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The Superman Wars: A Battle for Truth, Justice, and an American Icon
Up in the sky! Look! It's Superman!
Almost everyone knows about the man from Krypton who, disguised as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent working with the fearless Lois Lane, fights for the vulnerable and the oppressed. But few know the truth about this indelible character's creation. From mobster tactics to decades-long courtroom drama, a beloved American myth was born, betrayed, and eventually reclaimed—almost eighty years after the character first appeared.
New witnesses, unpublished manuscripts, personal letters, and more reveal the complex and dramatic history of Superman and his creator, Jerry Siegel. This is a David and Goliath clash with twists, turns, and devastating upheavals. An underdog tale of a creator who fought for his rights and finally found redemption in his battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. A story that has never been fully told . . .
Until now.
Almost everyone knows about the man from Krypton who, disguised as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent working with the fearless Lois Lane, fights for the vulnerable and the oppressed. But few know the truth about this indelible character's creation. From mobster tactics to decades-long courtroom drama, a beloved American myth was born, betrayed, and eventually reclaimed—almost eighty years after the character first appeared.
New witnesses, unpublished manuscripts, personal letters, and more reveal the complex and dramatic history of Superman and his creator, Jerry Siegel. This is a David and Goliath clash with twists, turns, and devastating upheavals. An underdog tale of a creator who fought for his rights and finally found redemption in his battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. A story that has never been fully told . . .
Until now.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryComics
416 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2026
About the author
William Bernhardt
99 books518 followersWilliam Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the bestselling Daniel Pike and Ben Kincaid legal thrillers, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and Nemesis, three books of poetry, and the ten Red Sneaker books on fiction writing.
In addition, Bernhardt founded the Red Sneaker Writers Center to mentor aspiring writers. The Center hosts an annual writers conference (WriterCon), small-group seminars, a monthly newsletter, and a bi-weekly podcast. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the owner of Balkan Press, which publishes poetry and fiction as well as the literary journal Conclave.
Bernhardt has received the Southern Writers Guild’s Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (University of Pennsylvania) and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (Oklahoma State), which is given "in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large." He has been nominated for the Oklahoma Book Award eighteen times in three different categories, and has won the award twice. Library Journal called him “the master of the courtroom drama.” The Vancouver Sun called him “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.”
In addition to his novels and poetry, he has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. OSU named him “Oklahoma’s Renaissance Man.”
In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion winning over $20,000.
When Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can “write a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.”
In addition, Bernhardt founded the Red Sneaker Writers Center to mentor aspiring writers. The Center hosts an annual writers conference (WriterCon), small-group seminars, a monthly newsletter, and a bi-weekly podcast. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the owner of Balkan Press, which publishes poetry and fiction as well as the literary journal Conclave.
Bernhardt has received the Southern Writers Guild’s Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (University of Pennsylvania) and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (Oklahoma State), which is given "in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large." He has been nominated for the Oklahoma Book Award eighteen times in three different categories, and has won the award twice. Library Journal called him “the master of the courtroom drama.” The Vancouver Sun called him “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.”
In addition to his novels and poetry, he has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. OSU named him “Oklahoma’s Renaissance Man.”
In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion winning over $20,000.
When Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can “write a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.”
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Hero, the Contract, and the Men Left Standing Beneath the Cape
Reading “The Superman Wars” as a moving history of authorship, erasure, and the long afterlife of a bad bargain
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 29th, 2026
Superman can outrun bullets. He cannot outrun a rights contract. That is the smallest and meanest joke inside William Bernhardt’s “The Superman Wars,” a book sold as the making of an American icon and written, more interestingly, as the history of a theft that could never quite be called theft in the language that mattered most. Superman is the visible subject, naturally: the clean silhouette, the impossible body, the cheerfully exportable idea of strength in tights. What Bernhardt keeps circling, though, is something harsher and more human. His real subject is what happens when a creator’s defining act of self-invention becomes the mechanism by which he is slowly, legally, and almost respectably separated from himself.
Bernhardt tells you his terms early. This is “narrative nonfiction,” built from documents, eyewitness accounts, and the historical record, even as it moves close to Jerry Siegel’s consciousness and shapes the material for dramatic force. The wager sounds neat in summary and is much harder to sustain in practice: documentary authority without surrendering emotional urgency. Bernhardt does not want a monograph in a cape. He does not want fiction in archival clothing, either. He wants something trickier and more unstable – a documentary drama in which facts stay upright while feeling is allowed to move at full speed. The method works best when he lets the hurt explain the history. When he does that, the book acquires a charge that no amount of dutiful scene-setting could manufacture.
The prologue earns its keep immediately. Jerry Siegel stands outside a Westchester courtroom in 1947, about to testify in the lawsuit that might return his characters to him or leave him with nothing. That opening does more than create suspense. It changes the whole job of the book. The question is no longer simply how Superman was made. It is how Siegel lost him. Bernhardt does not offer innocence first and betrayal later. He gives us litigation first, then walks us backward into the conditions that made it inevitable. Even the book’s most buoyant early chapters arrive with the lawsuit already in the room.
So back we go to Cleveland: loneliness, ambition, and a boy whose imagination is already doing more labor than his world knows what to do with. Bernhardt is at his best on the young Jerry Siegel – socially stranded, chronically overexcited, underadmired, and half-raised by pulps, comic strips, and movie serials. He is mocked at school, fiercely protected by his mother Sarah, and drawn to stories not just because they entertain him but because they offer a system in which intense feeling might finally produce consequence. Jerry reads not to flee but to build. One of Bernhardt’s sharpest instincts is that this early hunger is not merely artistic. Jerry does not simply want to invent. He wants to see his name in print. He wants proof that he counts for something, that he is not just another awkward boy being laughed at in the hallway.
