Somebody’s posted good quality scans of Action Comics #1, the 1938 comic book where Superman made his debut.

The cover’s still a striking image, with the beautiful art-deco logo above a less-than-hyperrealistic image of Supes lifting and smashing a car. The thirteen-page Superman story inside is frenetically paced and ends in a cliffhanger. The character’s more emotional, even vengeous, than he’d become in the ’50s. Creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (uncle of original Saturday Night Live writer Rosie Shuster) packed a lot of story and art into those 13 pages, for which (and for all rights to the character in perpetuity) they were paid $10 a page.

The backup strips are where the real wackiness starts. My personal fave is Tex Thompson, the tale of a cowboy hero in rural England who stumbles upon a domestic murder scene. Ya gotta love writer-artist Bernard Bailey’s description of the villainess: “A satisfied smile was evident on the girl’s face… The girl heads for a wooden shack, partially hidden between two hills.”