Remembering the First Hero
By Lily Long & Kent Smith
The title of this article is misleading. Very few people alive today remember the first hero, and those that do, are old and have nothing but the vaguest recollections of him. He never took any photos with people and the ones that exist are blurry and false.
As a matter of fact, if not for the documented proof of his existence, we’d be hard pressed to call him anything other than an urban legend. A figure that existed only through word of mouth–and that elders of today think they saw when they were children.
But he was real. Radio interviews, impossible shots of a silhouette saving people and fighting the first villains still make the rounds to this very day, eighty years after he first appeared.
His appearance was documented by this very paper, World Weekly back then. It was the paper's twenty-seventh issue. Sales up until that point hadn’t been good and bankruptcy was around the corner.
Until the cover of a man raising a car above his head captured the imaginations and dreams of over a hundred thousand people. The paper survived and a new era was born. The year was nineteen-thirty-eight. We highlight the thirty-eight for no other reason than to establish just how bleak the year was.
Villainy was running rampant. Madmen with crazy schemes and the resources to bring the world to heel were common. The looming spectre of World War Two was on the horizon, and the crash of nineteen-twenty-nine was still fresh in people’s memories. The existence of a man such as the First Hero and the wave of heroism he ushered in was, without exaggeration, the thing that kept a lot of people going through those times.
As one man, Harold ‘Harry’ Cohen, put it:
“Most of us had never seen him. He was a far away idea, but also so close. I remember my family had emigrated from Germany just before the holocaust. It was horrifying to listen to what those we’d left behind were witnessing. I’d been just a young boy then. I couldn’t understand it, but I could understand the sadness everyone was going through. It was these-these little comics [of the First Hero] that kept me going. Supposedly real adventures retold in comic form by people like me. People that needed this escape.”
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Cohen is now ninety-six years old. He still has his first comic proudly on display in his home. A memoir of those difficult times he’s held onto since he was six years old.
The world has changed dramatically since the First Hero debuted. That was a world where physical newspapers dominated the market and Television was an alien word to most people. Now there exist phones that are vastly more powerful than most people during that age could even comprehend. We’d wager that most, if not all, of the cutting edge technology of the day is now considered obsolete, and the ideals of our world have evolved every so drastically.
We do not subscribe to the Great Man theory. History is not shaped by singular men that are born for that purpose. It is the ideals and trials of every human being that makes the world what it is–for better or for worse.
Still, anyone claiming that the First Hero didn’t have a wave of influence still felt to this very day would be lying. He didn’t influence politics or economics, but he gave birth to the idea of what we think of as Heroes. Even now, almost a century later, there have been over thirty thousand documented heroes fighting to better our world in all ways they can.
There are of course those who do not see all those contributions as good. Those who see the rise of heroes as directly responsible for the rise of the villains they fight. This is not the article for that discussion, but we’d be remiss if we did not mention it.
All we will say is that we do not subscribe to that theory either. It is reductive and it dismisses the countless villains who use their powers and gifts for purely selfish goals. Goals that are unrelated to any heroes.
But even then, it is to our point that this is even a debate and discussion. That the effects of heroes in our society can be so tangible and not relegated to fiction and the imagination of children.
This was not an article in remembrance of the First Hero. We have already shown that to be almost impossible. What we want is to showcase and remind everyone everything our world owes to him–for better or for worse.
We find that the following quote by Alpha Surge regarding summarises this perfectly:
“The First Hero changed the world! Heroes from all across the world were clamouring to follow suit. To change the lives of people for the better. I cannot help but think we have lost that. We have stagnated, thinking we cannot go any further. I say we challenge that. We follow the example of the First Hero and at least attempt to bring things to the next level. So that tomorrow is not just as good as today, but even better!”