Then Joe Shuster arrives, not as destiny in spectacles but as the necessary counterpart. Bernhardt is too sensible to stage their meeting as myth. He lets it remain what it likely was: two matching obsessions finally sharing a desk. From there the boys move through school papers, homemade magazines, rejected pitches, and several wrong versions of the idea before they find the one tough enough to survive publication. This matters, and Bernhardt knows it. One of the quiet strengths of “The Superman Wars” is that it refuses the lightning-bolt fantasy of invention. Superman does not descend in finished form. He is drafted, redrafted, misfired, reimagined, and argued into existence. Bernhardt makes process feel fated without pretending it was instantaneous, which is harder than it sounds and more honest than the usual origin-story pieties.
Then the book darkens. After Michael Siegel is robbed at his store and dies, Bernhardt lets the official record and Jerry’s inner record stand side by side. On paper, one thing happened. In Jerry’s mind, another. The distinction matters, and Bernhardt is careful not to blur it away for convenience. But he is equally alert to the fact that imagination has no respect for tidy legal wording. Superman begins to look less like a bright pulp concoction than like a fantasy of repair stitched to grief – a hero for a world in which the father could not be protected, the crime could not be stopped in time, and ordinary life could be punctured by violence and humiliation without warning. The claim is bold, maybe a shade tidier than life usually is, but Bernhardt earns it because he makes it feel like emotional logic rather than clever retrospective symbolism.
From there the book becomes a history of invention fed into the company mill. Superman reaches print, and the triumph is already nicked. Bernhardt is excellent on the first wound that never really closes: the meager payment, the legal hooks buried in the contract, the excitement that keeps the young creators from seeing, or fully seeing, what they are signing away. The hero is the glamorous figure. The contract is the explanatory one. Bernhardt never lets us forget that the first real superpower on these pages is the ability to read a legal document better than the boy desperate to be published. Once Superman enters the corporate machine, Jerry and Joe begin the long experience of watching something unmistakably theirs become, in every enforceable sense, not theirs.
Here chronology hardens into argument. “The Superman Wars” moves in three sharp turns: creation, erosion, and belated partial repair. Part One gives us invention, ambition, and the exhilarating mistake of believing talent will protect its owner. Part Two becomes the long central stretch of estrangement – editorial interference, lawsuits, temporary returns, Joe Shuster’s failing eyesight, and the special misery of watching your own creation prosper in other hands. Part Three narrows toward public pressure, restored creator credit, and an ending whose power comes from its limits. Superman is not returned. What returns – belatedly, inadequately, movingly – are the names the credit line had withheld.
That structure keeps pulling off the same hard trick. Each Superman victory registers, somewhere else, as a loss for the men who made him. As Superman’s public glow brightens, his creators shrink inside the institution built to monetize him. Joe’s failing eyesight is almost indecently apt in this scheme. One of the men who helped give modern culture one of its cleanest visual myths gradually loses the ability to see. Bernhardt does not need to underline the irony. The fact does the underlining for him. The same is true of the late restoration of the “created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” line. Bernhardt understands exactly how to handle it. He does not pretend the corrected byline heals the wound. He lets it matter, and he lets it fail to be enough.
To carry all this, Bernhardt relies on prose that is plainspoken, disciplined, and not looking for applause. He favors short and medium-length sentences, moves briskly between scene and summary, and understands that a long ownership fight becomes readable only when the paperwork has human toll under it. The payoff is immediate. A book like this could easily seize up on contracts, depositions, royalty disputes, and corporate reshuffling. Bernhardt keeps the legal machinery from stalling by refusing to treat readability as a concession. That decision has a cost. You rarely stop for the sentence itself. This is not a book of verbal set pieces. The prose does not often insist on being admired in isolation. But the restraint is purposeful. Bernhardt is not trying to dazzle you away from the material. He is trying to keep the material breathing.
And what he pulls off, though, is harder than sentence-by-sentence flourish: he makes paperwork hurt. That is the book’s hardest conversion. A story that could have hardened into signatures, lawsuits, and grudges becomes grievance made dramatically legible. Bernhardt knows where the real electricity of the Superman story now lies. It lies in the gap between the character’s public radiance and the private debt, failing eyesight, resentment, humiliation, and bad bargains of the men who made him. As the symbol grows larger and cleaner, the creators become more exposed. Not every writer can make a contract feel like a plot turn. Bernhardt comes remarkably close.
The review would be dishonest if it pretended the book paid for none of this. Clarity here comes with a bill attached. Bernhardt stays so near Jerry Siegel’s emotional and moral vantage that the book narrows around it. Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz work on the page, but they can flatten into corporate appetite backed by better lawyers rather than the messier knot of greed, habit, legalism, bluff, self-excuse, and sincere self-justification that reality usually supplies. The larger industrial story compresses too. At times it becomes a cleaner creator-versus-corporation struggle than reality is likely to allow. None of this breaks the book. Too much dutiful even-handedness can turn urgency into paste. But the price of Bernhardt’s emotional continuity is a real compression of motive, and it should be named as such.
The middle gives up some altitude as well. Partly, that is simply honest design. Bernhardt is writing about attrition, and attrition is repetition with a mortgage. Return, setback, renewed effort, another setback: the pattern is deliberate, and you feel the drag exactly because Bernhardt wants you to. Part Two never buckles, but it does develop a slow, dragging gait. This is a strong book with a softer middle, not one that remains equally sharp from first page to last. Still, even here, Bernhardt’s command of pacing is better than average. He knows where to cut away, where to summarize, where to let a scene hold the page for a moment longer than mere efficiency would advise.
