Superman: Champion of the Oppressed

by Michael Kobre In 1975, Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, was shocked and infuriated, again, when he heard about the announcement of the upcoming production of a new big-budget Superman movie. In an all-too-familiar rage in what had been a lifetime of thwarted anger, Siegel did the only thing he could after decades of struggle and poverty since he’d been fired by DC Comics in 1945 when he’d sued the company in a failed attempt to regain the rights to Superman—which he’d sold, along with the pages of the first story in Action Comics #1, for $130 in 1938. Fuming at the news of the movie, Siegel wrote a press release and sent a thousand copies to every news and media outlet he could think of. The press release began with Siegel literally putting a curse on the movie—“I hope it super-bombs!” he wrote—and then went on for nine more typed, single-spaced pages to expostulate all the ways that DC and its chief operating officer, Jack Leibowitz, in particular, had manipulated and…