Maximortal, by Rick Veitch (King Hell Press/Tundra Publishing). Trade comic, $14.95. By James Digiovanna IN 1938, JERRY Siegel and Joe Schuster naively sold all rights to their creation, a comic book superhero named Superman, for $140 and the promise of more work. Nearly 40 years later, shortly before the release of a film based on his character, but for which he was to receive nothing, Jerry Siegel wrote in an open letter to the Hollywood press, "the publishers of Superman comic books killed my days, murdered my nights, choked my happiness, strangled my career. I put a curse on the Superman movie!" Rick Veitch takes Siegel's life and mixes it with the invention of the atom bomb, the politics of mid-century America, and the Superman story itself to produce an uneven but strangely compelling "graphic novel." Maximortal contains Veitch's usual excessive indulgences into feculence (one character is an excrement-collecting shaman named "El Guano") and revolting violence (the back cover, for example, features a baby tearing out a man's eye), but it also portrays, sympathetically, the shame and pain that these induce. The story begins with the conception of a super-powered embryo by a polysexual alien and an unfortunate Russian trapper, and this physical conception is echoed in the creative conception of a superhero character by a young comic book writer. The childishly violent creature and its idealized mirror in the form of the character "True Man" move past and into each other in a parable about the unknowable source of creative thought and the destructive potential it holds. While parts of the book won't make sense to the uninitiated, much of it can be fruitfully read as insightful commentary on the violence done to the inventors of our modern myths, the comic book writers of the 1940s, who received little reward for creations that earned their "owners" billions of dollars.

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