Superman Day: The $130 Contract Behind the Cape

Superman Day lands on June 12. DC Entertainment started it in 2013, when the character turned seventy-five and the film Man of Steel was opening. Comic shops and bookstores gave away free copies of an All Star Superman special edition, and the day stuck. Batman Day followed in 2014 because Superman Day worked.

In 2025 DC moved its own celebration to April 18, the date Action Comics #1 went on sale in 1938. June 12 is still the date most calendars carry, and the story worth telling on either date is the same one.

That story belongs to two young men from Cleveland. They built the most recognizable character in American fiction, sold every right in him for $130, and spent the next forty years fighting to be paid and named.

How did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster invent Superman?

As teenage science fiction fans, and the first version was a villain.

Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland on October 17, 1914. Joe Shuster was born in Toronto on July 10, 1914, and his family moved to Cleveland when he was nine or ten. They met as kids, shared a love of pulp science fiction and comic strips, and graduated together from Glenville High School in June 1934.

In January 1933 Siegel wrote a short prose story called “The Reign of the Superman,” illustrated by Shuster, and printed it in a science fiction fanzine he published himself. The Superman of that story is a bald man who gains mental powers and uses them to dominate people. It’s a cautionary tale about power.

Then Siegel turned the idea inside out. The new Superman came from an advanced world, landed on Earth, and used his powers to protect ordinary people. That reversal, from a man who rules to a man who serves, is the whole character. It’s also a useful trick for any writer stuck on a premise. Take your villain, flip his motive, and see who shows up. Siegel kept the powers and changed what they were for. That one change turned a forgettable fanzine story into a character still in print almost a century later.

Why did Superman take five years to sell?

Because nobody wanted him.

Siegel and Shuster reworked the hero into a newspaper comic strip and pitched it to syndicates and publishers from 1933 onward. The answer kept coming back no. At one point Shuster gave up on the character and Siegel went looking for another artist. They kept circling back to it anyway.

In the meantime they worked. They sold other features to the comic book publishers springing up in New York, and by 1938 they were working regularly for Detective Comics, Inc., the company that would become DC. When the publisher needed a lead feature for a new anthology title, the old Superman strip got cut up and pasted into comic book pages. The most famous debut in comics was a rejected newspaper strip, reformatted in a hurry to fill a slot.

Five years of rejection for the character that went on to sell more than anything else in the business. Every writer holding a stack of rejections should know that.

What did Siegel and Shuster sell for $130?

Everything.

In March 1938 the two signed a release that transferred all rights to Superman to Detective Comics, Inc. Their pay for the 13-page story was $10 a page, $130 in total. Superman appeared in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938 and on sale April 18, 1938. The issue cost ten cents and ran 68 pages with eleven features. The print run of 200,000 sold out fast. By the time it reached the stands, the character had belonged to the publisher for weeks.

A daily newspaper strip started in January 1939, written and drawn by the creators who no longer owned him. The radio series that started in 1940 ran 2,088 episodes over eleven years.

DC did keep them on, and paid them well for a while. In 1942 Siegel and Shuster earned $63,776.46 between them, serious money in wartime America. The money came as wages for producing a character somebody else owned, and it lasted only as long as the publisher wanted their work.

A copy of Action Comics #1 graded CGC 9.0 sold privately for $15 million, a sale made public on January 9, 2026. The two men who made it got $130 and a byline that later disappeared.

What happened when Siegel and Shuster sued over Superman in 1947?

They lost the character twice over.

While Siegel was in the Army, DC launched Superboy, a teenage Superman, without his consent. He’d pitched DC a similar idea earlier and been turned down. In 1947 he and Shuster sued for the rights to both characters. The judge ruled that Superman belonged to DC. Superboy, he found, belonged to Siegel. The two men settled for $94,013.16 and signed over both characters for good. Siegel’s divorce papers show he had about $29,000 left after court costs. DC then dropped them, and their bylines came off the strip and the books.

They tried again in 1965, arguing that the renewal term of the copyright should go to them. The court found the renewal rights had passed to DC back in 1938, in the same release they’d signed for $130.

