In fact, Man Of Steel may be the most embellished, elaborate superhero movie we’ve seen: it’s difficult not to marvel at the unfettered scale of its visuals. While some have compared some of Man Of Steel’s designs to those in Prometheus, it has to be said that Zack Snyder’s unfettered world-building makes the latter look quite conservative.

This is, after all, a film where Russell Crowe’s Jor-El rides around on a lizard with dragonfly wings, dives into an ocean where babies are grown in pods and attended to by crab-like robots, and retrieves something called a codex, which looks like a human skull made of coal.

Man Of Steel’s production design appears to take influence from the darkly sensual work of artist HR Giger, the eccentric sets and costumes of David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune, and most of all, the organic style of Art Nouveau. In fact, the movie’s concept artist Peter Rubin has stated that Art Nouveau was a major influence in an interview with Comic Book Therapy:

“The art department was full of biological specimens, dried grasses, roots, fungi, bark, and lots and lots of bones. Books of micro-photography. Then the second big source was the nineteenth century Art Nouveau movement, the design philosophy that looked to nature to guide the artist’s hand… we tried to avoid straight lines if we could, and just do flowing, natural forms.”

Jor-El’s pet lizard-dragonfly, H’Raka, looks like the kind of exotic animal Edgar Rice Burroughs used to describe in his John Carter books. Could this be a conscious homage to a pulp series that paved the way for Superman himself? Burroughs’ first John Carter book, 1917’s A Princess Of Mars, was effectively the Superman story in reverse: an ordinary man is transported from Earth to an alien planet (in this case, Mars), where the environment gives him extraordinary powers of strength.

Siegel and Shuster have both acknowledged that John Carter was an influence. In a 1983 interview, for example, they admitted that, “Carter was able to leap great distances because the planet Mars was smaller than the planet Earth, and he had great strength. I visualised the planet Krypton as a huge planet, much larger than Earth.”