Olga Mesmer

Like the newspaper comic-strip character Popeye (1929) and novelist Philip Wylie's protagonist Hugo Danner (1930), she is among the precursors of the archetypal comic-book superhero, Superman.

Olga Mesmer, "The Girl with the X-ray Eyes", starred in a single-page comic strip that ran in issues of the pulp magazine Spicy Mystery Stories cover-dated August 1937 to October 1938.

[1] The first story, "The Astounding Adventures of Olga Mesmer, the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes", and subsequent installments are by an unidentified writer.

[6] More generally, writes historian Peter Coogan, she is considered a precursor: The only clear superhero convention present is superpowers.

Her tale generically fits within the SF superman (or woman), genre, particularly in the way she gets her superpowers, seemingly drawing directly on Wylie's Gladiator for inspiration.