False Facts About Superman You Always Thought Were True

It's impossible to argue that Superman's debut in the pages of Action Comics #1 is not the most historically important moment in the history of the superhero genre. His adventures popularized the comic book medium and kicked off a wave of imitators that within a few short years would include Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and more. It's more than fair to cite him as the first superhero, but when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sat down to create their brand new character, they didn't invent everything out of whole cloth.

Instead, they drew a pretty heavy influence from a handful of obvious sources. The concept of the mild-mannered secret identity, for instance, had been around in pop culture since Baroness Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. An even more direct source likely came in the form of Gladiator, a 1930 novel by Philip Wylie about a man named Hugo Danner, whose father's experiments gave him powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men — like, say, bulletproof skin, the strength to lift a car over his head, and the proportionate leaping ability of a grasshopper. If you've ever seen the first page of Action Comics #1, where Siegel and Shuster provide their "scientific explanation of Clark Kent's amazing strength," that last bit might seem pretty familiar. Even his name was probably lifted from other sources. The two most popular pulp characters of the '30s were Doc Savage and the Shadow, also known as Clark Savage and Kent Allard. That might seem like a coincidence, but consider that a story in 1938, the same year that Superman first appeared, introduced the world to Doc Savage's "Fortress of Solitude" in the Arctic Circle.

Of course, none of that means Superman wasn't revolutionary. Siegel and Shuster were influenced by other sources, but they put it all together in a very original way in a whole new medium, and the rest was history.

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