No one has to drag “The Superman Wars” into the present. It gets there on its own. Bernhardt does not need to force relevance around creator rights, work-for-hire arrangements, restored credit lines, or the familiar cultural arrangement by which institutions adore the fruits of imagination while remaining markedly cooler toward the imaginative worker. The book is diagnostic rather than topical. It is explaining a pattern, not flattering the moment. Culture loves the miracle of invention. Institutions become practical the minute the invention starts making money. A restored byline can be real, useful, and still nowhere near enough.
That double truth is what gives the ending its force. Bernhardt does not pretend the late settlement heals the wound. Jerry and Joe do not get Superman back. They get stipends, public acknowledgment, and the restored “created by” line – payment in place of restoration. Legally, that is modest. In lived terms, it is not minor. Bernhardt treats naming not as ceremonial confetti but as a final durable form of identity. To be written back into the credit line is not to recover the world that was lost. A name returned is not a world returned. But it is an official refusal to keep the record wrong, and the book is disciplined enough never to confuse that refusal with justice.
For me, “The Superman Wars” lands at 86/100, or 4 stars: an intelligent, affecting, precise book whose real accomplishment is not that it uncovers some wholly hidden history, but that it clarifies the human cost of a history many readers thought they already knew. It is not the latest serious accounting of Superman, and it is not formally restless. What it becomes is narrower and better aimed: a book that leaves the myth standing while making the paperwork impossible to ignore. The cape still flies. Bernhardt makes sure the byline does too – late, and with more ache than celebration. By the end, Superman has not become smaller. He has become harder to see without the paperwork catching the light. Behind that silhouette stand two young men at their desks, one writing, one drawing, both trying not to be written out of the credit line that should have carried their names from the beginning.
Reading “The Superman Wars” as a moving history of authorship, erasure, and the long afterlife of a bad bargain
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 29th, 2026
Superman can outrun bullets. He cannot outrun a rights contract. That is the smallest and meanest joke inside William Bernhardt’s “The Superman Wars,” a book sold as the making of an American icon and written, more interestingly, as the history of a theft that could never quite be called theft in the language that mattered most. Superman is the visible subject, naturally: the clean silhouette, the impossible body, the cheerfully exportable idea of strength in tights. What Bernhardt keeps circling, though, is something harsher and more human. His real subject is what happens when a creator’s defining act of self-invention becomes the mechanism by which he is slowly, legally, and almost respectably separated from himself.
Bernhardt tells you his terms early. This is “narrative nonfiction,” built from documents, eyewitness accounts, and the historical record, even as it moves close to Jerry Siegel’s consciousness and shapes the material for dramatic force. The wager sounds neat in summary and is much harder to sustain in practice: documentary authority without surrendering emotional urgency. Bernhardt does not want a monograph in a cape. He does not want fiction in archival clothing, either. He wants something trickier and more unstable – a documentary drama in which facts stay upright while feeling is allowed to move at full speed. The method works best when he lets the hurt explain the history. When he does that, the book acquires a charge that no amount of dutiful scene-setting could manufacture.
The prologue earns its keep immediately. Jerry Siegel stands outside a Westchester courtroom in 1947, about to testify in the lawsuit that might return his characters to him or leave him with nothing. That opening does more than create suspense. It changes the whole job of the book. The question is no longer simply how Superman was made. It is how Siegel lost him. Bernhardt does not offer innocence first and betrayal later. He gives us litigation first, then walks us backward into the conditions that made it inevitable. Even the book’s most buoyant early chapters arrive with the lawsuit already in the room.
So back we go to Cleveland: loneliness, ambition, and a boy whose imagination is already doing more labor than his world knows what to do with. Bernhardt is at his best on the young Jerry Siegel – socially stranded, chronically overexcited, underadmired, and half-raised by pulps, comic strips, and movie serials. He is mocked at school, fiercely protected by his mother Sarah, and drawn to stories not just because they entertain him but because they offer a system in which intense feeling might finally produce consequence. Jerry reads not to flee but to build. One of Bernhardt’s sharpest instincts is that this early hunger is not merely artistic. Jerry does not simply want to invent. He wants to see his name in print. He wants proof that he counts for something, that he is not just another awkward boy being laughed at in the hallway.
Then Joe Shuster arrives, not as destiny in spectacles but as the necessary counterpart. Bernhardt is too sensible to stage their meeting as myth. He lets it remain what it likely was: two matching obsessions finally sharing a desk. From there the boys move through school papers, homemade magazines, rejected pitches, and several wrong versions of the idea before they find the one tough enough to survive publication. This matters, and Bernhardt knows it. One of the quiet strengths of “The Superman Wars” is that it refuses the lightning-bolt fantasy of invention. Superman does not descend in finished form. He is drafted, redrafted, misfired, reimagined, and argued into existence. Bernhardt makes process feel fated without pretending it was instantaneous, which is harder than it sounds and more honest than the usual origin-story pieties.
Then the book darkens. After Michael Siegel is robbed at his store and dies, Bernhardt lets the official record and Jerry’s inner record stand side by side. On paper, one thing happened. In Jerry’s mind, another. The distinction matters, and Bernhardt is careful not to blur it away for convenience. But he is equally alert to the fact that imagination has no respect for tidy legal wording. Superman begins to look less like a bright pulp concoction than like a fantasy of repair stitched to grief – a hero for a world in which the father could not be protected, the crime could not be stopped in time, and ordinary life could be punctured by violence and humiliation without warning. The claim is bold, maybe a shade tidier than life usually is, but Bernhardt earns it because he makes it feel like emotional logic rather than clever retrospective symbolism.
