10 Comics Characters You Didn’t Know Were Rip-Offs

7. Superman (Gladiator)

Superman - the most hopeful and powerful of all superheroes. He's considered The Superhero. Almost every superhero you know about was, in at least a small part, inspired by him. He came before all of them. Before the comics' well dried up, and heroes with powers like "an ant but a man" and "what if Spider-Man but with more teeth" came about, there was Superman.

And even he wasn't original.

The book was called Gladiator. It came out 1930 and told the tale of a man with strength, bulletproof skin, ability to jump over buildings, who gained his abilities from what his father did to him. This book was also published five years before Superman came out in comics. In Gladiator, there's a fortress of solitude (with a different name), and the hero hails from a small town in the midwest. He even wears those outside trunks that Superman always wears.

In 1933, there was another creation, a short story, by Siegel and Shuster (the men who created Superman), called Reign of the Superman. Later, the pair would take the basic idea of a bald-headed evil man with more intellectual power than anyone on Earth and turn him into Lex Luthor.

But as for Superman? That was all Gladiator.