Publication
High school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster tried selling their stories to magazines in order to escape Depression era poverty. With their work rejected by publishers, 18-year-old Shuster printed the duo's own typewritten, mimeographed science fiction fanzine titled Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, producing five issues.
According to a 1983 interview with Siegel, he first wrote the short story "The Reign of the Superman" in 1932. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of an Übermensch, Siegel's original story featured his first Superman as a powerful villain bent on dominating the entire world. Siegel's short story appeared in Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization Issue #3, with accompanying artwork by Shuster. For this publication, Siegel used the pen name Herbert S. Fine, combining the first name of a cousin Herbert with the maiden name of Siegel's mother.
The name Superman originated in the English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's statement, "Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen" ("I will teach you the Superman"), in his 1883 work Also sprach Zarathustra. George Bernard Shaw popularized the term with his 1903 play Man and Superman. The character Jane Porter refers to Tarzan as a "superman" in the 1912 pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Siegel would later name Tarzan as an influence on the creation of his own Superman.
Read more about this topic: The Reign Of The Superman
Famous quotes containing the word publication:
“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)