In the 1960s, Marvel comics made its name by dragging superheroes down to street level. Peter Parker worried about his homework. The Fantastic Four bickered like flatmates. Even the Hulk, a walking nuclear tantrum, was really just a green and muscular guy having a bad day. Over at DC, though, the heroes remained clean, polished and largely unbothered – moral titans gazing down from above, solving problems without ever really having any of their own.
Superman was the prototype of that ideal: an all-powerful alien whose only weakness was a glowing space rock and an unshakable sense of duty. He wasn’t like us – he was better than us. And that was the point. When Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane first meets the man of steel in 1978’s Superman, she is almost impossibly awestruck by the presence of this walking, talking, flying god. Lois’s wide-eyed vulnerability is a stark contrast with the condescension she doles out to his alter ego, Clark Kent. The two sides of the Last Son of Krypton might be exactly the same person, but it’s virtually impossible for anyone to recognise them as such, because one radiates impossible power while the other can barely hold on to his briefcase.
