Jerry Siegel was born on October 17, 1914, in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of six children born to Lithuanian, Jewish immigrants. While attending Glenville High School he befriended Joe Shuster, as the two bonded over a shared interest in science fiction and movies.
Unable to pay for college, Siegel had various day jobs while he also started to submit and sell comic scripts to National Allied Publications. Together with Shuster, he had developed a character called Superman, which they had intended on selling as a syndicated newspaper strip. However, after a few unsuccessful years, they finally sold the character to comic-book publisher, Detective Comics Inc. for $130.00.
The comic became a huge success with Jerry Siegel on board as writer and Shuster on art duties. After military service during World War II, Siegel returned to DC Comics for a brief spell, but left in 1947 following a much publicised rights battle with the publisher over Superboy. He would return to DC Comics later in his career. Throughout his career, he co-created a number of key characters for DC, including Doctor Occult, The Spectre, Star-Spangled Kid and many members of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Beyond DC, Siegel would team up one more time with Shuster to create the comic Funnyman, published by Magazine Enterprises. As well as scripting some Strange Tales scripts for Marvel and The Fly, The Mighty Crusaders and The Web for Archie Comics, he reached out to the Lion publishers, having received some copies of the comic and was so taken by The Spider, took over scripting duties from Ted Cowan.
Donne Avenell's career in comics started before the outbreak of World War II when he was an assistant editor with Amalgamated Press working on Radio Fun. After serving in the navy, he returned to the company, now as an editor on an architecture magazine, while also writing radio dramas and romance stories. In the 1950's Avenell was a prolific writer on War Picture Library and then Lion, penning such classic strips as The Spider, The Phantom Viking, Adam Eterno and Dr. Mesmer's Revenge. By the 1970's he was working on a number of projects including co-writing Powerman (the Nigerian superhero comic illustrated by Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland) and The Sun newspaper strip Axa. In the same decade, Avenell also found work in the television industry, where he wrote scripts for popular spy programme The Saint. Later he would work with artist John Burns on both an official comic book adaption of Prince Charles and Lady Diana's wedding, and a newspaper strip called Eartha which ran in the News of the World.
