The first and most important comic book superhero, Superman looms large not only in comic books but in all of twentieth-century American popular culture. Among the few American characters instantly recognizable in virtually every corner of the globe,...

Promotional art forSuperman vol. 2, #204 (April 2004)by Jim Lee and Scott...

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just Ben Affleck in a lumpy blue Superman costume from studio wardrobe. O.K., the image is silly and appetite-curbing, even in color, but in Hollywoodland, a fascinating, intelligent and probing new film noir about the unsolved Tinseltown...

Passing through southern Illinois on their way to Nashville, Diana Brown and her son Colin saw the signs pointing the way to this town's Superman Square and its colorful bronze statue of the Man of Steel. Thanks to...

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just Ben Affleck in a lumpy blue Superman costume from studio wardrobe. O.K., the image is silly and appetite-curbing, even in color, but in Hollywoodland, a fascinating, intelligent and probing new film noir about the unsolved Tinseltown...

Gilbert Arenas was slowed again by Chicago in what turned out to be a Washington win, then was asked how it felt not to have to be Superman every night."The supporting cast did a great job," Arenas said, holding back laughter. Then a loud voice...

In recent years Superman has been changing…. When we discarded our old legacy of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, we also abandoned the view that a heroic super-powerful individual might solve all our problems with some magnificent gesture. But what is important about Superman is not that he is changing…. It is what Superman represents, as a symbol, before he started changing that I am most interested in; and it is his symbolic significance that is most important, I feel, for our pur...

[Superman] has hardly more than his name in common with [Friedrich] Nietzsche's blasphemous and iconoclastic phantasm; in fact one suspects that he originally owed his "super" to the "super-duper," the "ne plus ultra and then some" of advertising usage. This Superman is a Li'l Abner without Mammy Yokum and without popular background, a hillbilly without the fertile background of folklore or remnants of creed. He is a Goliath rather than a David, but a ...

[The] Man of Steel, with his super-hearing, super-sight and super-vitality, has become all things to all boys. He has shaken the pedestal of many a classic boyhood idol: Tarzan, whom he can outleap and outfight; Nick Carter, whom he can out-sleuth; Galahad, whose purity is as tarnished brass compared to his. More than this Superman accomplishes with casual ease feats that are common to every boy's daydreams…. And to top it all, his motivating traits are "super-courage, super-goodness an...