From there the book becomes a history of invention fed into the company mill. Superman reaches print, and the triumph is already nicked. Bernhardt is excellent on the first wound that never really closes: the meager payment, the legal hooks buried in the contract, the excitement that keeps the young creators from seeing, or fully seeing, what they are signing away. The hero is the glamorous figure. The contract is the explanatory one. Bernhardt never lets us forget that the first real superpower on these pages is the ability to read a legal document better than the boy desperate to be published. Once Superman enters the corporate machine, Jerry and Joe begin the long experience of watching something unmistakably theirs become, in every enforceable sense, not theirs.
Here chronology hardens into argument. “The Superman Wars” moves in three sharp turns: creation, erosion, and belated partial repair. Part One gives us invention, ambition, and the exhilarating mistake of believing talent will protect its owner. Part Two becomes the long central stretch of estrangement – editorial interference, lawsuits, temporary returns, Joe Shuster’s failing eyesight, and the special misery of watching your own creation prosper in other hands. Part Three narrows toward public pressure, restored creator credit, and an ending whose power comes from its limits. Superman is not returned. What returns – belatedly, inadequately, movingly – are the names the credit line had withheld.
That structure keeps pulling off the same hard trick. Each Superman victory registers, somewhere else, as a loss for the men who made him. As Superman’s public glow brightens, his creators shrink inside the institution built to monetize him. Joe’s failing eyesight is almost indecently apt in this scheme. One of the men who helped give modern culture one of its cleanest visual myths gradually loses the ability to see. Bernhardt does not need to underline the irony. The fact does the underlining for him. The same is true of the late restoration of the “created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” line. Bernhardt understands exactly how to handle it. He does not pretend the corrected byline heals the wound. He lets it matter, and he lets it fail to be enough.
To carry all this, Bernhardt relies on prose that is plainspoken, disciplined, and not looking for applause. He favors short and medium-length sentences, moves briskly between scene and summary, and understands that a long ownership fight becomes readable only when the paperwork has human toll under it. The payoff is immediate. A book like this could easily seize up on contracts, depositions, royalty disputes, and corporate reshuffling. Bernhardt keeps the legal machinery from stalling by refusing to treat readability as a concession. That decision has a cost. You rarely stop for the sentence itself. This is not a book of verbal set pieces. The prose does not often insist on being admired in isolation. But the restraint is purposeful. Bernhardt is not trying to dazzle you away from the material. He is trying to keep the material breathing.
And what he pulls off, though, is harder than sentence-by-sentence flourish: he makes paperwork hurt. That is the book’s hardest conversion. A story that could have hardened into signatures, lawsuits, and grudges becomes grievance made dramatically legible. Bernhardt knows where the real electricity of the Superman story now lies. It lies in the gap between the character’s public radiance and the private debt, failing eyesight, resentment, humiliation, and bad bargains of the men who made him. As the symbol grows larger and cleaner, the creators become more exposed. Not every writer can make a contract feel like a plot turn. Bernhardt comes remarkably close.
The review would be dishonest if it pretended the book paid for none of this. Clarity here comes with a bill attached. Bernhardt stays so near Jerry Siegel’s emotional and moral vantage that the book narrows around it. Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz work on the page, but they can flatten into corporate appetite backed by better lawyers rather than the messier knot of greed, habit, legalism, bluff, self-excuse, and sincere self-justification that reality usually supplies. The larger industrial story compresses too. At times it becomes a cleaner creator-versus-corporation struggle than reality is likely to allow. None of this breaks the book. Too much dutiful even-handedness can turn urgency into paste. But the price of Bernhardt’s emotional continuity is a real compression of motive, and it should be named as such.
The middle gives up some altitude as well. Partly, that is simply honest design. Bernhardt is writing about attrition, and attrition is repetition with a mortgage. Return, setback, renewed effort, another setback: the pattern is deliberate, and you feel the drag exactly because Bernhardt wants you to. Part Two never buckles, but it does develop a slow, dragging gait. This is a strong book with a softer middle, not one that remains equally sharp from first page to last. Still, even here, Bernhardt’s command of pacing is better than average. He knows where to cut away, where to summarize, where to let a scene hold the page for a moment longer than mere efficiency would advise.
No one has to drag “The Superman Wars” into the present. It gets there on its own. Bernhardt does not need to force relevance around creator rights, work-for-hire arrangements, restored credit lines, or the familiar cultural arrangement by which institutions adore the fruits of imagination while remaining markedly cooler toward the imaginative worker. The book is diagnostic rather than topical. It is explaining a pattern, not flattering the moment. Culture loves the miracle of invention. Institutions become practical the minute the invention starts making money. A restored byline can be real, useful, and still nowhere near enough.
That double truth is what gives the ending its force. Bernhardt does not pretend the late settlement heals the wound. Jerry and Joe do not get Superman back. They get stipends, public acknowledgment, and the restored “created by” line – payment in place of restoration. Legally, that is modest. In lived terms, it is not minor. Bernhardt treats naming not as ceremonial confetti but as a final durable form of identity. To be written back into the credit line is not to recover the world that was lost. A name returned is not a world returned. But it is an official refusal to keep the record wrong, and the book is disciplined enough never to confuse that refusal with justice.
For me, “The Superman Wars” lands at 86/100, or 4 stars: an intelligent, affecting, precise book whose real accomplishment is not that it uncovers some wholly hidden history, but that it clarifies the human cost of a history many readers thought they already knew. It is not the latest serious accounting of Superman, and it is not formally restless. What it becomes is narrower and better aimed: a book that leaves the myth standing while making the paperwork impossible to ignore. The cape still flies. Bernhardt makes sure the byline does too – late, and with more ache than celebration. By the end, Superman has not become smaller. He has become harder to see without the paperwork catching the light. Behind that silhouette stand two young men at their desks, one writing, one drawing, both trying not to be written out of the credit line that should have carried their names from the beginning.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
My thanks to NetGalley and Post Hill Press for an advance copy of this look at the origins and ongoing trials and tribulations of the creators of Superman, their long battles for not only financial reasons, but to be acknowleged for their contributions to the world of comics, and to the imaganations of people all around the world.
