Days after the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerome Siegel were rebuffed in a lawsuit against Warner Bros., co-creator Joe Shuster is at the center of a film deal, reports Variety.
The Gotham Group has optioned screen rights to “Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster,” a book by Craig Yoe published earlier this year by Abrams ComicArts.
Gotham Group CEO Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Lee Stollman and Julie Kane-Ritsch will produce, and they are out to writers.
The book pegs Shuster as the secret artist behind “The Nights of Horror,” a 16-volume series of mob-financed underground comics depicting scenes that range from S&M to brutal torture.
The comics were sold covertly under the counters of Times Square bookshops — until they sparked a dragnet and crackdown on comics, several sensational trials and a Supreme Court censorship case in 1954.
