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Superman was a Jew. Well maybe not, but he was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were Jewish. Last Son is the new documentary by Brad Ricca about the creators of Superman. Its Canadian premiere was part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival’s special section on people of the comic book industry.

The film chronicles the childhoods of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Joe Shuster was actually born in Toronto but this documentary focused more their teen years growing up just a few blocks away from each other in Cleveland, Ohio. Joe as the artist and Jerry as the writer created a world that was influenced by pop culture, the movies, sports, history and the people around them to create on of the most enduring fictional characters of all time. There have been many misconceptions of how and where much of the Superman mythology came from over the years. This film does a great job of clarifying those myths and revealing many unknown facts: Everything from the origins of Lois Lane to where the look and name of Clark Kent came from.

The documentary only goes to 1940, shortly after the comic book becomes a world-wide phenomenon, and doesn’t  cover any of the legal problems that Siegel/Shuster had with DC Comics, which destroyed their careers soon after. This was a smart move, because while the sad saga of what happened after needs to be documented someday, if it was included in this film it would have taken away from the focus.

The only part that seemed out of place were some segments the filmmaker did asking kids questions about Superman. The kids didn’t seem to have much of a clue who Superman was, and if they did know, they didn’t seem to really care about the character, so I really didn’t see the point of these segments. Is the filmmaker saying that Superman is forgotten today? It felt very out of place.

The one-hour documentary was followed by three Fleischer Superman cartoon shorts. The Superman shorts of the 1940s were way ahead of their time in quality of animation. The storylines were almost non-existent, but the action scenes are wonderful to watch and they have fun kinetic energy to them. The 30 minutes of cartoon shorts was a nice companion to the documentary, and it served as a great reminder of why Superman had such a huge impact on popular culture, especially during the war years of  the late 1930s and 40s.

The evening concluded with former Toronto Star reporter Henry Mietkiewicz giving a brief talk and Q&A session with the audience. Mietkiewicz was fortunate to interview Joe Shuster just a few months before his death in 1992, and he spoke about some of the inspirations for Superman that weren’t covered in the film. Toronto in the 1920s, for example, was the was the main visual influence on the fictional Metropolis (not New York as most people believe). The Daily Planet, the paper that Clark Kent and Lois Lane work for, was influenced by the Toronto Star (which at the time was called the Toronto Daily Star).

The Q&A session was very illuminating, highlighting the fact that even though Last Son is a solid history of Superman, the character is steeped in so much lore that it can’t be captured all in one place. In the end though, the great thing about the Superman mythology is that it is so applicable to whomever the viewer or reader is. Last Son makes for fascinating viewing, and it is recommended for anyone that is interested in learning how a modern myth is created.