Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero

by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster (Visual Art), Thomas Andrae (Editor)

Here is a kaleidoscopic analysis of Jewish humor as seen through Funnyman , a  little-known super-heroic invention by the creators of Superman . Included are complete comic-book stories and daily and Sunday newspaper panels from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creative fiasco. Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, sold the rights to their amazing and astonishingly lucrative comic book superhero to Detective Comics for $130 in 1938. Not only did they lose the ownership of the Superman character, they also agreed to write and illustrate it for ten years at ten dollars per page. Their contract with the DC publishers was soon heralded as the most foolish agreement in the history of American popular culture. After toiling on workman’s wages for a decade, Siegel and Shuster struggled to come up with a new superhero, one that would right their wrongs and prove that justice, fair-play, and zany craftsmanship was the true American way and would lead to ultimate victory. But when the naïve duo launched their new comic character Funnyman in 1947, it failed miserably. All the turmoil and personal disasters in Siegel and Shuster’s postwar life percolated into the comic strip. This book tells the back story of the unsuccessful strip and Siegel and Shuster’s ambition to have their funny Jewish superhero trump Superman. Mel Gordon is the author of Voluptuous The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin . Thomas Andrae is the author of Batman and Me .

Genres: Comics, History, Jewish, Humor, Graphic Novels

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

Jerome "Jerry" Siegel, who also used pseudonyms including Joe Carter, Jerry Ess, and Herbert S. Fine, was the American co-creator of Superman (along with Joe Shuster), the first of the great comic book superheroes and one of the most recognizable icons of the 20th century.
He and Shuster were inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.
No where on the cover does the book suggest you'll have an 80 page history of Jewish humor to read through. The history reads like a term paper, touching on a lot of key points and leaving out others and missing on some basic, easy comic book history (Lex Luthor originally had red hair.)

There is no index to the history even though the authors make it half the book.

i thought i bought a 200 page book of Funnyman stories(i v. wrongly thought it would be an archives type volume), instead there are four stories from the six issues and about three weeks of the comic strips. However you do get a description of what was in each issue and each comic strip storyline, so you have an idea of what the authors didn't put in the book.

The Funnyman stories that are reprinted are a lot of fun and show Shuster to be a great graphic artist, better than the Boring one (sorry). i liked these stories much more than any in the comicbook issues of Mad.

This would have been five stars if it had been the comics and a few pages of introduction.

The Contra Costa Connection is on of the authors teaches at Cal State East Bay.

[Paul Riches · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funnyman Is An Incomplete History Of A Different Superman



They created one of the most well known characters in the world.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave us Superman.

And about a decade later, they tried again with decidedly different results.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave us Funnyman.

For the uninitiated, Siegel and Shuster were the young men who invented the world changing Superman that DC Comics first published in 1938. He became an instant hit, DC made a ton of money, and Siegel and Shuster were very well compensated for their work on Superman, whom they had sold to DC. But over the years, grievances between both sides had escalated and by the late 1940’s Siegel and Shuster had left DC, and their pride and joy, Superman.

At this point, they created and published a new character, on that they owned, Funnyman, in 1948. And he lasted an extremely short time to say the least. This time around, their creation was standup comedian Larry Davis who becomes the crime buster Funnyman, using gadgets and gizmos to save the day.

Now being a lifelong Superman, I have always wanted to read Funnyman, as a completist and for historical curiosity. And when I got this volume, I was excited to experience the whole of Funnyman, good and bad.

But that is not what you get.

The introduction by comics writer and editor Danny Fingeroth is solid and leans into the first essay, a look at the premise that Funnyman is heavily based on Jewish humour. This idea is partly from the content of the comic, and partly is because writer Siegel and artist Shuster were Jewish.

This section by Mel Gordon goes on and on, traces back centuries of Jewish history, and really feels it could easily be condensed a lot. I understand the concepts Gordon is writing about, and even if I did not, this is still overdone.

Thomas Andrae then gives us a far more interesting look at Jewish superheroes in his essay, which feels like more a roadmap to Superman. Andrae follows this up with another essay, this time about the creation of Funnyman itself, and includes interviews with Siegel and Shuster themselves. Which means you also get a lot of DC bashing, some of which you can tell is justified.

And now they bring you the main attraction, Funnyman.

But as I stated earlier, no they don’t.

Instead of reprinting everything Funnyman, all six issues of the comic, then the subsequent newspaper comic strip, even the ones without Funnyman (don’t ask), you get a selection. Even if these stories are not great, and they aren’t, they all should be reprinted here. A summary of the comic stories and newspaper strips are included, but it is certainly not the same thing.

Of what they show, my favourite Funnyman story is “Leapin’ Lena” which has a certain Loony Tunes vibe to it. It is of course illogical, but darn fun.

