Superman at 80: The Jewish origins of the Man of Steel and the 'curse' that haunts the actors who pl
This week marks the 80th anniversary of Superman's first appearance in a comic book. The Man of Steel adorned the cover of the June issue of Action Comics #1 when it first hit newsstands on 18 April 1938, lifting a car over his head, red cape billowing in the breeze as terrified pedestrians run for cover. His iconic image was already there, fully formed, and the character has barely changed in the intervening decades.
Superman was created by childhood friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, classmates at Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio, two avid comics fans who saw pulp publishing and syndicated newspaper stories as their ticket to glory.
They developed Superman from ideas Siegel had first worked on in amateur fanzines about crimefighters with supernatural powers. After struggling to interest the daily press in their hero, Siegel and Shuster eventually sold the rights to Detective Comics (DC) in March 1938 for $130 (about $2,225 today), resigning themselves to failure.
How wrong they were. Superman proved an immediate hit and quickly secured his own spin-off comic. A phenomenon was born.
One of the most interesting aspects of the character's genesis is that his origins lie not in Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of the ubermensch – travestied into Adolf Hitler's belief in the innate superiority of an Aryan master race – but in Jewish mythology.
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