2011 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News Archives

October 25, 2011: The Infamous Check That Purchased Superman

BleedingCool.com reports on the surfacing of the 1938 check DC wrote to purchase the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

    Here is the March 1, 1938 check that DC Comics publisher and accountant Jack Liebowitz issued to Siegel and Shuster to complete that transaction:

    Note the Superman line item next to the amount $130.

Check

    Also note the total $412, with other line items including "D.C", "Adv", and "Fun". This would probably correspond to payments for work in Detective Comics, New Adventure Comics, and More Fun Comics, where Siegel and Shuster had strips such as Doctor Occult, Federal Men, and Slam Bradley published just prior to the debut of Superman.

    Adding to this already rather stellar bit of comic book history, the back includes not only the endorsements of both men (spelled both incorrectly and correctly to account for Liebowitz's misspelling of both names on the front), but also an April 6, 1939 stamp for the U.S. District Court of New York, where it was presumably used to prove DC's ownership of the character in Detective Comics, Inc. v. Bruns Publications, Inc.

Back of Check

Read the complete article at BleedingCool.com. Fans may also be interested in seeing the original contract signed on the same day posted over at UncivilSociety.org.

The check is due to be auctioned off by ComicConnnect in early 2012.



2011 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News

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