Trivia is something that comic book fans feed off of. And that many use as a club to those who they think don't belong in comics, usually women, minorities and those who create movies without knowing the source books. Superman is one that comes up alot, mainly as there have been so many different media versons of the Man of Steel. They can talk about secret identities. What this color kyrptonite does to Superman. How many times has Lois Lane been made to forget that Clark Kent and Superman are the same. How to say the name of a specific villan backwards to make him go back to his home in another dimension. However this bits of comic bon monts are nothing in comparison to the true stories that exist about Superman. The lawsuits, the other comics driven into the dustbin of history. Even the attempts to make the creators be forgotten, all in the name of capitalism and the amounts of money, amounts that even Superman, who uses a collapsed white star as a key, would have trouble lifting. The Superman Wars: A Battle for Truth, Justice, and an American Icon by William Bernhardt is a book about creators, work for hire, fairness, contracts, legacy and two young men with a dream, and a story of a comic icon who still makes people dream of flying free.
The book begins with a man outside of a courthouse, knowing the odds are against him, but sure that this case it right, and that justice will prevail. However justice and right is something that only seems to exist in comic books, and true judgement wouldn't happen until decades later. Moving into the past, we meet two young men, both who have lived hard lives, one losing a father early, one moving constatly in search of a place to belong. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were shy, loved science fiction, and separetly couldn't do much. However together they created an idea, and a medium that would stretch well into the future, and make certain people a lot of money. After some fits and starts the two came up with an idea, about a young baby sent to Earth, with powers beyond mortals, with a strong sense of right and wrong. After a four year search for a publisher they sold the idea to National Publications, who after many name changes would be better known as DC comics. The book goes into the contracts, the underworld dealings many of these publishers had, the lawsuits, and the changes that swept through comics, from millions in sales, to nearly being bankrupted numerous times. Before a movie in the seventies brought comics back to life, and a gave two men, some sort of satisfacton.
A sad book in many ways, about a character who has made so many people happy over the years, except the two who created him. Bernhardt has a very good grasp of how to make the many, many court cases interesting and understandable. Which is quite helpful. Bernhardt looks at work for hire, creator rights and other issues that have been raised, many because of the media flurry about the Superman creators not getting any share at all. The book is written in a narrative nonfiction and does jump in time, but once gets into the book, it really moves well. Bernhardt covers quite a bit, and again makes it easy to follow.
Bernhardt is also very honest about the creators, something that many don't like to talk about Siegel can be a little much sometimes, but it is important to know that all are heroes are only human. For those who want to understand more about the comic medium, or understand what The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was based on. Interesting and full of lots of comic lore.
Trivia is something that comic book fans feed off of. And that many use as a club to those who they think don't belong in comics, usually women, minorities and those who create movies without knowing the source books. Superman is one that comes up alot, mainly as there have been so many different media versons of the Man of Steel. They can talk about secret identities. What this color kyrptonite does to Superman. How many times has Lois Lane been made to forget that Clark Kent and Superman are the same. How to say the name of a specific villan backwards to make him go back to his home in another dimension. However this bits of comic bon monts are nothing in comparison to the true stories that exist about Superman. The lawsuits, the other comics driven into the dustbin of history. Even the attempts to make the creators be forgotten, all in the name of capitalism and the amounts of money, amounts that even Superman, who uses a collapsed white star as a key, would have trouble lifting. The Superman Wars: A Battle for Truth, Justice, and an American Icon by William Bernhardt is a book about creators, work for hire, fairness, contracts, legacy and two young men with a dream, and a story of a comic icon who still makes people dream of flying free.
The book begins with a man outside of a courthouse, knowing the odds are against him, but sure that this case it right, and that justice will prevail. However justice and right is something that only seems to exist in comic books, and true judgement wouldn't happen until decades later. Moving into the past, we meet two young men, both who have lived hard lives, one losing a father early, one moving constatly in search of a place to belong. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were shy, loved science fiction, and separetly couldn't do much. However together they created an idea, and a medium that would stretch well into the future, and make certain people a lot of money. After some fits and starts the two came up with an idea, about a young baby sent to Earth, with powers beyond mortals, with a strong sense of right and wrong. After a four year search for a publisher they sold the idea to National Publications, who after many name changes would be better known as DC comics. The book goes into the contracts, the underworld dealings many of these publishers had, the lawsuits, and the changes that swept through comics, from millions in sales, to nearly being bankrupted numerous times. Before a movie in the seventies brought comics back to life, and a gave two men, some sort of satisfacton.
A sad book in many ways, about a character who has made so many people happy over the years, except the two who created him. Bernhardt has a very good grasp of how to make the many, many court cases interesting and understandable. Which is quite helpful. Bernhardt looks at work for hire, creator rights and other issues that have been raised, many because of the media flurry about the Superman creators not getting any share at all. The book is written in a narrative nonfiction and does jump in time, but once gets into the book, it really moves well. Bernhardt covers quite a bit, and again makes it easy to follow.
Bernhardt is also very honest about the creators, something that many don't like to talk about Siegel can be a little much sometimes, but it is important to know that all are heroes are only human. For those who want to understand more about the comic medium, or understand what The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was based on. Interesting and full of lots of comic lore.
