Irene and I drove to Ohio this week to take in the exhibition The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and while I enjoyed that part of our trip, what I was looking forward to the most was our visit to the neighborhood where Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster met in 1930 when they were on the staff of the Glenville High School student newspaper.

And so, 85 years and one day after Action Comics #1 went on sale, introducing the world to the Man of Steel, an event without which I would not have had my life, we made a pilgrimage to two of the spots where it all began.

While Joe Shuster’s apartment building no longer exists, Jerry Siegel’s boyhood home still stands. So we started with a visit to 10622 Kimberly Avenue, which is a private residence. It’s obvious, from both the whimsical window dressing and the decorations surrounding the lot, that the current owners are well aware of the property’s importance.

I have no idea how many others make the journey to pay their respects, but we were the only ones gawking for the 15 of so minutes we were there.

The street signs at the corner of Kimberly and Parkwood also read Jerry Siegel Lane and Lois Lane.

We then drove nine blocks away to the vacant lot where the apartment building Joe Shuster lived in once stood, which is now a vacant lot. If you’d also like to visit this location, plug “Parkwood Drive and Amor Avenue” into your GPS. (more…)

Last weekend, I accompanied Irene to the New Jersey Romance Writers conference, but I didn’t hang around there with her. All of my fun occurred outside of New Jersey. And serendipitously, each of the three days of my trip delivered a comics-related delight.

On Friday, I headed to the Comics at Columbia exhibit, which was held in the Butler Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Highlights for me included a George Herriman Archy and Mehitabel illustration, a nostalgia-inducing photo of Chris Claremont taken around the time I would have met him in the ’70s, Jerry Robinson’s sketch of Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne made during class in 1940 when he was supposed to have been taking notes, and this 1970 letter in which Joe Shuster thought he and Jerry Siegel were “very close” to settling the Superman lawsuit.

That last one made me a little sad.

The Columbia University exhibit will continue through January 23, 2015 and is well worth your time. It’s one of the better comics exhibits I’ve seen.

Saturday, I visited the Society of Illustrators to catch an exhibit on Dick Dillin, who was the primary Justice League of America artist of my youth. (more…)

While I was down in Florida last week visiting my mother, I spotted a box of Manischewitz matzoh which celebrated the creators of Superman, those two Jewish kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. My first thought was, how cool is that?

My second thought was … well … take a look at the back of the box and see whether you can guess.

Did you spot it? (more…)

There’s a new wrinkle to the war against Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Superman that goes beyond what’s in the play The History of Invulnerability, which I told you about earlier this week. It seems Ohio wants to offer a special license plate commemorating that state as the “Birthplace of Superman” for the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Man of Steel, but DC Comics and Warner Bros. have objected to the wording.

Nate Beeler, a staff cartoonist for the Columbus Dispatch commented on the brouhaha with the cartoon below, which I spotted over at Daryl Cagle’s blog.

No one’s really sure why there’s an objection to the wording of the plate, but Ohio is attempting to come up with an acceptable alternative. Beeler worries that those alternatives might also be found unacceptable:

Everybody knows Superman is a fictional character who comes from the fictional planet Krypton and grew up in the fictional town of Smallville. What people might not know is that he was created in Cleveland by the legendary Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The license plate is a nice way of bringing attention to the great cultural contribution of these Ohioans. If the wording is changed to something like “Birthplace of the creators of Superman,” I just hope that DC Comics won’t object by saying, “But Superman’s parents, Jor-El and Lara, were also from Krypton!”

As for me, there’s something I find unacceptable, but believe me, it ain’t the slogan.