10 Fascinating Comic Moments That Almost Happened
3. The Original Superman Series Was Almost Completely Different
If there's a superhero more iconic that Wolverine or Spider-Man, it's Superman. The Man of Steel was responsible for kicking of the superhero genre as we know it and it's impossible to imagine him as anything else that a super strong alien who stands for truth, justice and the American way and yet, the original ideas for him were completely different.
When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster first came up with the name Superman, the character they thought up was actually a villain. Superman was going to be a one-shot story in which a man drank an experimental serum which gave him mind control powers. He would use his powers to commit crime, only for them to fade away and he would be unable to replicate them because he had killed the scientist.
Their second, more heroic version, was a non-powered strongman who went around beating up bullies. DC rejected both these pitches though and so Siegel and Shuster came up with a third idea, the Superman we're all familiar with (although the second idea was turned into private detective Slam Bradley, who also featured in Action Comics).
Another change was that early Superman strips portrayed Clark as an orphan. One of Jerry Siegel's original plots was for Lois to work out Clark Kent was Superman when they first encountered kryptonite. Superman would then abandon his civilian identity and the two would fight crime together.