See Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Inadvertent Inter-Company Crossover!

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Nov 1, 2019

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover the time that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had an inadvertent

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and fifty-fourth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this installment's all-Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster-related legends!

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COMIC LEGEND:

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Doctor Occult invadvertently appeared in another company's comic book.

STATUS:

True

Before they sold their Superman comic strip to National Comics (now DC Comics), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster paid their bills by doing comic book work for Major Malcolm-Wheeler Nicholson's comic book line, specifically New Fun Comics, where they introduced the Doctor Occult feature...

Comic books were at a weird point in time during the mid-1930s, where they were selling a little bit, so there was clearly SOME sort of future here, but not so much that they were easy money. Wheeler-Nicholson famously couldn't afford to keep going and was pushed out by the business partners that he was forced to take on RIGHT before National Comics hit big with Action Comics #1.

Anyhow, two of Wheeler-Nicholson's employees, John Mahon and Bill Cook, ultimately left National to help form their own comic book company, Comics Magazine Company, Inc. They, like Wheeler-Nicholson, believed in the power of original comic book material (the most successful comics of the time were reprints of comic strips). It is very likely that Wheeler-Nicholson owed them some back pay before they left, but whatever the reason, part of their deal was that they were allowed to take some National Comics material with them when they left.

So, in the first issue of Comic Book Magazine, they had one of Siegel and Shuster's Doctor Occult stories. They renamed him Dr. Mystic. Here's the really funny bit...it was PART ONE OF A STORY!