Only the Superman Story is Worth Your Time
This is not one of Action Comics finer moments. Nearly all of the stories in this issue are a little sub-par. Let's run through them:
'Superman Joins the Circus' is probably one of the best of the lot. Superman decides to help a struggling circus by appearing as the star attraction. There he uncovers a sinister plot. Overall it's well drawn by Joe Shuster, but Superman acts like kind of a jerk, needlessly destroying property and humiliating the circus' strong man for no reason.
The Chuck Dawson piece is another good one, but it's still pretty much a standard Western story with few surprises. Same goes for the Pep Morgan feature, which is a standard sports story.
'Coyote Canyon Bill' is just a simple gag strip such as you'd find in the Sunday funnies - not very funny, though.
The Adventures of Marco Polo is way too text heavy this time, and not very dynamically drawn either.
'The Diddle Family' is another humor piece, but at two pages it's much longer than 'Coyote Canyon Bill' and not much funnier. This one-off gag could have been told in less than a page.
'Jungle Episode' is the standard text story that was included in these early comics to meet postal regulations. I must confess, due to the poor print quality I didn't read this one.
The Tex Thomson story was a little better than Marco Polo, but not as good as Chuck Dawson this month - basically heavy on the talk and light on the action.
Scoop Scanlon is normally my favorite feature from these early issues of Action Comics - often better than Superman... but not this month. This month the strip is confusing and disjointed in places, and just not that exciting.
The Zatara story also irks me because basically Zatara can do anything with magic - so there's really no interest, no danger - he can materialize anything he wants out of thin air, transform himself and Tong into anything. There is nothing they can't do. Boring.
'Sport-Data', 'Now You Know' and 'WESThrills' are just filler pages that give random bits of trivia with accompanying sketches.
All-in-all, most people aren't going to be interested in this comic at all/ Siegel and Shuster fans will be interested in the Superman story. Everything else is pretty much skip-able.
