Behold! I give you the problem of Superman. It’s a problem that has less to do with the character himself and more to with DC Comics, which found itself stuck with a flagship character it thought needed fixing. In trying, it broke him nearly beyond repair.

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The storytelling engine Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel devised for Superman when they created him should be, like their hero, bulletproof. Clark Kent is a mild-mannered reporter hiding his secret identity from the world, including his sharp, competent coworker, who happens to be the woman of his dreams. He’s stuck in a love triangle with himself, between the man he is, and the man he wishes he could be. He’s an immigrant driven not by tragedy but by an unshakable sense of right and wrong and a desire to fix the world for the less fortunate—a battle that can never end. As the famed comics creator Alan Moore wrote:

Almost certainly by instinct rather than by psycho-social analysis, two Cleveland teenagers had crafted a near-perfect and iconic fantasy which spoke to something deeply rooted in the psyche of working America [in the early 1930s] … At his inception, Superman seems very much a representative of the downtrodden working classes his creators hailed from, and a wonderful embodiment of all the dreams and aspirations of the powerless.

This is who the character is at his best: not a walking set of superpowers, but a man fighting for truth and justice to the best of his considerable ability.

Superman was so popular in the 1940s that his comic was adapted into a smash-hit radio show, which itself proved popular enough that it helped bring down parts of the Ku Klux Klan. Before long, he was the biggest comic-book character in the world. But Siegel and Shuster, exploited and cast aside by the company whose fortunes they had made, saw barely a dime of the profits. Away from his creators and under DC’s management, Superman changed from a rabble-rousing populist into a bland icon of the establishment, cycling through the same sets of adventures every few years: a hero with nothing better to do than devise elaborate pranks to play on Lois Lane. Despite the gloriously silly super-science of Silver Age Superman, with its time-travel, transformation rays, and bottled cities, the engine rusted under the hood.

In 1962, the competition arrived. In August of that year, the newly christened Marvel Comics, already humming with hits like The Fantastic Four, debuted Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, his creators, had reinvented the Superman engine, taking the archetype of the superheroic outsider and making him an underdog through a series of clever tweaks. Where Clark Kent’s romantic life was a game, Peter Parker’s was a soap opera; where Clark’s boss was gruff, Peter’s was a jerk; where Kent was ignored in civilian guise, Parker was actively picked on. Marvel had, in effect, figured out how to supplant Superman. In doing so, they began selling not just to children but also to college students, and eventually to adults. It was a challenge that DC, formerly the dominant comics publisher, had to answer.