Action Comics #1
This review was comissioned by @Gun Jam.
Action Comics' 1938 debut wasn't the beginning of DC as a company, but it marks the point when DC really started to come into its own as a publisher and began its growth into a nation-infusing pop culture juggernaut. Both because it was an anthology series with a diverse range of content from numerous contributors that could keep a large audience on lockdown, and because of one particular piece of content that...oh who am I kidding you all know what I'm talking about.
I'm not entirely sure that Superman really was the first superhero. There were various pulp magazine and early comic adventurers and vigilantes who had some combination of "secret identity," "unique powers," and "garish costume/callsign." I've already reviewed "The Living Shadow," which came out nearly a decade before AC1. There's also at least one other new character introduced in this same AC launch issue as Superman, a fellow by the name of Zatara, who fits at least nearly all of the cape criteria. But, even if he wasn't exactly the first, he was absolutely the codifier. The naming scheme, the spandex uniforms, the confluence of all rather than just some of the genre codifiers I listed above, we have Kal "Clark Joseph Kent" El to thank for all that.
Having now read Action Comics #1, I wonder if part of the reason why Superman had so much more influence than other adventure serial protagonists of his time isn't actually because of that combination of elements, though. See, reading 1938 Superman alongside its temporal peers, what jumps out at me the most is how much better it is than anything else in the issue. The stuff that ended up catching on and being copied - the spandex, the dual identity - may have been totally incidental to what actually made Superman such a success. Really, it just happened to be better drawn and better written than the era's standard. If Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegal had done something else instead of Superman and brought the same effort and skill to bear, I think there's a good chance that that would have been DC's big runaway success.
Anyway. Something that @Gun Jam said that they wanted me to do was comment on Superman's original portrayal and how it differs from the version most of us think of today. So, I'll focus on that primarily.
Superman's origins are established very tersely. His home planet hasn't been named "Krypton" yet, and the concept of him drawing his power from the sun is also not present. Rather, his powers are supposedly down to his species having spent many millions of years' worth of evolution within the humanoid body plan, and thus natural selection has had a chance to optimize it. Not how evolution works, but I mean, this is fucking Superman lol.
Interestingly, there are a few bits that imply that underneath their human-looking exterior, Clark's species have as much in common with insects as they do with mammals. That's an interesting scifi detail that seems to have been totally dropped in later iterations.
More importantly to who Superman is as opposed to what he is, there's no adoptive midwestern farm family. The motorist who found baby Clark Kent's space pod brought him to an orphanage, and there's no mention of adoption.
We go straight from there to Clark's adulthood, with him working as a news reporter while going out in costume to fight for justice. It's very important to understand that what "justice" means to this version of Superman is not necessarily what it means for his later iterations. Remember, this Clark Kent wasn't given an archetypally wholesome smalltown USA childhood. He's an orphan who joined the workforce at a young age before eventually making it into journalism, and it shows.
His first ever "onscreen" adventure has him breaking into a governor's mansion in the middle of the night to force the governor to belay the execution of a convict Clark knows to be innocent. The first bullet we ever see his skin deflecting is fired by the governor's bodyguard, and that same bodyguard is the first enemy combatant we see him knock out. He also takes pains to operate at night when he can get away with it, and to minimize his exposure to police and press. At the point where we start following him, Superman has managed to keep his existence mostly secret from the public, though rumors are slowly emerging and he knows he won't be able to keep it up forever.
His relationship with The Law is ambivalent at best. In a way that foreshadows Batman much more than it does Superman's own later incarnations.
But hold on with that, we're going somewhere else with this train of thought in a little bit.
Superman's more covert modus operandi is necessitated in part by him not being all that powerful yet. He can outrun a car, punch through a steel door, or leap over a tall building, but he can't fly or throw buildings around. His skin is bulletproof, but the captions explicitly spell out that an antitank shell would get through. Part of it is also down to personality. Partly to avoid suspicion and keep himself out of situations where he might need to use his powers in public, partly out of personal temperament, Clark Kent out of uniform really is a mild mannered reporter. I wouldn't go quite so far as to call him a loser, but he doesn't get the respect he feels he deserves, and he's actually bothered by not getting that respect. There's some genuine angst brewing under that repression.
This is best explored when he manages to get attractive coworker Lois Lane to go on a date with him, and she ends up getting disgusted with him when some drunk guy at the club starts harassing her and he timidly backs off for fear of getting into a fight and revealing his strength.
The jerk turns out to be a gangster, and he and his buds end up chasing after Lois to teach her a lesson about humiliating him in public like that. Clark sees them tailing her out, and quickly changes into his Superman outfit to save her. The way she reacts to him now - this hypermasculine demigod who protects her in a way that her date just failed to do - leaves Clark in visible pain after he drops her off and vanishes. Wishing he could just be himself while also being himself.
A bit of that resentment seems to come out when Clark is in uniform, in his tendency to engage in mean-spirited snark at his enemies' expense.
Panels 2, 3, and 4.
