In a January 1993 issue of Superman, the Man of Steel dies in a battle with the monstrous villain Doomsday. Comic book Superman briefly sported a mullet. Other Superman actors, despite remaining in good health, have seen their careers slide downward upon taking off the blue tights and red cape.ħ. He died in 1991 at age 14 after huffing solvents from a can. In the first of those films, Lee Quigley depicted Superman as a baby. Tragedy also struck Christopher Reeve, the star of four Superman movies, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a May 1995 horse-riding accident. Then, in June 1959, he was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Reeves never quite took to the role, reportedly once telling a co-star: “Well, babe, this is it the bottom of the barrel.” Typecast as Superman, he had trouble finding other work.
The so-called Superman curse got its start with George Reeves, an actor who played Superman on a 1950s TV show. The actors playing Superman often suffer grave misfortunes. Following their deaths in the 1990s, Siegel’s and Shuster’s heirs brought additional copyright litigation that has led to multiple suits and countersuits as recently as 2016.Ħ. Furthermore, DC once more began crediting them as Superman’s creators. The shaming strategy worked, as DC’s parent company agreed to give him and Shuster pensions of $20,000 a year, a sum that later went up.
When a Superman movie began production in the 1970s, Siegel put a curse on it as part of a public relations campaign. He left again in 1965 and lodged a second, equally unsuccessful suit that dragged on for years. A financially struggling Siegel returned to the company in 1959, accepting standard pay and no byline. “Also bear in mind … that we can at any time replace you.” Siegel and Shuster were then fired in 1947 after filing a lawsuit against DC. “Our company has very little to gain in a monetary sense from the syndication of this material,” DC Comics’ publisher disingenuously told Siegel in 1938 in response to one of his many requests for more cash. But they received no royalties, having signed away all rights to their character for $130.
Siegel and Shuster earned fairly high salaries writing and illustrating Superman comics. Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to Superman for $130. Finally, a predecessor to DC Comics asked them to rework it into a 13-page story for Action Comics #1, which would go on to become the most valuable comic book of all time, with one copy selling for $3.21 million on EBay in 2014.Ģ. For several years, Siegel and Shuster unsuccessfully pitched their comic strip idea to newspaper syndicates. Soon after, Siegel and his friend Joe Shuster, who illustrated the piece, revamped Superman as a good guy with an alien backstory, a secret identity and a cape, among other features that would come to define him. This so-called Superman, intoxicated by power, then kills the mad scientist and begins taking over the world until the enchantment wears off and he once again becomes a nobody. Recent high school graduate Jerry Siegel self-published a story in January 1933 called “The Reign of the Superman,” featuring a mad scientist who plucks a vagrant from a bread line and gives him telepathic capabilities. Superman’s creators first envisioned him as a villain.