Hugo Hercules was an American weekly comic strip published in the Chicago Tribune, written and drawn by Wilhelm Heinrich Detlev Körner. It ran for five months, from 7 September 1902 to 11 January 1903, totaling seventeen strips. Despite its short run, it's considered one of the earliest Superhero comics, if not the first, in the world.
The titular Hugo Hercules is a gentleman with Super-Strength, who spends his time using his power to help damsels, deal with criminals, and tussle with unruly animals. That's more or less it. No capes, no cowls, no supervillains, no doomsday machines. Just the day-to-day life of a well-meaning man who just so happens to have inhuman strength.
Hugo would later appear as a prominent character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
This strip contains examples of the following tropes:
- Catchphrase: "Just as easy."
- Crossover: "Hugo Hercules Saves Four Comic Supplement Lives", where Hugo helps the main characters of Archie and Boggs, another Chicago Tribune comic strip, escape a burning building.
- Flat Character: Hugo. Besides his selflessness, he doesn't have that much of a personality. For his appearance in League, Alan Moore reinvented him as a Hit Man With A Heart Mr. Vice Guy who casually murders Hugo Danner and is heavily implied to be Cú Chulainn.
- Good Samaritan: Hugo is just a humble and generous soul who helps out when he can because he's usually passing through, and it's basically no trouble for him. There is a hint that he's a bit of a showman and enjoys showing off his miraculous feats of strength, but it's always to help people.
- Magic Realism: As down-to-earth as you can get in regards to the genre it started. Hugo has Super-Strength, animals can talk, and there's never any explanation for either, but Hugo's world is otherwise completely grounded in reality.
- Mundane Utility: Hugo mostly uses Super-Strength to simply manipulate things nobody else could, such as pulling an entire train to help the people on it get to their destinations, or picking up an elephant to entertain a crowd.
- Proto-Superhero: The very first one in a comic format, in fact.
- Public Domain Character: The character wasn't a big hit, and is arguably only remembered in retrospect because a similar character would soon eclipse him in popularity and birth a brand new genre.
- Slice of Life: This is basically the format of the series–it's very light-hearted and there's no overall plot or Myth Arc besides the day-to-day antics of an impossibly strong man lending a hand to people in various forms of need.
- Superhero Prevalence Stages: The Early Stage. Hugo's the one and only superhuman, most of his heroic acts are to rescue people from entirely mundane dangers (like a falling safe or a house fire), and his villains are either regular human criminals, or inexplicably sentient, but otherwise normal, animals.
- Super-Strength: Hugo's primary power.
- Talking Animal: Animals can speak in Hugo's world.
- Ur-Example: Being a man with superhuman abilities who helps those in need, Hugo is arguably the very first traditional Superhero ever created, predating even the likes of The Shadow, The Phantom, The Lone Ranger, and Golden Bat.
