Guide to Pre-Crisis Action Comics - Golden, Silver, & Bronze Age

To celebrate seven years of my Guide to DC Comics, it’s time to tackle DC’s biggest hero in a new guide exclusively for Pledgeonaut Patrons of Crushing Krisis. When it comes to the superhero that started the Age of Superheroes, you have to start at the start, which is why today I’m debuting: Guide to Superman in Pre-Crisis Action Comics – The Golden, Silver, & Bronze Ages!

Guide to Superman in Action Comics (1938 – 1986)

I have Marvel’s complete publishing history dedicated to memory thanks to reading and re-reading Les Daniels’ Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics over and over again as a tween. My relationship to DC Comics was more approximate. I knew DC better through cartoons and films, and through the major events of the 90s like “Death of Superman” and “Knightfall,” but I didn’t know much about its beginnings and how it kept superhero comics alive in the post-war era until the dawn of the Silver Age.

Of course, I knew Superman made his debut in the iconic Action Comics (1938) #1, but I didn’t know how that came to be or why DC Comics (then a pair of related companies) chose to publish it.

One interesting thing I learned was that National Allied Publications was truly the first publisher of original comic magazines in America. Up until they published New Fun Comics in 1935 the format existed but it was comprised entirely of reprinted newspaper strips. That’s part of why the early DC Comics titles have such plain, declarative titles: New Fun Comics, New Comics, Detective Comics, and Action Comics – they each had to describe what they contained, because they couldn’t rely on images of familiar comic strip characters to entice youngsters to part with their nickels!

Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster contributed to that initial trio of DC titles, so when they were invited to pitch for the fourth title they submitted their creation – Superman. They originally intended to pitch Superman as a newspaper comic strip, so their submission was a collection of single strips – which DC had to ask them to paste together into pages so they could make it the lead story in Action Comics (1938) #1.

Superheroes existed on the fringes of the comic world in the 1930s, but at the time they were just a subset of a wider collection of pulp heroes – many of whom were common crime-fighters much nearer to Batman than to Superman. The seismic impact of Superman’s debut Action Comics almost single-handedly created a market for superhero comics on American newsstands – leading DC to debut Batman in the already-running Detective Comics a year later.

I also didn’t exactly know what Golden Age Action Comics contained, other than Superman. DC’s anthology titles have always worked differently than Marvel’s, sometimes featuring multiple different stories of one hero or brief bursts of back-ups of a second unrelated hero that switch every-other issue.

As it turns out, there was nary another superhero to be found in Golden Age Action Comics (although regular back-up character Zatara retroactively became Zatanna’s father), and only one Superman story per issue! Even in the early Silver Age Action Comics the back-up features were pulp heroes like Tommy Tomorrow until the invention of Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Later, in Bronze Age Action Comics, rotating back-ups featured Green Arrow, Aquaman, Ambush Bug, The Human Target, The Atom, & Airwave.

The final thing I learned in putting this guide together is that we have a long, long way to go to see all of Pre-Crisis Action Comics reprinted. We still need four or five more omnibuses just to finish off the Superman stories in Golden Age Action Comics, four or five more for Silver Age Action Comics, and seven or more for the Bronze Age – which is almost entirely uncollected in color!

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