The early comic books of the 1930s were primarily anthology formats that collected miscellaneous material—humor strips, adventure stories, detective tales, sports features. They were sold at the ten-cent price point that Action Comics No. 1 would also use, targeting the newsstand audience of children and young adults who had pennies to spend on entertainment. The publication that would become Action Comics was part of National Allied Publications’ expanding line of such anthologies.
What Action Comics No. 1 introduced was not simply a new character but a new type of character: a figure with abilities that exceeded those of a normal human being, who used those abilities to solve problems and fight injustice. The concept of the superhero—defined by the combination of extraordinary powers and a commitment to using them ethically—did not exist as a genre convention before Superman. There were science fiction stories with super-powered figures, and there were vigilante heroes in pulp fiction and radio drama, but the specific combination that defines the superhero—the secret identity, the extraordinary abilities, the costume, the commitment to a code of ethics—was new.
The qualification that is important to note here is that Superman was the first successful superhero in the commercial comics medium, not the first figure in all of fiction with superhuman abilities. Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology, Hindu mythology, and countless other traditions had long featured figures with divine or extraordinary powers. What Superman introduced was the specific genre convention that would define superhero comics as a distinct category of popular entertainment. The genre did not exist, in the particular form that generated DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and the cultural infrastructure of superhero storytelling, before Superman.