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2008 Comic Book News Archives

August 21, 2008: Russell Keaton - Superman's Almost Co-Creator

Jeff Trexler over at Newsarama has added a very interesting entry to his blog, one that shows how Jerry Siegel and Russell Keaton (not Joe Shuster) could have quite easily been known as Superman's creators.

    It's relatively common knowledge that in 1934 Jerry Siegel approached other artists besides Joe Shuster to be his collaborator on Superman. One of these artists was Russell Keaton, who had been ghosting the Buck Rogers Sunday pages. Siegel and Keaton maintained a brief correspondence over the character, with Keaton eventually deciding "not to gamble on such a young and inexperienced writer." Instead, a few years later Keaton launched his own newspaper strip, Flyin' Jenny.

    And now, in the words of Paul Harvey, the rest of the story.

    In preparing the termination notice to regain the Superman copyright, the Siegel family found a box of old Superman material, catalogued its contents - and then, in a move, lost track of it. Fortunately, the material was re-discovered in April of last year.

    Among the documents: photostats of the scripts and artwork of Siegel and Keaton's Superman.

Read the rest of Jeff's report to discover the rest of this intriguing history.


2008 Comic News

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