ABSTRACT
There is a general consensus that the “Golden Age of Comics” began with the publication of the first complete Superman story in Action Comics no. 1 (June 1938). This DC comic book was phenomenally successful; by its third issue it had sold 900,000 copies, and this was largely due to the popularity of the Man of Steel (Jones 2004: 155). Superman, created by sf fans Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, epitomized a number of motifs that came to dominate the creation of superheroes and which demonstrate their deep connection to modernity: authoritarianism, the body, industrialization, eugenics, technologies of war, and the utopianism of the 1939 World’s Fair.
