much of the thirteen pages of the first adventure featured very current, real-world issues such as corruption in government, domestic violence, and injustice. Later stories would feature such contentious ‘ripped from the headlines’ issues as drink-driving, the arms race, slum housing, and workers’ rights. This first incarnation of Superman was a hero for the Depression, fighting as much to improve the social conditions for the downtrodden in America as to right the wrongs of ‘super-villains’. The origin story fills less than a single comic book page. The first panel shows a baby launched into space by his father to escape the destruction of ‘a distant planet’ (Krypton is not named) about to be ‘destroyed by old age’. In the second panel, a passing motorist discovers the alien baby crash-landed on Earth. The baby is put in an orphanage. The first act of super-strength is shown in the next panel, as the baby lifts a chair above its head with a single hand, amazing the orphanage staff with ‘his feats of strength’. By the fourth panel, the now mature boy – called Clark – is testing his powers, including the ability to leap (the very specific) ‘eighth of a mile’, hurdle a twenty-storey building, run faster than a train, and lift huge weights. Superman’s look and powers would gradually develop: he’d get the red boots in Action Comics #5, super-hearing in #8, and X-ray vision in #11. The final panel is his mission statement: ‘. . . he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind, and so was created ‘Superman’, champion of the oppressed . . .’
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