ABSTRACT
In the late 1930s, during the rise of Nazism and in the midst of the Holocaust, two 17-year-old Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, found refuge in fantasy and together created the first costumed superhero- the Man of Steel- Superman. The story of the last son of Krypton, rocketed to earth to escape the destruction of his birth planet and later adopted by the loving Martha and Jonathan Kent, resonated loudly among the millions of American Jews in the early 1940s and those who managed to escape from German-occupied Europe. The popularity of Superman was such, and the demand for fantasy so great, that during World War Two, over 30 per cent of printed materials shipped to military bases were comic books. The journey of the superhero has strong parallels with that of the securely attached adolescent on his quest towards individuation.
