The Comedy Legend Who Helped to Inspire Superman

The teaser trailer for director James Gunn’s newest movie version of Superman was recently released online. And, unlike previous films, this one has a cute dog that everyone seems to already love. 

Of course, Superman has proven to be one of the most enduring heroes in the history of pop culture, even surviving John Cleese’s awkward take on the character. But this multibillion dollar franchise began as a simple idea from two guys who were eventually screwed out of those billions of dollars: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Also, it could be argued that the character of Superman wouldn’t be quite the same if not for the influence of one of Canada’s most famous comedians: Joe’s cousin Frank Shuster. 

Frank, along with Johnny Wayne, performed as the comedy duo Wayne and Shuster for decades. They had their own shows on radio and television in Canada, but their big international break was on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan called Wayne and Shuster “the two greatest young comics I’ve run into,” praising their more “literary” comedy, and even signing them to a contract that led to a “record-breaking” number of appearances. 

According to the book Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster by Brad Ricca, Joe and Frank were “best pals” when they were kids. The “double first cousins” (their fathers married two sisters) even lived in the same building at one point, and mostly spent their days watching silent movies at the Pickford Theatre in Toronto, owing to the fact that Frank’s father worked there as a projectionist. 

As The Toronto Star (which inspired Superman’s The Daily Star, later renamed The Daily Planet) noted in their final interview with Joe Shuster, when the artist later “tried to imagine what Superman and his friends would look like, he drew upon actors in the movies he’d seen in Toronto with Frank.”

Shuster took inspiration from silent film icons like Douglas Fairbanks Sr., star of The Mark of Zorro and Robin Hood. “He had a stance which I often used in drawing Superman,” Shuster told an interviewer in 1983. “You’ll see in many of his roles — including Robin Hood — that he always stood with his hands on his hips and his feet spread apart, laughing — taking nothing seriously."

As for Superman’s costume, that, too, came from Fairbanks movies, such as The Black Pirate, in which the star would “swing on ropes very much like Superman flying.”

And the look of Superman’s bespectacled alter-ego was taken from silent comedy legend Harold Lloyd. 

Several Superman character names were also pulled from old movies. “Clark Kent” was a combination of “Clark Gable” and “Kent Taylor,” and the city of Metropolis was named after the classic Fritz Lang epic.

Had Frank Shuster’s dad worked in a shoe store, it’s entirely possible that Action Comics #1 would have been about a superpowered loafer.