June 1, 2026
Often the story of a writer or creative artist palls in comparison to their creation. And inasmuch as Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster created Superman, an extraordinarily powerful and colourful character, that is true. And that is specifically true of the actual creation of the character, which The Superman Wars labours an awful lot of pages over. The story of the creation of Superman really only gets interesting when you look at the contracts they signed, their shoddy treatment and the lifelong battle they had to be fairly compensated and get a cut of the many millions their creation made for DC Comics, and latterly whatever the Warner company was called this week. And the main reason that is interesting is because Jerry Siegal was quite so bitter and nuts about it.
Joe Shushter is very much a side character here, and as per much of this story writer William Bernhardt has to delicately couch his artistic mediocrity. A solid cartoonist, he was slow when the work ramped up, and quickly was hiring his own assistants and doubles to do his work, relying of extra money for Jerry. Jerry, of whom this is largely a fictionalised narrative biography, was a complicated man, and again Bernhardt has to juggle the ideals of Superman with a man who left his first wife and child, would send curses and abusive poems to all and sundry at DC, and whose talent as a writer wasn't particularly impressive. None of these removes his right as an author, but as we get into the much more interesting second half of the book, when Jerry is fired, rehired, butting heads with later editors and corporate malfeasance, the flaws of the man become more and more apparent. Even as it starts as a pedantically slow narrative, which then throttles into something a little more pacey, whilst clearly leaping over years and years of his life in a single bound.
The Superman Wars is an odd book because by the end even Bernhardt doesn't seem entirely sure what Joe and Jerry deserved for creating Superman (its own debt to existing characters is mentioned exhaustively, and the details added by other writers at a later date become a significant part of the story). It works best as an instructive story about rights management, and Berhnardt knows that he hasn't got a heroic protagonist on his hands by delving into second-hand psychology at the end to pull Jerry's immigrant Jewish status, his overbearing mother and death of his father as reasons for his poor judgement. I found it a very lopsided read, too slow to start, too fast at the finish (and I would have appreciated a little bit more on the Fawcett Captain Marvel vs Superman case which veels very much like a Superman War to me). There is a bombshell of a kicker at the end too; when you discover what the main villain of the piece actually did with that early Superman money. That refers to another book, and of course, isn't really relevant, but does contrast the morality of the real world with that of the comics.
Joe Shushter is very much a side character here, and as per much of this story writer William Bernhardt has to delicately couch his artistic mediocrity. A solid cartoonist, he was slow when the work ramped up, and quickly was hiring his own assistants and doubles to do his work, relying of extra money for Jerry. Jerry, of whom this is largely a fictionalised narrative biography, was a complicated man, and again Bernhardt has to juggle the ideals of Superman with a man who left his first wife and child, would send curses and abusive poems to all and sundry at DC, and whose talent as a writer wasn't particularly impressive. None of these removes his right as an author, but as we get into the much more interesting second half of the book, when Jerry is fired, rehired, butting heads with later editors and corporate malfeasance, the flaws of the man become more and more apparent. Even as it starts as a pedantically slow narrative, which then throttles into something a little more pacey, whilst clearly leaping over years and years of his life in a single bound.
The Superman Wars is an odd book because by the end even Bernhardt doesn't seem entirely sure what Joe and Jerry deserved for creating Superman (its own debt to existing characters is mentioned exhaustively, and the details added by other writers at a later date become a significant part of the story). It works best as an instructive story about rights management, and Berhnardt knows that he hasn't got a heroic protagonist on his hands by delving into second-hand psychology at the end to pull Jerry's immigrant Jewish status, his overbearing mother and death of his father as reasons for his poor judgement. I found it a very lopsided read, too slow to start, too fast at the finish (and I would have appreciated a little bit more on the Fawcett Captain Marvel vs Superman case which veels very much like a Superman War to me). There is a bombshell of a kicker at the end too; when you discover what the main villain of the piece actually did with that early Superman money. That refers to another book, and of course, isn't really relevant, but does contrast the morality of the real world with that of the comics.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you NetGalley for early access in exchange for an honest review!
Anyone who is fond of comic books likely knows the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It's one of those things you learn when you fall in love with comics and want to know where your favorite characters come from. And of course, none is as iconic as Superman. Equally, no story of creation is quite as infamous. I went into this book already knowing the basic details of their story and the legal battles they fought for years, their unfair treatment at the hands of executives with bigger wallets than their hearts, and the spoiled legacy they left in their wake due to these continuous actions. This book was just a highly detailed recollection of that story, giving insight where some details may not have been present before or clarifying a few things that may have been lost to time.
While the book is factual and very well researched, I find that it skipped around a lot, as if it really wasn't sure how to format what it wanted to say in a way that flowed naturally. Granted, you are telling the story of someone's life and creation over several decades, so some details may be important while others are minor. But I often found myself wondering if these little break off sections that lasted only a paragraph or so on occasion could have been slipped in somewhere else for an easier reading experience, instead of jarring you out of a passage to drop a random fact and go back as if nothing had happened. There are facts in this book as early as January 2026, so it makes me wonder if an editor had time to properly go over it and smooth out the wrinkles before putting it out for publishing. I hope, if anything, they are doing that now in the few months before it hits shelves.
If you are someone who loves comics, this is definitely a book I recommend, following the creation of the world's first proper superhero and the legacy his creators left behind. It is well researched and very thorough and I believe that telling the story of the two men that DC tried to erase for decades is extremely important. Superman is one of the most influential and important characters to ever be put to pen and paper, and his creators fought their whole lives to be given the recognition they deserve.
