Joe Shuster Quotes

Those early sketches looked too cartoony; I really wanted to do detailed drawings – I was taking anatomy classes – but unfortunately I wasn’t able to do it because of the time element.

Not only that, but when I first met Joe, to my intense delight, he showed me that he was a collector. He was collecting some of the early Tarzan pages by Hal Foster, and, later, early Flash Gordons; and I found that we were both absolutely interested in the same type of thing.

Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

Jerry often says that Slam Bradley was really the forerunner of Superman, because we turned it out with no restrictions, complete freedom to do what we wanted; the only problem was that we had a deadline.

Jerry and I always felt that the character was enjoying himself. He was having fun: he wasn’t taking himself seriously. It was always a lark for him, as you can see in my early drawings.