The Superhero Reader

Comics Predecessors

7 Comics Predecessors peTer Coogan Reprinted by permission from Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Books, 2006), 165–74. though dime novels, sCienCe fiCtion, adventure stories, and the pulps contain the main predecessors of the superhero genre, the superhero did not spring to life in literature but in comics. Comics—both books and strips— provide the final bit of the prehistory of the superhero. Essentially unknown today, J. Koerner’s [actuallyWilliam H. D. Koerner’s— eds.] Hugo Hercules ran in the Chicago Tribune from September 7, 1902 to January 11, 1903, and was the first positive presentation of a heroic superman in comics.1 Hugo Hercules’s introductory episode, a six-panel Sunday strip titled “Hugo Hercules Obliges Beauty in Distress,” opens with a young woman attempting to board a speeding streetcar, which does not heed her plea to stop. Hugo— dressed in striped pants, a dark jacket, bow tie, and a hat that seems to be a cross between a fedora and a cowboy hat—replies to her request for aid with “I’m a real stopper.” He bounds after the streetcar and jerks it to a halt, sending its passengers flying into disarray. He closes the day’s strip with his tagline, “Just as easy.”2 Hugo’s adventures follow this pattern. Someone asks for help in a relatively minor matter, and Hercules obliges by using his strength in a humorous way. Most of the time very little is at stake in any of his adventures, although he occasionally does aid someone in a dangerous situation: he stops a runaway carriage; he catches a falling safe; he escorts a woman to her carriage in the rain by removing the portico from her house and using it as an umbrella; he lifts an elephant so a lady can retrieve her dropped handkerchief, which the elephant is standing upon; he lifts a car so a man can kiss his girlfriend, who is in a window some ten feet up a wall; he carries home a woman and her many bags during a cab strike; he puts a derailed train back on its track; and he carries home a party of iceboaters and their iceboat when the craft crashes. Twice he defends himself from attackers: the first time he faces down armed muggers by fetching a cannon and threatening to fire it at them; the 8 peTer Coogan second time he wrestles and defeats a bear who announces “I’ll tear him in two” (“Hugo Hercules Wrestles a Bear”). In two instances his strength both creates and resolves the crises: attempting to kick a football, Hugo misses and sends a house flying, which he catches and returns to its foundations; attempting to break “all bowling records” at a New Year’s bowling contest, Hugo hurls his ball through the back of the alley, where it derails a street car and overturns two wagons, one loaded with policemen (“Hugo Hercules at New Year’s Bowling Contest”). Hugo Hercules does not seem to have been much of an influence on the superhero, coming and going so quickly as he did. The next cartoon strongman had considerably more influence in comics and specifically on the superhero.3 Introduced into Thimble Theatre in 1929, Popeye soon took over the long-running strip. While not quite achieving the level of Hugo Hercules’s might, Popeye’s strength is superior to that of just about any comic strip character since the dapper strongman. Popeye once lifted the corner of a house to demonstrate his strength to Bullo Oxheart, the “strongest man in the world,” while in contract negotiations for a prizefight. a few years later another boxer, curley Gazook, the state champ, has designs on Olive Oyl and wants to prove to her that he is stronger than the sailor. He brings a weight to her house and tells her to come to his place that afternoon and she will see that Popeye cannot lift the weight the boxer carried with ease. Gazook bolts the weight to the floor, which foils Popeye, but the sailor goes down to the basement and lifts the house, with Olive and Curley, over his head. Later that year while out walking with Toar, a monstrous brute of a man who has come for a visit, Popeye encounters a crippled boy on crutches who has to walk a mile to and from school each day. Popeye and Toar take pity on the boy and solve his problem by carrying the...