The word superhero is a multi-billion dollar business today. The word ubermensch is not. You needed to have stopped conflating the two in 1909.
New York Times’ first reference to superheroes was on July 9, 1917, p3, during WWI.
DEEDS OF NEW ZEALANDERS.
Acts of Superheroism in the Battle of Messines Are Recounted.
OTTAWA, July 8.- Stories of the superheroism of New Zealanders at the battle of Messines, as related by Malcolm Ross, special correspondent with the New Zealand forces, are recounted in a dispatch from London received at the agency here of Reuters, Limited.
Ross tells how wounded officers and men fought on until forcibly sent back;…
The second reference was on December 21, 1925. The superhero was the star (and producer) of a silent Western.
THE SCREEN; Clothes and Cosmetics.
Quick as a flash with rope and gun and sitting his horse with the same old ease, the heroic and not infrequently theatric William S. Hart is appearing at the Mark Strand in a picture called “Tumbleweeds.” His previous production, “Singer Jim McKee,” was not exactly a howling success and prior to that his film conception of “Wild Bill Hickok” did not live up to that dauntless gentleman’s bearing or physique. Although Mr. Hart is the same style actor he has always been, he is not an annoying character, being only a superhero in this photoplay, which incidentally deals with “homesteaders” and “sooners” in the fight for a plot in the Cherokee Strip.
The wiki link indicates that Tumbleweeds has held up fairly well.
The third reference was in a 1965 review for the James Bond flick Thunderball.
You’ve just reminded me of the TOM STRONG comic book, where — well, he’s not hiding a secret identity like Superman, or even being a public identity guy who adopted a codename like Mister Fantastic; his given name happens to be “Tom Strong,” and, okay, “Strong” is pretty much an adjective you’d expect of a superhero, so, uh, that’s passable. And, like you’d maybe expect, he is strong — but not, like, leaping tall buildings in a single bound; it’s just enough leg strength to set a new world record in the long jump. Which, sure, let’s go with that, too. And he doesn’t go in for the Cape And Tights With Underpants On The Outside look; he wears, like, pants tucked into boots — but with a t-shirt that does have a chest emblem, so, again, okay. And, if you need it, maybe the tiebreaker is: again and again, he foils his masked-supervillain archenemy when the latter (a) spends decade after decade attempting to commit crime after crime, and (b) keeps getting clobbered by the guy with the superstrength.
Anyhow, they eventually did a three-issue arc showcasing our hero’s alternate-timeline counterpart: Tom Stone, who — didn’t get Tom Strong’s ‘superstrength’ upbringing, but just exercises a lot. And he tops off pants with — a shirt that’s unbuttoned enough to reveal part of a white undershirt. And the first time he met that masked fella I mentioned, there was no fistfight; Tom simply noted that the guy could make a fortune off his Lex-Luthor-esque devices instead of committing crimes, and said guy then spent decades as a law-abiding rich inventor.
So if you figure Tom Strong counts as a superhero, and you view Tom Stone as a riff on the previous comic-book stories, it all pretty much fits together; but outside that context, if viewed as a standalone, he’s, what, a guy with no superstrength and no codename-and-costume persona, and neither you nor he would really know what hypothetical crimes got averted back when he discussed self-interest?
I mean, that’s practically you! And I don’t even know you!
What do you think makes a Superhero?
Atomic Radiation and Laboratory Accidents, chiefly.
Seriously, if you can’t run your lab properly, do we really want you fighting crime?
I’m surprised that the Times waited so long to use the term. By that time I found dozens of references in newspapers.com to fighting men, especially in the trenches, as superheros.
Before the war, several writers called star baseball players superheros. In 1915 “Hank” Gowdy was the “superhero” of the last year’s World Series. After the Titanic disaster, many articles called a ship’s captain a superhero for all the roles he had to play to get everything to go right. Another 1915 article referred to the inevitable closure of movies in which the superhero and the heroine affixed their lips together, to the critic’s thoroughgoing disgust.
The most modern of all the early references appeared in the London Evening Standard, Nov. 9, 1911, in a review of a new dramatic version of The Three Musketeers.
Modesty, thy name is Porthos!
“Six men attacked me,” said that superhero … at the Lyceum Theatre last night. “What did you do?” asked Aramis. “Pooh!” asserted Porthos, “there were only six of them. Why talk about it?”
Jeannie in Miracle Beach? (Trailer NSFW.)