To this purpose, he had hired young Mayer to paste up newspaper comic strips in magazine format pages for Dell Publishing Company to produce as Popular Comics, The Funnies, and The Comics. His job was rounding up printing jobs to keep McClure’s color presses running as many hours a day as possible. Moreover, his association with McClure was not in the editorial department. Gaines, despite having just a few years earlier participated in the publication of a pioneering comic book of newspaper strip reprints, 1934's Famous Funnies, did not yet think of himself as a comic book publisher. Said Mayer: “He took it and looked at it and read it, and he said, ‘You think this is good?’ And I said, ‘Yeah!’ This time-supposedly late fall 1937 or early 1938-something clicked. Ron Goulart, in his Great American Comic Books, takes up the story: “Mayer’s persistence got Gaines interested enough to look the material over again.” And they kept sending it back.”Īpparently, Siegel and Shuster submitted their Superman idea more than once. “They all asked me what I thought of it,” Mayer said. It struck me as having the elements that were popular in the movies, all the elements that were popular in novels, and all the elements that I loved.”īut he couldn’t convince anyone to sign up the feature.

“It was the thing we were all looking for. “I went nuts over the thing,” Mayer said years later when remembering the event. Hanging around the McClure offices, Mayer saw the Superman comic strip Siegel and Shuster had submitted in the hope of getting their brain child syndicated. “Charlie” Gaines, who, in turn, was functioning as a sort of freelance salesman and packager, scouting for printing jobs for the two new color presses McClure had acquired when Bernarr MacFadden’s scurrilous Daily Graphic folded in 1932. Sheldon Mayer, just out of his teens, was working with M.C. And then, all of a sudden, Superman was “discovered” by a young editorial assistant tangentially connected to the McClure Syndicate. Nobody wanted this super strong refugee from the disintegrated planet Krypton. But the invention in early 1933 was followed by frustration: for the next four years plus a few months, Siegel and his drawing partner Joe Shuster tried in vain to sell their creation to newspaper feature syndicates and to publishers who were just hatching the comic book business by reprinting newspaper comic strips in magazine format.

Gerry siegel