Many 40s superheroes had no particular super powers. Airboy, Atom, Blackhawk, Crimson Avenger, the Star-Spangled Kid, Guardian, Green Arrow, Phantom, Sandman, etc.
The term meant any costumed crime fighter (and some who didn’t use costumes). You’re falling into the “Red Screamer” fallacy, saying the name of the term (“superhero”) defines the term.
I’m sure there are a few exceptions, but “superhero” wasn’t really used to describe any comic book heroes in the ‘40s. It didn’t really gain traction until the 1960s.
True, but it was used retroactively to describe comic book heroes of the era.
Insisting they actually have to have to have superpowers ignores the heroes that didn’t.
IIRC, the first two fictional characters referred to as superheroes were Doc Savage and The Shadow.
And old Doc had no superpowers, right? He was just an incredibly smart, fast and strong human, if I recall correctly.
Pretty much. Highly highly trained, and at the peak of physical and mental ability, but no actual superpowers.
As per Wikipedia:
Rather like Buckaroo Banzai, as I think of it.
Good analogy, though I don’t know if Doc Savage was also a music star. 
(And, in case anyone is looking for the exact quote, it’s reported here and there online as Street & Smith advertising, back in the day, “Full length novels of the exploits of those two great super-heroes of modern fiction — Doc Savage and the Shadow”)
While Lois has, on occasion, gained powers on a temporary basis, I think that Jimmy’s far more frequent appearances as “Elastic Lad” qualify him to claim the title on a part-time basis.
You know, if you wrote a whole bunch of stories that (a) didn’t really go at all beyond the source material, and (b) had Jimmy routinely investigate the heck out of stuff right up until he inevitably summons Superman to the scene by firing up the signal watch, you could pretty much reverse-engineer a more competent version of the JSA’s Johnny Thunder — or of Rick Jones, back in his ‘switching places with Captain Marvel’ days.
Jules Feiffer’s introduction to The Great Comic Book Heroes disagrees with the assertion that Batman is a “super hero”:
“Previous [to Superman] heroes — the Shadow, the Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger — were not only more vulnerable; they were fakes. I don’t mean to criticize; it’s just a statement of fact. The Shadow had to cloud men’s minds to be in business. The Green Hornet had to go through the fetishist fol-de-rol of donning costume, floppy hat, black mask, gas gun, menacing automobile, and insect sound effects before he was even ready to go out in the street. The Lone Ranger needed an accoutrement white horse, an Indian, and an establishing cry of Hi-Yo Silver to separate him from all those other masked men running around the West in days of yesteryear.
But Superman had only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark Kent was the put-on….”
And more explicitly:
“But Batman was not a super-hero in its truest sense (however we may have liked to think of him). If you pricked him, he bled — buckets. Superman’s superiority lay in the offense, Batman’s lay in the rebound. Whatever was done to him, whatever trap laid, wound opened, skull fractured, all he had to show for it was a discreet patch of Band-Aid on his right shoulder. With Superman we won; with Batman we held our own….”
Like The Green Hornet, Batman is basically just a gimmick hero; a rich prick who likes to dress up in funny-looking underwear, go out at night and do the vigilante thing with some gadgets. Indeed, before he became an oppressor allied with the law YET working outside it, he was a full-fledged, gun-wielding vigilante. How many people did he kill or otherwise deprive of their constitutional rights? We are never told (nor does he ever face any accountability for his past actions).
Worse, it is a fact Bruce Wayne is a human being who makes mistakes. As such, we would expect - especially when he is first starting out and not yet a seasoned crimefighter or “the world’s greatest detective” - that his mistakes are going to prove costly in terms of lives (including innocents) and property.
In sum, I do not regard Batman as a “super hero” or even a “hero”; just some rich fascist dickwad with a bat fetish.
I don’t think a character needs to have superpowers to be a superhero, but if you don’t, you have to admit that the concept predates comic books entirely. I would argue that the superhero as we know it was invented by Baroness Orczy in 1905 when she created the masked, meek secret identity, justice seeking Scarlet Pimpernel.
Slight hijack: did the Pimpernel wear a mask?
You got me there. More like disguises. He was more like Superman/Clark Kent where his secret identity was the “mask”.
The argument has been made before:
1940s comics routinely had eight short features in their 64 pages. You could read about a western hero, a space hero, a detective hero, a magic hero, a costumed hero that was a regular guy, a person with beyond normal powers hero, and maybe a pirate or Viking or someone. They were as interchangeable as fast-food burgers. You might like one chain’s more than another, but they were all in the same category. The artists and writers and publishers felt the same way and swapped them in and out at random or by fan mail or because a creator sought an extra dollar raise.
I did an article on Ray Guns in Early Comic Books not long ago. They pop up first in science fiction strips like Don Drake on the Planet Saro, Dan Hastings, Rod Rian of the Sky Police, and Rex Dexter of Mars, but soon every villain had one handy. The Shark, Magno, the Companions Three, and Jim Giant, the Strongest Man in Universe battled them. Batman was “killed” by one. Good guys Blue Bolt, Cosmo Mann, and The Black Condor had their own. Even wacky cartoon guy Biff Bannon of the U.S. Marines had to guard one from spies.
Which of these had powers and which didn’t? You can’t tell by their names. Comics don’t make it that easy. Super Duck was created with super-powers in 1943 but powers got written out and by after the war he was a clone of Donald Duck. Yet Donald had all sorts of adventures and so did nonsuper Super, whose first name was still “Super”. The plot of Super Duck #30 in 1950 centered on an invisibility ray.
Where does the line get drawn? I know a superhero when I see one. Those guys in masks and capes who battle bad guys in improbable ways are all retconned as superheroes whatever their physical selves were like. If they look like superheroes they are. OTOH, if they look like a duck, and walk like a duck, and talk like a duck, who the heck knows?
After Captain Atom was done going through all the ways Batman can be killed, I really wanted The Dark Knight to growl “Good point, but I do work ten steps ahead of everyone else. Now, would you like the antidote?”
Captain Atom begins to sweat, turns green, falls to his knees, and says “Yes, please…”
I liked Skyman, who had an Atomatic raygun for ‘disintegration-pistol’ stuff, and a Stasimatic for ‘stunray’ stuff to save the day without killing anyone — but the fun part there was, if the settings were reversed, it could revive and help along the circulation or whatever of someone who’d been injured, which basically let it double as a healing raygun? — plus he had a handheld firefighting tool which, of course, looked like a gun; plus a magnetic knock-out-a-vehicle’s-engine-and-radio gun was in the mix at some point.
If the comic had lasted longer, he’d have, what, pioneered a change-his-appearance gun, or a see-the-future gun?
Not long ago? Who are you kidding? The copyright at the bottom says 2023. You wrote this in the future!