩︎
6. Jerry Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero” (unpublished manuscript, November 7, 1978), chap. 5, 1. ↩︎
7. Tom Andrae, Geoffr[e]y Blum, and Gary Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” Nemo: The Classic Comics Library (August 1983), 15. ↩︎
8. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 73–4, 135–6; Greenberg, “Did Superman Have Biblical Roots?,” 41. ↩︎
9. Feiffer, “Jerry Siegel: The Minsk Theory of Krypton,” 14. ↩︎
10. John Kobler, “Up, Up and Awa-a-y! The Rise of Superman, Inc.,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 21, 1941, 70; Dennis Dooley, “The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday,” in Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle, eds., Superman at Fifty! The Persistence of a Legend (Cleveland: Octavia Press, 1987), 22, 25–6, 32; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 10; Thomas Andrae, “Funnyman, Jewish Masculinity and the Decline of the Superhero,” in Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon, Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero From the Creators of Superman (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2010), 53–4; Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 1, 17. ↩︎
11. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 12. ↩︎
12. Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 5, 6; DC Comics, Superman: The Action Comics Archives, vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1997), 28. ↩︎
13. Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 1, 11–3, 15, 17, chap. 3, 6, 10, chap. 4, 11–2, chap. 5, 1, 6–7, chap. 6, 1, chap. 7, 1–2; Kobler, “Up, Up and Awa-a-y!,” 14, 70; Mort Weisinger, “Here Comes Superman!,” Coronet (July 1946), 24; Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 128. See also Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 12, 15. ↩︎
14. Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 9, 14. ↩︎
15. Kobler, “Up, Up and Awa-a-y!,” 76; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 7; Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (New York: Random House, 2012), 73, 78; Brad Ricca, Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators of Superman (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press, 2013), 119–24, 188; John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Thomas Andrae, “The Jewish Superhero,” in Andrae and Gordon, Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman, 41–7. ↩︎
16. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 151–2. ↩︎
17. Philip Wylie, Gladiator (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1930), 12–3, 18–20, 26, 46, 53–7, 221–2, 251, 290–1, 312. ↩︎
18. Wylie, Gladiator, 5–6, 48–9, 51; DC Comics, Superman: The Action Comics Archives, vol. 1, 11; DC Comics, Superman Archives, vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1989), 10, 42. ↩︎
19. Jack S. Liebowitz to Jerome Siegel, letter, March 10, 1939, item 1010271 on comicconnect.com; Harry Donenfeld to Jerry Siegel, undated letter [circa 1950s], item 1010246 on comicconnect.com. ↩︎
20. Gary Engle, “What Makes Superman So Darned American?,” in Dooley and Engle, eds., Superman at Fifty!, 84. ↩︎
21. Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 1, 9, chap. 3, 20; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 12. ↩︎
22. Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 11, 14. ↩︎
23. George Lowther, The Adventures of Superman (1942; Bedford: Applewood Books, 1995), ii, 4 passim; Les Daniels, Superman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 1998), 54, 71; Tom De Haven, Our Hero: Superman on Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 194–5. ↩︎
24. Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 5, 7; Daniels, Superman, 25; Ricca, Super Boys, 109–10; David Mamet, Some Freaks (New York: Viking, 1989), 178–9; Tye, Superman, 174–5. ↩︎
25. Feiffer, “Jerry Siegel: The Minsk Theory of Krypton,” 15. ↩︎
26. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, esp. 72–3, 78–9, 99, 101–3. ↩︎
27. De Haven, Our Hero, 116. ↩︎
28. Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1917), 96 passim; Tye, Superman, 10; DC Comics, Superman Archives, vol. 1, 42; Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 71, 73. ↩︎
29. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 176. ↩︎
30. Tye, Superman, 50, 90–2, 103, 114, 172–3; Ricca, Super Boys, 190. ↩︎
31. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 181–3; Tye, Superman, 50, 159; Ricca, Super Boys, 192. ↩︎
32. DC Comics, Superman: The Action Comics Archives, vol. 1, 11; DC Comics, Superman Archives, vol. 1, 9; “The Baby from Krypton,” The Adventures of Superman, aired February 12, 1940; Daniels, Superman, 50; Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 77. ↩︎
33. Greenberg, “Did Superman Have Biblical Roots?,” 41; Andrae, Blum, and Coddington, “Of Supermen and Kids With Dreams,” 10. ↩︎
34. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 78, 107–9, 151, 177; Jones, Men of Tomorrow, 84, 129–30; Siegel, “Creation of a Superhero,” chap. 5, 5, chap. 7, 1; Jerry Siegel, “For Immediate Release: Superman’s Originator Puts ‘Curse’ On Superman Movie,” October 1975, 8; Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, “HOW SUPERMAN WOULD END THE WAR drawn especially for LOOK,” Look, February 27, 1940, 16–7; “Jerry Siegel Interferes!,” Das Schwarze Korps, April 25, 1940, 8; Tye, Superman, 77; Ricca, Super Boys, 50, 168–9, 200; Dooley, “The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday,” in Dooley and Engle, eds., Superman at Fifty!, 24. ↩︎
35. Lund, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, 8, 11–2, 20, 23, 25, 29, 31–4, 37, 44, 47, 52–3, 59, 61–2, 73, 85, 99–100, 103, 180, 183–4. ↩︎