Talk:Superhero

Date: 1912 or 1909, or earlier

Hi, I got busted earlier for my edit, which is fair. And that just goes to show that I cannot fix this date, but it's wrong in many ways. So someone needs to fix it because I cannot.

It need to be changed to 1912 and also to 1909. Stewart cites my book but he gives 1917, despite my providing 1912 from Peter Sattler's search, which Stewart should have seen in the footnotes (page 269 in Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre)

But Thomas Common's 1909 translation of Thus Spake Zarathrustra gave us superhero and superman from Ubermensch and Uberheld

Here is the line from "The Sublime Ones": "For this is the secret of the soul, when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approachth it in dreams—the superhero. Thus spake Zarathrustra."

Here's the German from "Von dem Erhabenen": "Diess nämlich ist das Geheimniss der Seele: erst, wenn sie der Held verlassen hat, naht ihr, im Traume,—der Über-Held.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Complete_Works_of_Friedrich_Nietzsch/QhOowridPNUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22secret%20of%20the%20soul%22

Common replaced Alexander Till's translation of Ubermensch and Uberheld as beyond-man and beyond-hero.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thus_Spake_Zarathustra/5IURAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=secret%20of%20the%20soul has "beyond-hero" by Alexander Till. London MacMillan, 1896.

100 Peter Sattler posted a list of examples of the usage of superhero, super- hero, and super hero to the Comics Scholars Discussion List on July 11, 2004, which he garnered from the Proquest database. This list is not comprehensive as he left out many examples of war “super-heroes” like General Pershing, but it is indicative of the ways superhero was used prior to Superman. Clearly an exhaustive examination of these examples and others is called for.

“The real hero of the book is Peter Davenant. Peter is, in fact, a sort of super-hero, a trans-leading-man, a Cyclops of unselfishness, a dreadnought of duty.” Willard Huntington Wright, “Good Old Peter!”; review of “The Street Called Straight” by Basil King; Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1912. .

“Consider, for instance, the inevitable finish of practically all the dramas: A super-hero, closely locked in the arms of one of the aforesaid ravishing damsels.” Herman Reuter, “A Cynic at the Movies”; Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1915

“Psychologists ask if the warfare in the sky isn’t developing the superhero to whom killing is a sport and death but defeat, like arriving second in a hundred yard dash.” William Philip Simms, United Press, September 21, 1915.

“The Cid was such a super-hero that, dead and embalmed and fastened upright in his saddle, his mere presence scattered into flight the Moorish besiegers of Valencia.” “The Hero of the Epic”; Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1919.

Superhero was probably first applied to a superhero-genre superhero when Superman was called a super-hero in an ad for the Superman comic strip in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 1939, "look for the adventures of this super-hero".

And Superheroic goes back before superhero. Saturday, September 12, 1904! Superheroic. "no painting is there of virtues superhuman, superheroic even"

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-daily-telegraph/106030908/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1Lt5LersOTytF6ewdIVZrVrrfwutkKOltLkCCvcjRMeN4sN3mSoImomdo_aem_AV_CUQAOtwQ25yUf-QPSQSNZoJgJ0CBKGyAL5VN1yP4bKkSn8NNfuq7TqBi_inM91vM2kDNMkuNRaPipKBk3-44r

In fact, 1839 for superheroic

The People's Press and Wilmington Advertiser, Fri, May 24, 1839 ·Page 2 Petercoogan (talk) 18:28, 15 May 2024 (UTC)