Common, unexceptional villains filled the first few spots in Superman's rogue's gallery. There were no villains of note until the introduction of Lex Luthor in Action Comics #23. And back then he certainly wasn't the criminal mastermind I love today. I get as nostalgic as any comic book fan about those first few Superman stories, but in and of themselves, they aren't compelling. There isn't anything interesting about the strongest, toughest guy on Earth delivering two-fisted justice to completely average bad guys. It's just a series of beat-downs.

Monthly publishing schedules are brutal now, and they were brutal then. Seventy-five years after his introduction, we know that Superman is here to stay. Not so in 1938, when comic book creators banged out new characters every 30 days. Some stuck for awhile, but most came and went in the space of one or two issues. It was a surprise when characters lasted more than a few printings. Superman was the biggest surprise the nascent comic book industry had ever seen. His creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, certainly didn't assume that their new, modern age hero would enjoy such explosive popularity. They weren't ready for it. They hadn't planned ahead. All they knew when Action Comics #1 hit the stands was that Superman fights bad guys -- really effectively. But after a few issues of mundane crime-fighting, they realized Superman was too effective.

Unknowingly, they tripped over a storytelling problem that showed up millennia before Superman yanked his first car off the ground. What the hell does a writer do with a character that easily wins every battle and dispatches his enemies with ridiculous ease?

When The Iliad #1 hit the stands 2,500 years earlier, it introduced Achilles, best known for his thumping of the Trojan hero, Hector. In his first incarnation, he was invulnerable. He was immortal. He wasn't quite a god, but he was pretty damn close. Homer, author of this first issue and runaway hit, was okay with this. For him it was good enough to tax Achilles with one problem: finding Hector. Achilles stepped up, finally finding Hector after a series of seemingly endless ass-haulings up and down the battlefield. Achilles bitchslapped the poor Trojan. Homer laced up the rest of the story and moved on to the spin-off, The Odyssey.

Hollywood didn't invent retakes. That stuff goes way back. The ancients loved them as much as the producers of Smallville. Rewriters of ancient epics, such as Statius, took their retakes seriously. When he reached Achilles in The Iliad #2, he faced the same problem that eventually plagued the writers of Action Comics: an invulnerable hero is a boring hero. Statius answered the problem of the immortal hero with the introduction of Achilles' heel, eventually pierced by an arrow launched from the bow of Paris. Bam: vulnerable, flawed and human characters give stories good wrinkles.