“It’s been a very weird existence,” Siegel said in a telephone interview. His attendance at the convention will also mark Siegel’s emergence from years of seclusion, years that have seen the joy of creation marred by the bitter aftertaste of legal squabbles. But Dorf was able to get through one recent day to reach Siegel and arrange the first interview the creator of Superman has granted in several years. Any conversation with him is punctuated by a parade of casually dressed neighbors making and taking calls. The telephone in Dorf’s comic-littered and poster-plastered Ocean Beach apartment is the only one in an eight-unit court.

He has dropped into the background a bit this year, giving the actual chairmanship to Richard Butner, a 25-year-old graduate student in ancient Roman history, but he remains the father figure. Presiding benignly over the talks, panel discussions and comic book trading fests will be a round, shaggy, soft -spoken fellow called Shel Dorf, who at the age of 42 has been clipping and collecting comics for 32 years and who maintains that comics deserve every bit as much artistic respect as the works of Rembrandt and Van Gogh.ĭorf, a commercial artist when he isn’t visiting heroes such as Siegel and Steve Canyon creator Milton Caniff, founded the San Diego Comic Con in 1970, when about 300 persons attended. The convention runs Wednesday through next Sunday. Siegel, who in 1933 dreamed up the idea for Superman, first and mightiest of the great comic book superheroes, will be an honored guest, speaking at the convention banquet Saturday evening. The fans, about 3.000 of them, will pay the Siegels due homage next weekend at the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention at the El Cortez Hotel a gathering of funnies freaks and B-movie maniacs from all over the nation.

Jerry siegel superman