Empire of the Superheroes
America’s Comic Book Creators and the Making of a Billion-Dollar Industry
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Superman may be faster than a speeding bullet, but even he can’t outrun copyright law. Since the dawn of the pulp hero in the 1930s, publishers and authors have fought over the privilege of making money off of comics, and the authors and artists usually have lost. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, got all of $130 for the rights to the hero.
In Empire of the Superheroes, Mark Cotta Vaz argues that licensing and litigation do as much as any ink-stained creator to shape the mythology of comic characters. Vaz reveals just how precarious life was for the legends of the industry. Siegel and Shuster—and their heirs—spent seventy years battling lawyers to regain rights to Superman. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were cheated out of their interest in Captain America, and Kirby’s children brought a case against Marvel to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. To make matters worse, the infant comics medium was nearly strangled in its crib by censorship and moral condemnation. For the writers and illustrators now celebrated as visionaries, the “golden age” of comics felt more like hard times.
The fantastical characters that now earn Hollywood billions have all-too-human roots. Empire of the Superheroes digs them up, detailing the creative martyrdom at the heart of a pop-culture powerhouse.
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Editor Vaz (Mythic Visions) digs into the history of the comic book industry in this detailed, upbeat survey. The story begins with two high school students, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, who grew up in Cleveland during the Great Depression and dreamed up Superman, a "muscular man" with superpowers "costumed like an acrobat or circus strongman." After developing the character, they sold the rights to their creation for $130 to National Comics. Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and was soon followed by Batman (created by Bob Kane) and Wonder Woman (by William Marston and Harry Peter), and by 1939 comics was a big business: "a live-action Superman movie, a radio adventure series was in the works, and a full-color Sunday strip was introduced." In the early '60s, upstart Marvel challenged established publisher DC with the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Avengers, and became an entertainment powerhouse, leveraging its creations into the billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe. Vaz's history is comprehensive and finds ready drama in the exploitation of naive artists by rapacious publishers; indeed, the decades-long struggle by Siegel and Shuster to wrest back ownership of Superman "would define and consume their lives" and is the beating heart of the story. This grand comic book adventure is not to be missed.
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