10 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Superman For Everyone
6. When He Was A Villain
The origin story of Superman is an interesting one. No, not the whole "sent from a dying planet, crash landed on Earth, raised by kindly Southern couple" origin story, we mean his actual creation. In real life. By real people. The Man Of Steel is such a staggering cultural icon nowadays, a modern myth, it's hard to imagine there being a time when he didn't exist. And yet there was, and there was a time when two downtrodden Jewish kids in New York dreamt him up, trying to make a buck or two during the Great Depression. High school pals Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were both under 18 when they came up with the initial concept of a Superman, inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of an bermensch. Initially, though, he wasn't a saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned - he was a villain.
Before he had a chance to become the world's first superhero, he was very nearly the world's first supervillain. Their story was rejected by all the big pulp publishers of the age, which lead to the creative pair printing their own own typewritten, mimeographed science fiction fanzine, which is where "REIGN OF THE SUPER-MAN" first appeared (you can even read it online, copyright-free, if you fancy). Rather than a powerful dude saving lives, this Superman is a bald vagrant given telepathic powers by a mad scientist, who goes on the rampage. Not sure we'd be seeing that guy fight Batman at the Dawn Of Justice in March 2016. Bullet deftly dodged.