Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were co-creators of Superman, the cartoon character which, more than any other superhero, revolutionized comics, turning them from a sideshow in American media into a multi-million-dollar industry. "I conceived a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I heard tell of rolled into one. Only more so," Siegel once said of his Superman creation. Such a fanciful if not fantastical creation seems almost prosaic today, but in 1934, when Siegel had his summertime brainstorm, superheroes were a thing of the future, and the Man of Steel was initially laughed at and rejected by dozens of publishers as too strange and too fanciful before finally being picked up by DC publishers for its new Action Comics line in 1938. Since then, Superman has taken on mythic cultural as well as mercantile implications, spawning not only comic books, comic strips, television and radio series, movies...