De Haven breezes through the early comic history, dwelling for awhile on the odd attraction of the first Action Comics cover (above.) But he notes a pattern that recurs in each Super-incarnation. At first, Siegel and Shuster’s Superman was a champion of the oppressed, a crusader for tolerance and social justice.

He quotes an essay by Thomas Andrae noting that their Superman was “neither alienated from society nor a misanthropic power-obsessed nemesis but a truly messianic figure...the embodiment of society’s noblest ideals, a ‘man of tomorrow’ who foreshadows mankind’s highest potentialities and profoundest aspirations but whose tremendous power, remarkably, poses no danger to its freedom and safety.”