Empire of the Superheroes: America’s Comic Book Creators and the Making of a Billion-Dollar Industry

Mark Cotta Vaz

Jan 2021 · University of Texas Press

About this ebook

Superman may be faster than a speeding bullet, but even he can't outrun copyright law. Since the dawn of the pulp hero in the 1930s, publishers and authors have fought over the privilege of making money off of comics, and the authors and artists usually have lost. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, got all of $130 for the rights to the hero.

In Empire of the Superheroes, Mark Cotta Vaz argues that licensing and litigation do as much as any ink-stained creator to shape the mythology of comic characters. Vaz reveals just how precarious life was for the legends of the industry. Siegel and Shuster—and their heirs—spent seventy years battling lawyers to regain rights to Superman. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were cheated out of their interest in Captain America, and Kirby's children brought a case against Marvel to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. To make matters worse, the infant comics medium was nearly strangled in its crib by censorship and moral condemnation. For the writers and illustrators now celebrated as visionaries, the "golden age" of comics felt more like hard times.

The fantastical characters that now earn Hollywood billions have all-too-human roots. Empire of the Superheroes digs them up, detailing the creative martyrdom at the heart of a pop-culture powerhouse.

About the author

Mark Cotta Vaz is a New York Times best-selling author. His dozens of books include Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong; The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting, coauthored with Craig Barron; and, most recently, Pan Am at War: How the Airline Secretly Helped America Fight World War II, coauthored with John H. Hill.