The Arrogance of History
One of the interesting things to come out of my recent overview of the first two years of published Superman stories is to realize how devoid of mythology the character was. Sure, he was an alien, come from the doomed planet Krypton. But Siegel and Shuster seemed totally disinterested in Krypton. All we really knew about it was that everyone there had the same physical gifts as Superman himself... a few strips in the newspaper daily covered the death of the planet, and in them, we saw Jor-L capable of surviving a quake that topples buildings down on him. And then, a few panels later the baby goes in the spaceship and the planet blows up, thus ending Krypton... and really, any interest on the part of the writer and artist in ever seeing Krypton again. Theirs is a Superman of the world they lived in, and it was in that world that they were most interested in seeing him operate.

I've said before that I viewed the original Superman comic books as wish fulfillment, because that's exactly what they are: social wish fulfillment. It's no accident that the first, second and third things Superman always seems to be doing is smacking down bullies, gun-toting mobsters, and those with wealth beyond their needs, especially arms merchants, slum landlords and those that profit from the poverty or death of others. Whether it be crooked oil speculators who don't actually drill for the stuff when they can just keep offering stocks or Emil Norvell, forced to enlist in a foreign military so that he might see his own weapons in action, the Superman of these times is often found punching rich people in the face. Or forcing entire towns to drive more carefully by waging a one man war on each and every bad driver they have. Or destroying slot machines because kids play them instead of going to school.

Their Superman is a science fiction concept, yes, but the science fiction is really just there to allow them license to present their little parables. Their Superman is not so awe inspiring as later ones... he's far more capricious and cruel, for one thing, and just as likely to disguise himself as a washed up, suicidal boxer and help lift the man to the world championship as he is to expose crooked construction kingpins. He brazenly (and at times giddily) defies the police, going so far as to kidnap the mayor of an undisclosed town after smashing into a radio station twice to force them out so that he could make a radio address to the townsfolk. He's certainly good at heart - he'll help young orphans and wrongly abused convicts - but he often does so by convoluted and ridiculous means seemingly just for his own sense of fun. His alien heritage is absent: he's wholly and completely what you might expect from two young men in that time period, a strange mixture of imp and thug who has the power to actually do something about those things he finds objectionable.

All the things that would become so recognizably Superman over the next three decades... the Phantom Zone, Kryptonite, Kandor, the Fortress, Jimmy Olsen, the Daily Planet... none of these things are even in evidence. While Superman is much less potent, his only real adversaries are brilliant, but still human and outclassed by him. There is no real way to prevent him from doing whatever he sets out to do, ultimately. He's much less like a god, and yet, much less regulated or controlled by his milleu. He has no special weaknesses, no flamboyant alien robots or rocket-imprisoned sleeping Kryptonians to battle him. In fact, he is singular and unique, not just the only one of his kind as a last survivor of his dead world, but the only one of his kind period. No one else exists with powers like his. The closest we get is a dwarf hypnotist in the newspapers and a fake indian swami hypnotist in the comics.

This character is alien only as an afterthought. He is most sincerely a creature of his world, because the central pivot of the character is that he wants to change that world, and he can. His wish fulfillment is that of two men who wanted to see things get better, and imagined someone who could actually force them to.