BROOKE GLADSTONE: The comic book actually began life as a bound collection of comic strips. But that happened, as the philosopher said, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, actually on the Lower East Side of Depression-Era New York, the product of Jewish immigrants who had tried just about everything else. Their names were Harry Donnenfeld and Jack Leibowitz who slid into comic books from even more dubious publishing ventures in soft porn. But Jack and Harry would have gone nowhere without the help of two other men, kids really, in the generation just behind them. Short, near-sighted, nominally middle class geeks before geeks were called geeks, their names were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who pooled their fantasies and came up with Superman. Gerard Jones is the author of "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book," he starts his tale with a portrait of Harry Donnenfeld hustling his way through the roaring twenties.

GERARD JONES: He'd sell ladies clothing, he would run errands for mobsters, he would do whatever he had to do to survive on the Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, and found himself through a family connection in the printing business, and from there found himself in a perfect position to import Canadian whiskey during Prohibition, and hooked up with the Frank Costello organization 'cause Harry was buying paper from Canada, and he had warehouse space. And it was very easy for him to bring the stuff in, after which he also found himself able to tap into a large distribution network. There was this shadowy distribution network through America in the twenties, a lot of which was fueled by illegal booze, but it also carried contraceptives and it carried girlie magazines, which was Harry's particular passion. And into his life came Jack Leibowitz, a fallen socialist, son of a socialist organizer, who got a CPA degree in order to work for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and went through a crisis of faith in the twenties which I think was largely about the fact that the union was so infiltrated also by the mob during those same years. So Jack found himself, instead of setting up the strike fund for the workers, found himself skimming money for Lepke Buchalter and his friends. And Jack broke with the union and ended up as the only CPA in the girlie magazine business, as Harry's partner.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] And from girlie magazines they went on to publish spicy crime and detective mags and trying to stay ahead of the vice cops, finally comic books. But now let's expand on the inclusion of the word "geek" in the subtitle of your book. The geek was born when science fiction was born, and that happened in August of 1928 in a comic book called Amazing Stories.

GERARD JONES: Yes. Actually, it's a pulp magazine that had a picture on the cover of a spaceman lifting into the air from his suburban lawn. And it was an image that seized the imaginations of 13- and 14-year-old boys, mostly boys across the country. And that magazine Amazing Stories helped stitch together really the first pop culture fandom, as we've come to understand it. There were fans scattered everywhere, reaching each other by sending letters to the other kids they saw in the letters pages. And one of those was Jerry Siegel who was growing up in kind of a middle class suburb of Cleveland. His dad had made enough money that Jerry could afford to go up in his attic bedroom and draw pictures and type stories on his typewriter and read pulp magazines, whereas guys like Harry and Jack were hustling on the Lower East Side. And so he and other geeks like him began to send out their own stories. And among the ideas Jerry had, along with a friend of his, an artist named Joe Shuster, was this idea of the alien visitor who has powers and defends us from crime.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it's really these two generations that gave rise to the comic book. The publishers were the children from these mean streets. And the inventors of the characters were from these softer environments. And the publishers, it seems, brutally exploited the inventors.

GERARD JONES: As the story's normally been told, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were naive kids who didn't know their rights, who sold them away to Donnenfeld and Leibowitz and were treated coldly and cruelly thereafter. In fact, I found that there were several times when Jack and Harry tried to sit down again and keep Siegel and Shuster happy. But Joe Shuster, the artist, really just wanted to go off in his own world and draw and left all the real world work to Jerry Siegel. And Jerry, unfortunately, had his own sort of superheroic fantasy. He wanted to seem like a hustler and a bigshot, but in fact, he was floundering. People would tell him, you know, you should get a lawyer for this, Jerry. And he'd say I don't need a lawyer, I know what I'm doing. It is a tragic story in that the boys, the creators of Superman, ended up in poverty and ended up having to go public with their losses. But I think there's a particular almost classic quality of tragedy in that you see so many places where they might have done better, as did the creator of Batman, Bob Cane, their peer. He knew to get a lawyer and go in and negotiate with Jack Leibowitz. And he got a very good deal on Batman. Poor Jerry and Joe just kept shooting themselves in the foot. Jerry by the age of 60 was working at the Public Utilities Commission as a mail clerk, scrabbling for occasional comic book freelance work. And finally when the Superman movie came out when it was announced in 1975 he decided it was time to go public, and he launched a campaign trying to shame D.C. which was then part of Warner Communications, into giving him some credit and some recompense at last.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did he get it?

GERARD JONES: Oh, I hate to blow my ending, but let's say it's not an entirely tragic ending. It's a Greek tragedy with a modern happy ending, yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gerard, thank you very much.

GERARD JONES: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gerard Jones is the author of "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book."