mariness

Brad Rizza's Super Boys tells the story of writer Jerry Siegel and his best friend artist Joe Shuster, who together created Superman. It didn't benefit them much. Infamously, as Rizza details, Siegel and Shuster were so desperate to get their creation in print that they sold the rights to Superman for a pathetically low amount, and later, worn down and weary, accepted a very low settlement for the rights to Superboy during a long lawsuit that might have won them more cash.

It's a fairly depressing read. Siegel and Shuster were the sons of Jewish immigrants, something Rizza finds significant but then really doesn't know what to do with, who met in high school. Discovering a mutual love of science fiction and horror movies, they began to create comics together, starting with Shuster illustrating Siegel's high school stories, and continuing onto real comics. They created several in multiple genres. Superman was their first, and really only, blockbuster success, and it was followed by lawsuits, World War II, more lawsuits, financial problems and a pathetic interview at an early Comic Con where fans helped Siegel lobby Warner Brothers for cash before the release of the 1978 Superman movie. Things even once reached the point where Jerry Seigel attempted to turn his publishers into the FBI. This failed, because the snappily dressed J. Edgar Hoover didn't know who Siegel was.

Siegel did write other things post Superman, going here, there, and everywhere; Rizza, a major Siegel fan, likes many of these later efforts, especially those written for Archie Comics, more than Siegel's publishers did. Shuster had more issues. After watching Siegel walk off with his girlfriend (they later married) in a drama that apparently no one wanted to get on record about, Shuster ended up drawing a lot of pornographic cartoons and sleeping on city streets. Later, he rushed into an apparently none too happy marriage.

So, yeah, not the most pleasant of reads. It's also not helped by the problem that from time to time Rizza seems to have issues distinguishing the early lives of Jerry and Joe, whose families did come from similar backgrounds, and by the fact that at the time of Rizza's writing and interviews, both estates were involved in a bitter lawsuit with Warner Brothers, and were therefore reluctant to speak too much on the record. In some cases, Rizza admits that he's not clear on the timeline, which muddles things further. Also, Rizza's clear hero-worship of Siegel hampers him from time to time: reading through the lines, it's fairly evident that from time to time Siegel was just not a nice man. He went through a nasty divorce and was estranged from his son. (In a nasty twist, the son only contacted Siegel's daughter, his half-sister, over concerns about legal issues with Warner Brothers.) At other times, Siegel could be by all reports generous and kind, but there's stuff there that Rizza doesn't seem to want to deal with.

But the book does have some fun tidbits of information about the early days of science fiction (Hugo Gernsback really treated everyone like crap, didn't he? Can I just pretend that the Hugo Awards are named for Victor Hugo, not him? Thanks muchly), comics, cartoons and the start of San Diego Comic Con. Rizza's done a good job of detailing life in Cleveland between the wars, and if you're at all interested in the history of comics, this is worth a read.

I have to confess: I wanted them.

A picture appeared in virtually every comic book I saw, showing the smiling faces of a family of Sea Monkeys, who looked like some tortured set of mermaids created by a demented wizard. I knew the real sea monkeys would look nothing like that picture - I'd seen pictures of fish and insects and dinosaurs with strange head shapes, but none of those walked on two legs and the dinosaurs were gone. But still, I desperately wanted to know what they were. Did they really look like monkeys? Or little fish? Could they really be trained? Could I have happiness in a bowl?

The problem was, we lived in Italy, and the few comic books we had always came a few months later, brought over by parents on business trips to the States. Which created other issues; our parents kept bringing back Batman, and we wanted Spider-man. Issues were eagerly and fiercely traded on the back of the bus, with everyone hunched over the comic to see what had happened to Spider-Man next. It wasn't that we disliked Batman, mind you -- this was in the Brave and the Bold days, when Batman did a lot of orbiting around earth and teaming up with various other superheroes to prevent people from setting off nuclear bombs which was all kinda cool. But Spider-Man was funny. I also wanted more Supergirl comics, because Supergirl was blonde, like me, and a girl, but unlike me, she could do absolutely anything she wanted to -- fly, punch holes through space satellites, whatever -- and what she apparently wanted to do (in the Brave and the Bold days) was solve mysteries and stop bad guys, which was awesome. Later, I grew impatient with the perfection and superstrength (and questioned why anyone would choose to punch out satellites while wearing a skating costume), but at the time, I wanted to be Supergirl. I still wanted to fly, even if my flying lessons a few years back had not gone at all well for anyone concerned. I caught glimpses of other girls in the comics, too, but not many of them (and for some reason, our parents never seemed to bring back Wonder Woman comics, or if they did, the comics were so unmemorable that they have slipped my mind).

In this fantasy universe, anything could be true. Even Sea Monkeys. But at the same time, girls weren't flying into space and punching space satellites. So I looked at the Sea Monkeys, and wondered. I made up little tales, little explanations.

I had no way of ordering them from Italy, none. And even when we returned to the U.S., I had no way of getting the postal order together to pay for the Sea Monkeys. Instead, we got a worm (this was not approved of) and then a hamster (more approved of) and then a dog. The dog couldn't exactly do tricks - he meant well, but was a Dog of Little Brain - but he was soft and furry and playful and he actually found just the sight of me coming down the stairs marvelously exciting, and I figured I would never find out what Sea Monkeys actually were.

"Brine shrimp," explained someone in college.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. I was crushed."

Only later did I realize that brine shrimp are actually awesomely cool and beautiful critters. But that's another post.

This is the astonishing, and genuinely shocking story, of the man who almost got the world to understand the magic of brine shrimp. Read to the end.