Which brings up another reason they should have included all of Funnyman. It is fascinating to me to see the evolution of a series, whether comic book or television show or movie. You get to experience how the creators decided what was or was not Funnyman. I have the same reading journey everytime I reread that first year of Superman comics that Siegel and Shuster and their studios produced back in the 1930’s. “Leapin’ Lena” strikes me as definitive step in the right direction of where Funnyman maybe should have gone.

And maybe what you would be reading is….

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave us Funnyman.

We all know who he is.

Scoopriches

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

On p. 74, co-author Thomas Andrae makes an obvious mistake when he writes that the poster image for the film SCARLET STREET is "nearly identical" is a panel in one of the FUNNYMAN comic books. These are reproduced on the next page. While both images feature a woman approached by a man under a streetlight, in no other way are they "nearly identical."

I fault nearly all the prose in this book, and the book is mostly prose, for overstating similarities. The case is made for the uniqueness of Jewish comedy, for the prime place of Jewish comedians, and similar matters. Acknowledged, but barely, is that Irish, Scandinavian, Texan, female, and other comic stereotypes were well established at around the same time and accomplished many of the same things in their own ways.

It seems pretty clear that the authors believe that the Jewishness of the creators infused SUPERMAN and other early comic characters with a closet Jewishness that was am important part of their popularity. While Jewish creators were very important in early comics the fact is that people other ethnicities also created comics. The comics created by Jerry Siegel, Joe Schuster, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, the four Jewish creators named, could not have been all that Jewish for these characters thrived amonsgst a multicultural readership.

Just as Andrae failed to convince that the two images were "nearly identical," he fails to convince in every facet of his argument due to the cherry picking of his examples and, as to paraphrase SESAME STREET, one of these things is not always like the other. Though the authors tell us that the FUNNYMAN comic book and strip are not very good, I enjoyed the few samples reprinted and enjoyed them far more than the ideas in this book.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly, the only thing this book did was convince me that Siegel and Shuster had one great creation in them. The long historical argument that Funnyman was somehow the "first Jewish superhero" does not hold up for me since all the same influences listed also went into Superman (except Danny Kaye, I guess). So, if anything, Superman was the "first Jewish superhero." The few Funnyman comics reprinted here make no further argument. It's good to have the history of the creator's further attempts, but, meh... so what?

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Thomas Andrae sections needed better proofreading and fact checking. Not only are there errors that a spell check should have caught, but he also says that Stan Lee's real name is "Stan Leibowitz"--any comics fan knows that his real name is Stanley Martin Lieber. The cover credits the book to Andrae and Gordon, which Goodreads ought to do as well.

This is not even close to a complete collection of Funnyman--it's a book about the publication history of Funnyman with sample pages and stories. One question promoted on the back cover of the book that I felt was insufficiently answered was why Funnyman's creation coincided with the establishment of Israel as a country. The founding of Israel was barely mentioned on the book, and no strong connection was really made.

I though the story of Funnyman and the background in Jewish humor, hero tales, and golem tales was more interesting than the stories themselves. The artwork, though, is lively, and having recently read the first eight volumes of The Superman Chronicles, I was far more impressed with Siegel than with Shuster, and Superman was still taking on 1%ers, although criminals more and more often, at the point where I left off. The authors discuss how DC was not happy with Superman fighting corrupt businessmen and so forth, and Siegel was forced to make him go after violent criminals. The Funnyman stories are better drawn, without so many tiny wide shots and squinty-eyed men.

I also learned some interesting things about Superman, such as that Siegel named Superman's father Jor-L (as it was spelled in the Golden Age) as a shortened anagram of Jerome Siegel. At the point where I left off reading Superman, Krypton had yet to be named, Superman's birth parents never shown or mentioned beyond the most abstract, and no Kryptonian names given. I wondered if these were Siegel's ideas at all, but it seems based on the interviews he gave, they were. In fact DC rejected a story involving damage to Superman's powers via kryptonite and the revealing of his identity to Lois Lane. The authors mention the post-Crisis version of this, but they didn't dig deeply enough into their research to learn about the wedding of the GA Superman and Lois Lane in the 1970s and the ongoing feature, "Mr. and Mrs. Superman," which dealt with the married life of the Golden Age/Earth-2 version of the character--diagetically the same person Siegel wrote about.

Overall, this is an interesting read, but the authors' knowledge of comic books, as opposed to other forms of arts and entertainment, seems stretched thin whenever it goes beyond Funnyman or Siegel and Shuster. Perhaps Feral House thought such a book as this would be less expensive to produce than one presenting all the Funnyman stories, perhaps with less background material. This book is still definitely worth reading for anyone remotely interested in the subject matter, although my caveats still stand.

[Josh Bayer]

The essays about the thick black morasse that jewish humor emerged from is brutal and fascinating and will make you feel smart.