Word: shuster
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...identity of the girl who served as the inspiration for Lois Lane. It was not Siegel's schoolmate Lois Long, who sang in the choir, or Lois Donaldson, an editor of the Glenville H.S. Torch. It was Lois Amster, the class beauty, who hardly glanced at either Siegel or Shuster. "She's a grandmother now in Cleveland," according to Shuster, "but I don't think she has any idea that she was the inspiration...
...does. And when asked if she would have laughed at Siegel and Shuster if either of them had asked her for a date, she smiles and says, "Probably." Married for 46 years to retired Insurance Agent Robert Rothschild, she reveals that she never had any interest in being a newspaper reporter. "You know what I wanted to be? A detective...
...only Superman enthusiasts not taking part in the current festivities are Siegel and Shuster, both 73, living three blocks from each other in retirement in Los Angeles, Siegel suffering from a heart condition and Shuster legally blind. When DC Comics bought their creation 50 years ago, it acquired all rights, initially paying them only $10 a page for their work in writing and drawing. When the first issue sold out, and sales of subsequent issues soon climbed to 250,000 copies each, the two men sued for their rights. DC Comics dropped them, and the courts ruled against them...
Their litigation dragged on until the late '70s, when Warner Communications, which by then owned DC and wanted to make a movie version, paid off the creators with $20,000 a year for life. (Superman's estimated overall value: more than $1 billion.) Siegel and Shuster agreed to keep the peace, but they are giving no interviews and joining no celebrations. "They are just in such pain over this situation," says Thomas Andrae, a Berkeley sociologist who knows them, "particularly as it gets closer to the anniversary...
...Superman evolved over the years, so, of course, did Lois Lane. Shuster's dream girl was a sketchy figure with bobbed hair and a working girl's hat; his successors filled her out a bit, made her almost glamorous; today she wears slacks, bangs and a look of grim determination. From the beginning she has been an object of her creators' male chauvinist sport. When she asks, in one of the very first comic-book installments, to cover the collapse of a crumbling dam, Planet Editor Perry White gruffly insists on sending the less experienced Clark Kent...