September 30, 2004
Crossover point
Before they were comic book legends, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were a couple of Cleveland high school students; The "Man of Tomorrow", a New Deal superman fighting gangsterism and leaping tall buildings in a single bound, became a huge commercial success, giving the world an icon, the Golden Age of Comics its selling point, and the industry a character to clone; when Shuster and Siegel thought they weren't getting their fair share, they sued. Beginning in 1947, began a series of lawsuits over ownership of the character. Amazingly, 50 years later, the legal issues of who owned Superman were still murky. The two struggled through years of poverty before DC Comics offered them a modest annual stipend. Before he was a comic book legend, Gardner Fox was a lawyer, and he could see the writing on the wall. When editors stopped giving him work in the late Sixties, Gardner resumed his one-time career of writing pulp fiction, making a successful living churning out spy and romance novels, westerns, mysteries, and science fiction under a variety of pen names until his retirement. Gardner, who wrote everything from romance comics to funny animal books, but his lasting stamp was in the superhero genre. Frank Gorshin's Riddler is based on a Gardner script from the 1960s; he created Hawkman and the Flash; with Julius Schwartz, he almost single-handedly started the Silver Age of comics through his revivals of The Flash and The Green Lantern; and he created the superhero team-up.
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