Rating: ★★★ | 3/5
🐾
Anyone who is fond of comic books likely knows the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It's one of those things you learn when you fall in love with comics and want to know where your favorite characters come from. And of course, none is as iconic as Superman. Equally, no story of creation is quite as infamous. I went into this book already knowing the basic details of their story and the legal battles they fought for years, their unfair treatment at the hands of executives with bigger wallets than their hearts, and the spoiled legacy they left in their wake due to these continuous actions. This book was just a highly detailed recollection of that story, giving insight where some details may not have been present before or clarifying a few things that may have been lost to time.
While the book is factual and very well researched, I find that it skipped around a lot, as if it really wasn't sure how to format what it wanted to say in a way that flowed naturally. Granted, you are telling the story of someone's life and creation over several decades, so some details may be important while others are minor. But I often found myself wondering if these little break off sections that lasted only a paragraph or so on occasion could have been slipped in somewhere else for an easier reading experience, instead of jarring you out of a passage to drop a random fact and go back as if nothing had happened. There are facts in this book as early as January 2026, so it makes me wonder if an editor had time to properly go over it and smooth out the wrinkles before putting it out for publishing. I hope, if anything, they are doing that now in the few months before it hits shelves.
If you are someone who loves comics, this is definitely a book I recommend, following the creation of the world's first proper superhero and the legacy his creators left behind. It is well researched and very thorough and I believe that telling the story of the two men that DC tried to erase for decades is extremely important. Superman is one of the most influential and important characters to ever be put to pen and paper, and his creators fought their whole lives to be given the recognition they deserve.
Rating: ★★★ | 3/5
🐾
April 28, 2026
A biography of writer Jerry Siegel, who along with artist Joe Shuster, brought Superman to life on the page. With Jerry as the driving force, the two created one of the most popular & enduring superheroes ever to grace a comic book. Unbelievably the two were then gradually side-lined by the new owners of their original publisher & it would take decades of legal fights to even partially recover. Written in the form of narrative nonfiction using sources such as unpublished manuscripts & personal letters, the book details how Siegel & Shuster learned that truth & justice are two very different things in the legal system.
This turned out to be an interesting book about the creators of Superman which not only details the biography & legal complexities, but also how the character of Superman (& related characters) developed. Whilst reading through the early part of Siegel's life you can see where certain aspects of Superman were sourced (for example, the local school paper was named The Glenville Torch'), whilst popular wrestlers at the time wore tights with support trunks over them which could explain Shuster's choice of costume for Superman. It also detailed how other writers were brought in later on who added aspects such as Superman's power of flight (originally he 'leaped over buildings in a single bound'), the Fortress of Solitude, & characters such as Bizarro & Kara (Supergirl).
Whilst the biographical & comic book elements were really interesting, the legal proceedings can be a bit monotonous at times. You'll wonder why certain parties couldn't just do the honourable thing. It must have cost more in legal fees than it would to have just paid up. Overall I enjoyed this look at both Superman's origins & of those who were responsible for his rise to fame. 3.75 stars (rounded up)
SUMMARY:
Research: Very Good - Turns out I knew very little about Superman & even less about his creators.
Writing Style: Very Good - Written as narrative nonfiction, it helps inject some emotion into the story.
Enjoyment Level: High - Obviously this would probably be a hit with Superman fans & comic book readers, but it was also interesting to me, as someone who is more of a casual viewer of the films & TV series than a reader of the original comics.
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Post Hill Press/Permuted Press, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
This turned out to be an interesting book about the creators of Superman which not only details the biography & legal complexities, but also how the character of Superman (& related characters) developed. Whilst reading through the early part of Siegel's life you can see where certain aspects of Superman were sourced (for example, the local school paper was named The Glenville Torch'), whilst popular wrestlers at the time wore tights with support trunks over them which could explain Shuster's choice of costume for Superman. It also detailed how other writers were brought in later on who added aspects such as Superman's power of flight (originally he 'leaped over buildings in a single bound'), the Fortress of Solitude, & characters such as Bizarro & Kara (Supergirl).
Whilst the biographical & comic book elements were really interesting, the legal proceedings can be a bit monotonous at times. You'll wonder why certain parties couldn't just do the honourable thing. It must have cost more in legal fees than it would to have just paid up. Overall I enjoyed this look at both Superman's origins & of those who were responsible for his rise to fame. 3.75 stars (rounded up)
SUMMARY:
Research: Very Good - Turns out I knew very little about Superman & even less about his creators.
Writing Style: Very Good - Written as narrative nonfiction, it helps inject some emotion into the story.
Enjoyment Level: High - Obviously this would probably be a hit with Superman fans & comic book readers, but it was also interesting to me, as someone who is more of a casual viewer of the films & TV series than a reader of the original comics.
My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Post Hill Press/Permuted Press, for the opportunity to read an ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Simply put, I love this book! The Superman Wars is a page-turner that I stayed up late reading and woke up early to continue before I had to start the day. A simple description of the book is that it is a biography of Jerry Siegel, creator and writer of Superman. However, the book is so much more as it focuses on the history of the early days of comic books, the lives of Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, and most importantly, on the legal struggles of a creator against a large, powerful company. The narrative non-fiction writing style is one that I am not always a fan of; however, I found it beneficial to the storytelling aspects of this work. My only complaint about the book is that at times the legal aspects were difficult for me to follow, and I wish that more explanation had been provided. I highly recommend The Superman Wars to anyone who is interested in comic books, comic book history, the Jewish Experience in America, or in creators versus corporations.
What Works: The Superman Wars is well-written and entertaining, presenting the history of comic books in the Golden and Silver Ages through the perspective of Jerry Siegel.
What Doesn’t: It was sometimes difficult to follow all the legal wranglings with my layman's understanding of the law.