He's actually pretty dang funny, sometimes.
When his enemies are rich slimy types in particular, he can get downright nasty. Not in a Geneva Convention violating way (not that that was a thing yet in 1938, but you know what I mean), but still, harsh.
In other words, the OG Superman was, in fact, Spiderman. There might be a few preludes to Batman in here as well, but it's mostly Spiderman. Spiderman was the first superhero.
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I now genuinely believe that Spiderman's genesis was the 1960's Marvel crew looking back at early Superman and going "I wish DC still did that."
It was just straight up a Superman retroclone.
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Clark Kent having a real inner conflict is a big part of what separates "Superman" from the other stories it shares Action Comics #1 with. The other adventure heroes in this comic book don't have anything close to that level of complexity.
Another thing that separates it is the degree to which it shows rather than telling. Superman does rely heavily on third person narration in the captions, but it relies on them notably less than most of the others. The reader is allowed to glean a lot about both the plot and the characters from dialogue and thought bubbles, rather than it all just being dryly exposited at the top of the panel. It shows either greater respect for the audience's reading comprehension, or greater skill at storytelling. Possibly both.
Yet another is the art quality, especially when it comes to portraying the "action" of these action comics. Like, compare these two panels from "Superman" and a western piece called "Chuck Dawson:"
Joe Shuster knew how to draw the human body in motion. He could capture effort in a character's face and muscles, and he could show the resistance as bodies pushed or bounced off of one another. Most of the other artists in Action Comics #1 were a lot closer to the Chuck Dawson level. There's plenty of good art in these other stories, but precious little in the way of good action art. Given the title of this publication, well, it really isn't any wonder people liked Superman the best just based on its visuals, before getting into the story itself.
On that topic, remember that "Zatara" thing I mentioned at the beginning? Zatara is actually a really interesting point of comparison. If Spiderman was a retvrn to tradition for cape comics, then the first episode of Zatara is almost a look forward at what Superman would eventually morph into.
Zatara is a crime-fighting wizard who goes out in a stage magician outfit and a bunch of similarly circus-themed minions (some of them very painfully racialized). He coordinates openly and eagerly with the police. His magical powers are flexible and ill-defined to the point where it's hard to tell what's a challenge for him and what isn't. As far as character development goes, he's bland at best and a black box at worst, the story entirely focused on the minutiae of his fight with the current villain rather than the hows or whys behind his participation in it.
He might not be nearly as powerful as later Superman, but in terms of ethos and narrative focus Zatara is absolutely a premonition of what Superman would eventually be watered down into. It's ironic that Zatara was overshadowed by Superman in the beginning, and that the publisher realized Superman would be a better sell even before the fact when they decided to put him on the front cover. Zatara is boring.
I will say in Zatara's defence, though, that his mind control spells being in Black Lodge language is pretty kawaii.
So he at least has that going for him.
The rest of the AC1 lineup is variable in quality. It's mostly comics of the vigilante detective, sports drama, or cowboy revenge quest persuasions, but there are also some illustrated prose pieces. One of these in particular, a fictionalized account of the travels of Marco Polo, caught my eye. Mostly by virtue of its accurately garish depictions of period clothing.
It's really too bad that at some point everyone decided the past was all muted whites and browns and greys. If you look at any art or artifacts actually from the middle ages, it's clear that people back then put a lot of pride and effort into making the most of their few, labor-intensive articles of clothing. So, it's nice seeing an illustrated work from before that brainbug set in.
The writing itself is unfortunately dry, and the author doesn't do much to make Marco a real protagonist rather than just a hovering video camera to explore the medieval world through. But, I do like the character and clothing art. And also appreciate the generally nuanced (if dull) portrayal of nonwhite peoples; some of the other stories are unfortunately much closer to what you'd expect from 1930's American race relations.
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Did 1200's Europeans actually refer to the Abbasids as "Babylonians," though? There's one panel where they refer to the caliphate's ships as "Babylonian." Was that a thing? Maybe it was a thing, idk.
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Some of the others are okay. The cowboy one is perfectly readable, if very formulaic. There's also a little four-page slapstick comedy bit called "Sticky Mitt Stimson" about a halfwitted burglar using hairbrained schemes and disguises to just barely put one over on the equally halfwitted police that I liked (as much because of how uncannily close its art style is to "Beetle Bailey,' which was made decades later by a different creator). But...I don't really feel like I have too much to say about them. It's not just the fame retroactively making me give it more attention; Superman really was that much more interesting than its friends and relations.
The changes Superman underwent in the following decades look almost sinister now, seeing where he started out and what kind of ethos he originally espoused. Before he was a champion of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," Superman's political outlook was like such:
And yes, this plot thread leads to him taking out a corrupt warmonger in the US Senate. I guess we can add Raiden to the list of characters who are closer to OG Superman than later Superman is.
World War 2 and its rally behind the flag effect probably did some of the damage here, but much more of it was done by the postwar red scare. And it was done on purpose.
