It's debatable.
Superman?
Doc Savage?
Zorro?
The Scarlet Pimpernel?
El Cid?
Siegfried?
Sir Lancelot?
Herakles?
Gilgamesh?
Samson?
Who was the first superhero?
It's debatable.
Superman?
Doc Savage?
Zorro?
The Scarlet Pimpernel?
El Cid?
Siegfried?
Sir Lancelot?
Herakles?
Gilgamesh?
Samson?
Who was the first superhero?
Superman is the first superhero.
Probably go Hercules/Herakles on this. The mythos on him has been around for millenia, and some of it has served as the basis for future heroes.
I suppose it could be argued that Hercules was the first superhero, thanks to the cred he got from the Twelve Labors.
Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!
It's Superman because Superman popularized the term super-hero for action heroes. He was super, after all, and a hero. Retroactively you can say that all these other action heroes that came before Superman were super-heroes, but they weren't called that at the time. Superman begins the convention of using super-hero to mean such characters.
Basically yeah.
He was first in that he was the character that coined and almost universally defines the term, but he wasn’t first in that there were heroes before him who fall under that term.
I’ve seen ppl stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that distinction though. And, I won’t argue w. them.
The term superhero didn't get applied to the genre (which at the time wasn't really a genre) until it had been around a few years. Reading the early DC titles, they typically referred to the characters as "mystery men" until sometime in the early-mid 1940s. In its infancy, the characters and situations that became superheroes were more like an illustrated sub-genre of the existing pulp genre.
The Clock.