Rating: 4 out of 5 red capes
Advance copy provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The entire review can be found at - https://thrillingtonsuperherobooks.bl...
What Works: The Superman Wars is well-written and entertaining, presenting the history of comic books in the Golden and Silver Ages through the perspective of Jerry Siegel.
What Doesn’t: It was sometimes difficult to follow all the legal wranglings with my layman's understanding of the law.
Rating: 4 out of 5 red capes
Advance copy provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The entire review can be found at - https://thrillingtonsuperherobooks.bl...
April 28, 2026
This is the Superman story most people have never heard but should. From a teenage boy gazing at the stars and dreaming of John Carter of Mars, to the young writer who created Superman, Jerry Siegel was, at heart, a dreamer. In this compelling work, William Bernhardt paints a vivid—but not well-known—portrait of Siegel’s life and his long legal struggle for recognition and rightful ownership.
Bernhardt brings the story to life with clarity and emotional weight, showing not just the legal fight, but the personal cost behind it.
What sets this book apart is how well-researched and revealing it is. Drawing on letters, unpublished material, and new sources, Bernhardt presents a fuller picture of Siegel—not just as a creator—but as a man shaped by persistence, frustration, and an unshakable belief in what was right. Not knowing the history, I found the story infuriating at times; at others, deeply satisfying.
Even if you’re not a comic book fan, the themes resonate: who owns an idea, what creators are owed, and how easily business interests can overshadow talent. It’s a story that feels even more relevant today as it did when Superman first appeared.
Bernhardt brings the story to life with clarity and emotional weight, showing not just the legal fight, but the personal cost behind it.
What sets this book apart is how well-researched and revealing it is. Drawing on letters, unpublished material, and new sources, Bernhardt presents a fuller picture of Siegel—not just as a creator—but as a man shaped by persistence, frustration, and an unshakable belief in what was right. Not knowing the history, I found the story infuriating at times; at others, deeply satisfying.
Even if you’re not a comic book fan, the themes resonate: who owns an idea, what creators are owed, and how easily business interests can overshadow talent. It’s a story that feels even more relevant today as it did when Superman first appeared.
May 10, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley and Permuted Press for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Superman Wars is the story that many people in the comic book world have heard over the years. How the creators of Superman were screwed over time and time again by their bosses and did not see the fruits of their labor until decades later. But the general public might not know the story, and here it is for the first time in its entirety.
As someone who enjoys comic book movies and TV shows but haven’t read comics in ages, this was a great book to dip my toes into the behind-the-scenes struggles of Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman. His story is the story of Jewish immigrants, as well as a David vs Goliath tale pitting him against a very powerful company.
It’s not only Siegel’s story that is told; it’s also the story of comic books as a whole. Siegel worked during the golden age of comic books and on through the silver age. For anyone who doesn’t know the history of comic books in America, this is a great introduction to the story that is as much a legend as that of Superman himself.
Superman Wars is the story that many people in the comic book world have heard over the years. How the creators of Superman were screwed over time and time again by their bosses and did not see the fruits of their labor until decades later. But the general public might not know the story, and here it is for the first time in its entirety.
As someone who enjoys comic book movies and TV shows but haven’t read comics in ages, this was a great book to dip my toes into the behind-the-scenes struggles of Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman. His story is the story of Jewish immigrants, as well as a David vs Goliath tale pitting him against a very powerful company.
It’s not only Siegel’s story that is told; it’s also the story of comic books as a whole. Siegel worked during the golden age of comic books and on through the silver age. For anyone who doesn’t know the history of comic books in America, this is a great introduction to the story that is as much a legend as that of Superman himself.
Did Not Finish
May 14, 2026 I was happy to get an ARC on Netgalley for this book. It was one I thought was interesting given the subject matter - I love Superman related media and knew a little about the legal matters around ownership of it - but I thought given the cover design that it was going to have more illustration, less text. I didn't realize it was going to be such a long read with this much text that I was only able to read on the Netgalley reader for some reason, which can be a pain to use, so that meant reading on a screen not made for reading instead of my Kindle e-reader. I really tried, I did. . . I was truly enjoying what I was reading and the way this nonfiction story is written is super creative. I am here for nonfiction that is written in a way that it doesn't feel like you're reading a schoolbook. However, my eyes just couldn't handle it anymore and I had to tap out at 20%. It wasn't worth risking more eye strain or a migraine. I will definitely try to get a copy once it's available to be checked out at my library so I can finish it though. When I do, I'll definitely update my review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Permuted Press provided an early galley for review.
As a long-time comic book reader, I was familiar with the legal battles over the ownership writes of one of the most iconic characters in the medium. I was definitely curious to get into the details.
Bernhardt uses narrative nonfiction to tell Siegel's story, presenting the facts in the form of a story. This really works to put the reader into the events as they unfold. I certainly found myself torn with how I felt about Siegel, initially siding with him over how he was treated by the publishers but later feeling his own behavior and techniques made him come across as petty and whiny.
I also learned a bit more of the behind-the-scenes details of the comic industry from the late 30's to late 60's that I was not aware.
Recommended for comic fans and creators in general.
As a long-time comic book reader, I was familiar with the legal battles over the ownership writes of one of the most iconic characters in the medium. I was definitely curious to get into the details.
Bernhardt uses narrative nonfiction to tell Siegel's story, presenting the facts in the form of a story. This really works to put the reader into the events as they unfold. I certainly found myself torn with how I felt about Siegel, initially siding with him over how he was treated by the publishers but later feeling his own behavior and techniques made him come across as petty and whiny.
I also learned a bit more of the behind-the-scenes details of the comic industry from the late 30's to late 60's that I was not aware.
Recommended for comic fans and creators in general.
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