Word: supermans
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...Superman began life as a kind of populist statement. Created in 1938 by two Jewish colleagues, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, he offered justice for the little guy at the tail end of the Depression and upended the Nazi concept of the Ubermensch. "There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption," says DC Comics president Paul Levitz. "Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution." Batman, a morally ambiguous, revenge-driven crusader, emerged in 1939, at the outset of World War II, as the darker side of the heroic solution...
...other superheroes at other companies didn't seem to have too much vulnerability," says Stan Lee, who created Spider-Man at Marvel with artist Steve Ditko. "Peter had money troubles. He wasn't that popular with girls. Getting a date was a big deal with him." If Superman is a hero who dresses up as one of us, Spider-Man is one of us, dressed up as a hero. Says Jeff Ayers, manager of New York City's Forbidden Planet comics store: "Batman's a millionaire, Superman's an alien, and Wonder Woman's an Amazon goddess. Most superheroes...
...Superman. But then neither is Superman, in the hit WB TV series Smallville, in which a teenage Clark Kent (Tom Welling) discovers the powers that will someday make him the Man of Steel. He moons over an unrequited crush and battles villains who are really externalizations of teen emotions and self-discovery, as on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Part of the charm of Welling's Clark and Tobey Maguire's Peter, in fact, is that they have a little bit of the feminine in them: they've learned from Buffy and pop culture's other fatal femmes, who make fighting...
...Superman's 64-year journey from Man of Steel to Buffy Boy is just part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work...
...SUPERMAN DEBUTS, BEGINNING THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMICS...