Who is Superman?

On June 1, 1938, Superman made his first appearance on Action Comics #1. Neither Jerry Siegel nor Joe Shuster, writer and artist who created the superhero, would never thought of him as the American cultural icon. But who was Superman?

Tragedy behind heroism

Some believed that the death of Mitchell Siegel, Jerry's father, was the inspiration. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, the elder Siegel died during a night-time robbery at his Cleveland second hand clothes store. Was it the sudden loss of the old man that pushed a distraught 17-year-old to invent a bullet-proof superbeing to avenge evil and fight for good?

"In 50 years of interviews, Jerry Siegel never once mentioned that his father died in a robbery," said Brad Meltzer, who research on Mitchell Siegel's life for his book, "The Book of Lies".

"But think about it. Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero. I'm sorry, but there's a story there."

Gerard Jones, a comic book historian, agreed.

"Superman's invulnerability to bullets, loss of family, destruction of his homeland all seem to overlap with Jerry's personal experience," said Mr Jones. "There's a connection there: the loss of a dad as a source for Superman."

Meet Stanley Weiss

According to Jerry Siegel himself, Shuster met a certain Stanley Weiss during the early 1930s, who looked exactly like the character as he imagined him.

"I remember the sketches hanging on a wall in the house for a while, and I'm certain that was my mother's doing," said David Weiss, whose father died in 1978. "Then they were put away. It seemed a bigger deal to her, but that still doesn't mean that either of them considered it a big deal. The Jewish and family culture I grew up in had a fundamental modesty."

Larry Tye, the author of "Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero", approved of it.

"What Joe Shuster said was that he would look in a mirror, and when he was drawing Clark Kent and Superman, that was what he saw," Mr. Tye said. "And if you looked at Joe Shuster's picture, either he wasn't a very good drawer, or he was having fun with us."

Whom lads look up to

Although the Mitchell Siegel theory was acceptable, both Siegel and Shuster were looking for someone they could look up to. Stanley Weiss may have been their image for the Man of Steel, but they thought of something else. Call it a secret longing.

"The fellow with the eyeglasses and the acne and the walk girls laughed at didn't exist ... his fake identity was our real one. That's why we loved him so. For if that wasn't really us, if there were no Clark Kents, only lots of glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities - what a hell of an improved world it would have been," said cartoonist Jules Feiffer.

Feiffer believed this was the the reason behind Superman's enduring appeal.