Joe Shuster’s Superman springs over the heads of the startled, delighted passengers in an open-top double-decker bus in Action Comics 8 (Jan. 1939).
How I loved scenes like that.
Jerry Siegel’s splash page copy gushes at him: “Leaping over towering buildings, rending steel in his bare hands, lifting incredible weights high overhead, impervious to bullets because of an unbelievably tough skin, racing at a speed hitherto unwitnessed by mortal eyes — these are the miraculous feats of strength which assist Superman in his one-man battle against the forces of evil and oppression!”
The sheer wonder of Superman’s powers propelled and sustained interest in the feature for a long time (although that couldn’t go on forever, of course).
That’s one reason why his villains tended to be rather weak tea. They were often just excuses for him to exercise his astounding abilities.
The story has Superman battling a Fagin-like conspirator who encourages juvenile delinquency. Reporter Clark Kent gets wind of the scheme while sitting in a courtroom and using his super hearing (a power presented for the first time in this story).
Later on, he races and deflects a rifle bullet and hurls a malefactor blocks away into the river. The criminal presumably survives the experience. They didn’t always in those early days.
After he saves the teenage gang members from both the police and the “loathsome corrupter of youth” who manipulated them, Superman takes it upon himself to demolish their slum environment.
“So the government rebuilds destroyed areas with modern, cheap rental apartments, eh?” Superman says while smashing buildings. “Then here’s a job for it! — When I finish, this town will be rid of its filthy crime-festering slums!”
The publishers weren’t yet quite sure what they had in this Man of Tomorrow. The Action Comics 8 cover didn’t feature Superman, but an 18th-century British officer battling a native American warrior. The Fred Guardineer cover was an homage to N.C. Wyeth’s painting, The Battle at Glen Falls, which appeared on the cover of the 1919 edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.
“(Superman) shared the early Action Comics covers with other features, such as Tex Thompson and Zatara the Magician, but once the publisher realized who was actually selling the magazine, he had them all to himself,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Within a couple of years, comic books were dominated by superheroes inspired by him.”
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