My current plan is to go through the golden age Superman stories that have been reprinted, issue by issue, looking at their themes, style, structure, or whatever I happen to find interesting about them. For now, I will be looking at Action Comics #1.
It almost feels sacrilegious to write about Action Comics #1. This comic is the ur-text for the superhero genre. There may have been action, adventure, and masked vigilantes in the comic books and newspaper strips before April of 1938, but Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s extraterrestrial ubermensch codified many of the tropes that would go on to define the superhero genre: secret identities, bright spandex costumes, the love interest who yearns for the masculine displays of the heroic form and finds the hero’s civilian identity dull, the tragic backstory, the altruistic quest to protect others and make the world a better place.
Krypton is unnamed here, simply described as “a distant planet”. Metropolis is not named, either. Superman’s origin is a brisk, one page summary that feels almost mythic in its broad strokes. He is shot away from a collapsing planet (“destroyed by old age”) by his parents in a Moses-esque odyssey, found by the highway, dropped off at an orphanage, and then we get a brief description of his powers- before he could fly, shoot lasers from his eyes, or any number of other tricks he would go on to acquire throughout the 50s and 60s. As the radio serial would describe, he was “faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”. His strength is compared to an ant’s ability to carry many times its own weight, his leap to that of a grasshopper, in effort to lend plausibility to the tale. Though this may sound quaint in today’s world of Justice Leagues and Avengers, there was very little like it in 1938.
Superman as a concept was something Siegel and Schuster had been working on since very early in their partnership, with their first story bearing the name published in 1933. This early, evil bald telepath had more in common with later supervillains than he did with the Superman DC finally published, but it was a notable foray into the superhuman nonetheless. In the meantime, the duo continued to flesh out the concept, eventually settling on a heroic figure and developing a costume. In spite of this, they were continuously rejected by both newspaper and comic publishers. With DC, they created Dr. Occult in 1935, a Dr. Strange-meets-Dick-Tracy mystic sorcerer who battled everything from werewolves to vampires, and Slam Bradley, a private eye who fought off criminals and gangsters, debuting in 1937. This was enough to finally earn the trust of a major publisher and pitch their dream project, premiering in a brand-new series called Action Comics.
The narrative of Action Comics #1 begins in media res, with Superman rushing to stop an innocent woman's death sentence. The pace is breakneck, jumping through several vignettes as Superman establishes himself and stops various crimes. Aside from Superman himself the world is much closer to that of Slam Bradley than to full-blown science fiction, a superpowered man dropped into a 1930s crime thriller and changing the rules of the genre. His powers gave him access to government officials in a way that no one else has, able to use his speed to submit new evidence at the eleventh hour and change the outcome of a case, breaking down barriers with his strength and overhearing hidden conspiracies with his super-hearing. His position as a reporter also gives him privileged access to information before it reaches the public. The obstacles he faces reflect the social concerns of pre-war, depression era US, with gangsters and corrupt politicians run amok.
Lois is given a strong introduction, despite being eventually relegated to damsel in distress. She is a confident and self-assured career woman, and as such is much more memorable than most love interests in genre fiction of this era. She is often belittled by her male counterparts and not taken seriously despite clearly being a better reporter than Clark, and she is forced to put herself first in order to get ahead within this male-dominated workplace. In rescuing her from her kidnappers, we get the now-iconic shot of Superman lifting a car, which is replicated on this issue’s cover.
The issue ends with a 3-and-a-bit page coda where Clark is given an assignment in Washington DC about an upcoming war in a fictional South American nation, San Monte. Superman overhears a plot by arms dealers to extend the war to Europe. He dangles the shady lobbyist over a telephone wire, threatening to drop him if he doesn’t give up the details of their plot, in a scene more reminiscent of Frank Miller’s Batman or Daredevil than what we would expect from Post-Crisis, modern age Superman. This Man of Steel is not afraid to use extreme measures to achieve his goals of social reform. The “Champion of the Oppressed” is a depression-era hero of the common man, with no qualms about violently challenging the establishment.
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