Jerry Siegel was able to save only the cover from destruction.It wasn’t until April 1938 (in a magazine cover-dated June) that Superman – born Kal-El on the planet of Krypton, sent into space as a baby by his parents when they learned that their world was doomed, and rescued by a childless couple in Kansas, where he is renamed Clark Kent – that Action Comics 1 appeared, marking the debut of the Superman that we know today. Because DC Comics never bought the copyright to Superboy from Siegel, Siegel sued DC Comics for the rights to Superboy.

DC Comics now owned the character and reaped the royalties.

The ensuing Man of Steel was rather more benign, yet his disillusioned creators came to loathe him in the end.October 17, 1914, is the birthdate of Jerry Siegel, who together with partner Joe Shuster, created the Man of Steel: no, not Joseph Stalin – Superman.Siegel and Shuster met at high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and teamed up on a number of projects, including one centered on a mad scientist (bald, of course) called “The Superman”. Was it the sudden loss of his father that pushed a distraught 17-year-old to invent a bullet-proof super-being to avenge evil and fight for good?

"There's a connection there: the loss of a dad as a source for Superman." In other words, the father of Jerry Siegel wasn’t shot. Here is the first page of the second, the police report. But he remains convinced of its importance.

In 1931, he met and befriended his future partner, Joe Shuster, when the latter moved from his birthplace in Canada. It took them another four years before they found a publisher willing to help them tell their story.Jerome Siegel was born in Cleveland, the youngest of the six children of Mitchell Siegel and the former Sarah Fine. "To this day, half the family was told it was a heart attack, while the other half says it was a murder," he notes on his website. Both were, by all accounts, shy and somewhat awkward, and they bonded easily. By then both had been married and divorced. "Superman's invulnerability to bullets, loss of family, destruction of his homeland" all seem to overlap with Jerry's personal experience," Mr Jones told USA Today.

Titling the character The Superman, Siegel and Shuster offered it to Consolidated Book Publishing, who had published a 48-page black-and-white comic book entitled Detective Dan: … Warner also agreed to restore the men’s names to the Superman product, having removed their credit as creators back in 1948 when the ownership dispute began.Nonetheless, the legal battle over the future of the copyright continued until earlier this year, when a Federal circuit court in California ruled that DC Comics would retain sole ownership of the rights.By the early 1950s, Siegel and Shuster were no longer working together, and Siegel had taken a position as comics-art director for the publisher Ziff-Davis.

Or a store or place of business by the said Michael Siegel – where he collapsed and died?

As Siegel reported many years later, "I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed," he said.

Was he murdered? "In fact, Siegel’s first drawings for the evil version of The Superman were made only weeks after his father’s death.Of course, there were also more prosaic forces at work behind the inspiration for Superman. "I almost had a heart attack right there. On June 2, 1932, Jerry Siegel's father Mitchell, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, died during a night-time robbery at his Cleveland second hand clothes store. The first effort of high school buddies Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster was a mad scientist.

Both have died, Shuster in 1992 and Siegel in 1996. I thought, 'You have to be kidding me!' That's the theory of best-selling author Brad Meltzer, who researched Mitchell Siegel's death for his new novel, The Book of Lies, in which he draws parallels between Siegel's "murder" and another "true" mystery, the killing of Abel by his brother Cain. In March 1938, they sold all rights to Superman to the comic-book publisher Detective Comics, Inc., another forerunner of DC, for $130 ($2,361 when adjusted for inflation). As the result of natural causes following the theft of a suit of clothes by ?