Jerry Siegel’s & Joe Shuster’s Science Fiction Full Book - The Advance Guard of Future Civilization - Featuring The Reign of the Super-Man is a high-quality reprint and a comic book adaptation of “the Reign of the Super-man,” the very first “superman” story by Gerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.Originally a short novel in the style of the pulps, it tells the story of Bill Dunn, a down-of-his-luck man who acquires superpowers through a radical experiment.

 

The story has all the main elements of the Superman myth: a bald super-villain, an unknown element coming from space that mutates human beings, telescopic-vision, aliens, and an indomitable quest for absolute power.

 

It was originally published on Science Fiction – The Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3 (Jan. 1933), one of the very first fanzine ever created, which Siegel and Shuster carried out with a typewriter and a mimeograph machine for printing.

 

The book also contains:An essay on the creation of Superman by Siegel and Shuster that covers their early years since they met in high school, also exploring the many attempts at a professional career in the pulp first and in the comic book industry later on.

 

An introduction about the evolution of the super-man concept from the late 19th Century to the early ‘30s, going through notorious and less known literary characters such as Nick Carter, occult detective Diana Madburg, superman’s precursor Hugo Danner, the morally-challenged Night Wind and Dr. Zarkov the Surgeon of Souls.

 

The comic book adaptation is in black and white to maintain the original feeling of the pulp illustrations.

The original images from “The Reign of the Super-man” story have been restored in high quality.