~ 1914 - 1992
Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, Canada on July 10, 1914. At the age of nine, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he would later meet Jerome Siegel, with whom he would become a creative partner. Siegel and Shuster created a hero character which later became famous as Superman.
The story on Joe Shuster is a sad and shameful tale. He drew that big read S, made comic history and never received anything amounting to even a tiny percentage of the financial rewards his character should have given him. It led him towards drawing fetish artworks for the magazine Titled Nights of Horror
Nights of Horror is an American series of fetish comic books, created in 1954 by publisher Malcla. Broke and slowly going blind, Shuster took a project from his neighbor, a writer for a publishing company called Malcla. His neighbor "Clancy" was the "Cla" in the name, and the "Mal" was Eugene Maletta, who ran a print shop out of a basement in Queens. These magazines were sold under the counter at drugstores untill they got banned in the U.S.
The booklet lasted for 16 issues, with Clancy penning them all under pseudonyms. Shuster never signed any of his illustrations, but the work is universally attributed to him, especially when compared to his work on Superman. Some of the characters in Nights of Horror even look like Shuster's Superman character drawings, such as Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, even Clark Kent.
(read more about Nights of Horror via Wikipedia)
Some say the knowledge of Joe publishing in these ' crude, stapled pamphlets of erotic horror' magazines should have never been brought to anyones attention. From an erotic artistic point of view this part of his artworks is as much legacy as his non erotic artworks are, and therefor are worthwile to share in order to pay respects to an artist who maybe was just miles ahead of his time with his fetish artworks.
Joe Shuster, nearly blind & very bitter about his treatment from DC died July 30, 1992 just short of his seventy-eighth birthday. Though forgotten by the publisher that should have presented him as their savior, he will never be forgotten by the millions of fans worldwide who have read his legendary creation.
It is very challenging to find art, in good quality, and even more to connect them to the books/magazines they were illustrated for. Since I found a lot of mixed art for which I could not for sure determine the book they were published in I used theme galleries, for Nights of Horror I created this album with covers. A few books I could connect to the art, in time I will renew this page.
8 albums/86 artworks
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Karen Smits
