Jewish creators helped shape comics at two defining moments: the rise of the American superhero in the late 1930s and the later use of comics to tell family histories, preserve memory and explore Jewish identity. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman helped establish the superhero genre; Art Spiegelman’s Maus showed how a graphic narrative could confront the Holocaust through the story of one family. These works belong to a much wider history—not a single tradition with one shared experience or motivation.
How Superman helped establish the superhero
Action Comics No. 1, dated 1938, introduced Superman. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History identifies his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, as two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland and says the character helped give birth to the superhero genre. The museum’s record for Action Comics No. 1 anchors the familiar origin story in a specific comic and creative partnership.
Superman arrived amid the Great Depression and a period of rising fascism and antisemitism. The Smithsonian describes that political climate as part of the setting in which Superman and Captain America emerged. The Jewish Museum also connects early creators’ work with immigrant life and marginalization. This context can help explain why stories of power, danger and protection resonated, but it should not be treated as a single motive shared by every Jewish creator.
A cohort, not a claim about the whole industry
The Jewish Museum’s 2006–2007 exhibition, “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” presented superhero comics created between 1938 and 1950 and included work by fifteen Jewish artists and writers. Among them were Siegel and Shuster, as well as Bob Kane and Bill Finger, creators of Batman. The figure describes the exhibition’s selected creators; it is not a measure of the proportion of Jewish people in the comics industry.
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That distinction matters because the history is larger than a count or a roster. Jewish creators worked across writing, drawing and publishing, and their work took different forms. The superhero is a major point of entry, not the whole story.
From serial heroes to family history in Maus
Art Spiegelman’s Maus brings comics into a different register: a graphic account of his parents’ survival of the Holocaust and the transmission of that history within a family. The Jewish Museum describes the Pulitzer Prize-winning work as developing over thirteen years. Its retrospective, “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective,” places Maus within a wider career rather than treating it as an isolated achievement.
The contrast with early superhero comics is useful without being absolute. A serial comic book can build a continuing world around a hero; a graphic novel can use sequence, image and text to reconstruct memory and personal history. In Maus, the form makes room for an intimate account of trauma and inheritance. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum discusses the work in relation to Jewish identity and comics in its discussion with Gregory Spinner.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a natural starting point for readers who want to follow this shift from the superhero tradition to Holocaust memory. The Jewish Museum Berlin also considers the book and its subject in its account of “Heroes, Freaks, and Super-Rabbis.”
A wider Jewish comics history
Institutional exhibitions make clear that Jewish contributions cannot be reduced to Superman and Maus. The Jewish Museum Berlin’s overview traces comics through more than forty artists, including Rube Goldberg, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Spiegelman, Rutu Modan, Joann Sfar and Ben Katchor. Its scope includes illustrators, scriptwriters and publishers across the twentieth century.
Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s “Chosen Heroes: The Jewish Comics Experience” adds Jack Kirby and Stan Lee to the conversation and points to strands that a superhero-only account can miss: Yiddish comics, Sephardi identity, Hebrew-language children’s publications and anti-fascist comics. Together, these examples show a medium used for entertainment, cultural expression, political response and the exploration of identity.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why this history matters
Jewish creators are fundamental to comics history not because one identity explains every story, but because their work helped shape several of the medium’s defining possibilities. Siegel and Shuster’s Superman belongs to the emergence of the American superhero. Spiegelman’s Maus demonstrates the power of comics to carry testimony and family memory. The creators and traditions between and beyond those landmarks make the history broader still.
The record supports a history of substantial influence, not a numerical claim about what share of all comics creators were Jewish. Exhibition counts describe the works and people those institutions chose to present; they are not an industry-wide census.
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