The worst thing in that history is how ordinary the mechanism was. Nobody stole anything. Two young freelancers signed the paper the publisher handed them, and the paper held up in court for decades.

How did Siegel and Shuster get credit for Superman back?

By going to the press in 1975.

By the mid-1970s Shuster’s eyesight had failed and he’d left comics. During a stretch when he couldn’t draw, he’d worked as a deliveryman. Siegel was struggling too, decades removed from the money of the early 1940s and watching the character he’d written earn fortunes for other people. When Siegel learned that Warner Bros., by then DC’s parent company, was preparing a big-budget Superman film, he took the story of how the creators had been treated to the press.

The story spread, and the publicity landed on Warner’s doorstep just as the studio was gearing up for its biggest film. In late 1975 Warner Communications agreed to pay each man a lifetime pension of $20,000 a year, later raised to $30,000, plus health benefits. The byline came back too. Superman #302, dated August 1976, carried the credit again.

The deal had a price. The two men agreed not to contest DC’s ownership of the character.

Shuster died on July 30, 1992, at seventy-eight. Siegel died on January 28, 1996, at eighty-one.

Why couldn’t the creators’ heirs take Superman back?

Because of two more pieces of paper.

The Copyright Act of 1976 gave authors and their heirs a right to terminate old transfers of copyright after a waiting period. The right gives creators a second shot at a work they signed away before anyone knew what it was worth.

The Siegel heirs used it. In an October 2001 letter, DC agreed to pay them several million dollars plus $500,000 a year, and the heirs accepted. Then the deal fell apart before anyone signed a final contract, and they sued DC in 2004. They won a significant ruling in 2008. DC appealed, and the appeals court held that the 2001 letter was a binding agreement.

The Shuster heirs served their own termination notice in 2003. DC sued them in 2010. The court ruled for DC because of the 1992 agreement made with Shuster’s family after his death, in which they’d taken a stipend in exchange for not challenging ownership.

Both families lost on contracts. That’s the pattern across the whole Superman story, from 1938 to the last appeal.

When does Superman enter the public domain?

On January 1, 2034, and only partly.

The Superman of Action Comics #1 is due to enter the U.S. public domain that day. Anyone will be able to use the 1938 version, the strong man who hurdles buildings, along with the cast as it existed in that first story. Later additions stay protected until their own terms run out, and DC keeps its trademarks on the Superman name, his look and the S logo.

So the character Siegel and Shuster signed away will belong to everybody before long, ninety-six years after the sale. Mickey Mouse went through the same door in 2024. For more on how that works, see Public Domain Day.

What should writers learn from the Superman contract?

Read every word before you sign, and know what you’re selling.

Siegel and Shuster weren’t fools. They were young freelancers who’d waited five years for a yes and grabbed it. That’s the most dangerous moment in any writer’s career, the moment when getting published at all feels like the prize. Publishers know it, and contracts get written for it.

Work for hire and an assignment of copyright aren’t the same thing, and the difference decides who owns a character in fifty years. I wrote about that split in work for hire versus copyright assignment, and the basics are in copyright law for writers.

I’m a ghostwriter, and my clients own the books I write for them. That’s the deal from the first conversation, it’s spelled out in the contract, and it’s priced accordingly. A writer can give up ownership safely when you know you’re doing it and you’re paid for what you’re giving up. Both conditions matter. Siegel and Shuster gave up the most valuable character in the business and got paid for thirteen pages.

How should you mark Superman Day?

Find a reprint of Action Comics #1 and read the thirteen pages. It’s rough, fast and strange, and the Superman in it is a social crusader who roughs up a wife beater and a crooked lobbyist. He’s a different man from the one in the films, angrier and closer to the Depression streets his creators grew up on.

Then say the creators’ names. Superman Day exists because of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and they fought most of their adult lives to have their names printed next to his.

If you write, pull out any contract you’ve signed and find the rights clause. Know what you gave away and for how long. The same week, look up National Comic Book Day for the rest of the medium’s story.

Two kids from Cleveland built the template for every superhero who came after. They deserved better paper than they got. For more dates like this one, see the literature-related holidays calendar.

Frequently Asked Questions