Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 18, 2024 | 1 comment

A year after Action Comics #1, the Man of Steel changed the world again…

By PETER BOSCH

On May 18, 1939 — 85 years ago —Superman #1 soared to the newsstands, just one year and one month after his first appearance on April 18, 1938 in Action Comics #1. The contents of Superman #1 were basically reprints of the Superman stories that first appeared in Action Comics #1-4… but there were 13 new things that were added that would contribute to the mythos of the greatest comic book hero of all time. (Speaking of the “greatest of all time,” on April 4, 2024, Heritage Auctions sold Action Comics #1 for $6,000,000, making it the most valuable comic in the world.)

All Superman pages were written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, unless otherwise noted:

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1. Superman was the first superhero to get his own comic book.

The cover was based on a drawing by Joe Shuster used in Action Comics #10 but the cover here may have been put together by Leo O’Mealia.

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2. An expanded origin. Where Action Comics #1 had a one-page origin that skimmed over practically everything, the new and completely redrawn two-pager contained much more detail.

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3. Krypton was given its name for the first time in comic books. In Action Comics #1, it was just known as “a distant planet” that was “destroyed by old age,” but was called “Krypton” in the Superman #1 revamped origin above. (This, however, still comes after the Superman daily newspaper did so a few months earlier, on January 16, 1939.)

4. Ma and Pa Kent were also introduced in the expanded origin. In Action Comics #1, the person who discovered the baby in the rocket was merely referred to as “a passing motorist” who turned him over to an orphanage. In Superman #1, it was the Kents who found him and took him to an orphanage, then later returned to adopt him. In the new origin above, it was also the Kents who instilled in him the need to hide his powers, but to use them to help humanity. It also contained their deaths, leaving Clark to move on to his destiny.

5. Four new pages were added to the first Action Comics reprint. In Action Comics #1, the story started in midstream with Superman flying a gagged and bound woman to the governor’s estate. What was missing prior to this were the four pages of story presented below in which several things happened, starting with:

6. Clark is shown being turned down for a job at the Daily Star. In the cut-down version in Action Comics #1, Kent is already a reporter. (The Daily Star was named after the newspaper in Toronto, Canada, where Joe Shuster was born. Just as a note of trivia, Shuster was a newsboy for the Star and I freelanced for the Toronto Star when I lived in the city for a few years.)

7. Clark changes from his street clothes to the Superman costume for the first time. Thirteen issues of Action Comics were published before Superman #1, and a few of them showed Clark changing to Superman, but since these four pages were added retroactively this makes the real first time storywise.

8. Superman springs into action for the first time ever, stopping a lynching. Though Superman then reveals to the prisoner that he is a reporter (oops!), he gets information about the true murderer of a man named Jack Kennedy (an unfortunate bit of character naming considering the future event). This page also has him being hired to the Star and in meeting his first villain(ess). The last of these pages is followed by where Action Comics #1’s story began.

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9. The “Supermen of America” club is introduced. The two-page centerspread of Superman #1 featured a house ad about a new club for young Americans, which offered a membership certificate, a button, and a secret code to decipher future messages appearing in the comics from the Man of Steel, all for a single dime! (Action Comics #14 would rerun this ad two weeks later but reduced to a single page.)

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10. An updated page about his strength.

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11. Bios of Siegel and Shuster.

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12. A new text-and-illo two-page Superman story by Siegel and Shuster.

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And, finally…

13. And ad for Action Comics #14, which also tells kids they can cut off the back cover of Superman #1 (I’ve pictured it next to the ad) for framing. From me to those kids of 1939… just a gentle piece of advice… DON’T DO IT!!!!!! Go to all the newsstands you can and buy 100 copies of Superman #1, store them, and leave instructions for your descendants to recover them in 2024 where they will be worth more than a total of $300 million.

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MORE

— The Best ACTION COMICS #1 Facsimile Edition You Can Get. Click here.

— 13 Reasons SUPERMAN Still Inspires Us After Eight-Plus Decades. Click here.

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13th Dimension contributor-at-large PETER BOSCH’s first book, American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s – From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, was published by TwoMorrows. He is currently at work on a sequel, about movie comics. Peter has written articles and conducted celebrity interviews for various magazines and newspapers. He lives in Hollywood.