Joe Shuster - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Joseph Shuster was born in Toronto, Ontario to a Jewish family. His father, Julius, an immigrant from Rotterdam, had a tailor shop in Toronto's garment district. His mother, Ida, had come from Kiev in Ukraine. His family, including his sister Jean lived on Bathurst, Oxford and Borden Streets. and Shuster attended Ryerson and Lansdowne Public Schools. One cousin is comedian Frank Shuster of the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Shuster.

As a youngster, Shuster worked as a newspaper boy for the Toronto Daily Star, The family barely made ends meet, and the budding young artist would scrounge for paper, which the family could not afford. He recalled in 1992,

I would go from store to store in Toronto and pick up whatever they threw out. One day, I was lucky enough to find a bunch of wallpaper rolls that were unused and left over from some job. The backs were blank, naturally. So it was a goldmine for me, and I went home with every roll I could carry. I kept using that wallpaper for a long time.

Sometime in 1924, when Shuster was 9, or 10, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There Shuster attended Glenville High School and befriended his later collaborator, writer Jerry Siegel, with whom he began publishing a science fiction fanzine called Science Fiction. Siegel described his friendship with the similarly shy and bespectacled Shuster: "When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together."

The duo broke into comics at Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications, the future DC Comics, working on the landmark New Fun — the first comic-book series to consist solely of original material rather than using any reprinted newspaper comic strips — debuting with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" and the supernatural crime-fighter strip Doctor Occult, both in New Fun #6 (Oct. 1935). In a 1992 interview, in which he used the fledgling publisher's future name, he said the two sample strips were not the ones eventually published:

One was drawn on brown wrapping paper and the other was drawn on the back of wallpaper from Toronto. And DC approved them, just like that! It’s incredible! But DC did say, 'We like your ideas, we like your scripts and we like your drawings. But please, copy over the stories in pen and ink on good paper.' So I got my mother and father to lend me the money to go out and buy some decent paper, the first drawing paper I ever had, in order to submit these stories properly to DC Comics.