Action Comics #1

History

The road to publication stretched back to January 1933, when a teenage Jerry Siegel wrote a prose story called 'The Reign of the Superman' featuring a bald telepathic villain; he and his Cleveland friend Joe Shuster then reconceived the character as a heroic figure from a more advanced society and spent years unsuccessfully pitching the strip to newspaper syndicates. The break came when National Allied Publications — under new co-owner Jack Liebowitz, after Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's bankruptcy — tasked editor Vin Sullivan with assembling a fourth anthology title under a crushing deadline; Sullivan, tipped off by Sheldon Mayer to the languishing Superman strips, asked Siegel and Shuster to cut-and-paste their rejected newspaper panels into 13 comic-book pages, and the resulting story became the lead feature. Because Liebowitz wanted the most eye-catching cover, Superman's page was placed first, cementing his role as the book's flagship; the first print run of 200,000 copies sold out, though it took National some time to fully realize that the Superman installment was the engine driving sales that would soon approach one million copies a month.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Superman (Jerry Siegel, writer; Joe Shuster, artist) — the debut of the character widely credited with establishing the superhero genre.
• First appearance of Lois Lane, Clark Kent's fellow reporter and Superman's most enduring supporting character, introduced here as a reporter at the Daily Star (later renamed the Daily Planet).
• First appearance of Zatara the Master Magician (created by Fred Guardineer), whose backwards-speech spellcasting would later be inherited by his daughter Zatanna, a major DC mystic hero introduced in 1964.
• The issue is a 64-page anthology (68 pages including covers) containing nine additional features alongside Superman: Chuck Dawson (western, by Homer Fleming), Zatara Master Magician (Fred Guardineer), a text story 'South Sea Strategy' (by Vin Sullivan under the alias Captain Frank Thomas), Sticky-Mitt Stimson (by Russell Cole, credited as Edwin Alger), The Adventures of Marco Polo (by Sven Elven), Pep Morgan (by Fred Guardineer, credited as Gene Baxter), Scoop Scanlon Five Star Reporter (by Will Ely), Tex Thomson (by Bernard Baily), and a final-page astronomy feature 'Stardust,' plus an inside-back-cover gag page by Sheldon Moldoff.
• Superman's debut story is only 13 pages; in it Clark Kent works at the Daily Star (not yet the Daily Planet), the paper is located in Cleveland rather than Metropolis, and Superman cannot yet fly — he leaps tall buildings and outruns a freight train.
• The issue was published on April 18, 1938 (cover-dated June 1938) by National Allied Publications; Jack Liebowitz later stated that placing Superman on the cover was 'pure accident,' driven entirely by the deadline need for the most compelling image.
• The first major authorized reprint appeared in 1974 as Famous First Edition C-26, an oversized reproduction including the original interior advertisements; DC followed with promotional reprints in 1976 (Safeguard soap and sleeping bag giveaways), a 50th-anniversary reprint in 1988, a U.S. Postal Service commemorative edition in 1998, a Millennium Edition in 2000, and a complete Facsimile Edition in 2022 that restored the inside covers previously omitted from earlier reprints.
• Tex Thomson (spelled 'Thomson' through Action Comics #55) is one of only two non-Superman features from this issue to sustain a long run in the title; he later evolved into a superhero identity as Mr. America and then the Americommando, while Zatara continued in Action Comics through issue #141.

Cast · 28 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers