Super Heros In American Pop Culture

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look… up in the sky… it’s a bird, it’s a plain…it’s …Who is it? Ask anyone born between 1940 to the present to answer that question and they will say it’s Superman! Well…at least, that’s the answer you would have got in the mid 1950’s. Who was this super-man, where did he come from, and, why was he so bent on saving man kind? My mother, a devout christen, would tell me “This superman person sounds like Jesus Christ. I would respond “no way, how can you compare the man of steel with Jesus?” Your right, I don’t know anything about your hero, so tell me, where does he live, where did he come from and who are his parents? I told her that he come from a place far, far away, that his name was not really superman (that was what the people of earth call him) and that he was adopted by a childless couple after being sent to this world by his true father. Mom couldn’t understand how I could not see the similarities between them, for example, Superman, like Jesus possessed powers and capabilities far beyond those of mortal man. Superman, like Jesus, was from another world. Superman, raised by a man (Jonathan Kent) who was not his father, like Jesus, raised by Joseph of Bethlehem. In the latest adaptation, Superman, like Jesus, is willing to sacrifice himself to save the world. Fascinated by the similarities, I started to wonder if there were other fictional icons with similarities of living persons or other historical figures.

I began my research by looking into the origin of another hero from my childhood, Batman, better known today as, The Dark Knight. Unlike Superman, Batman did not have super strength. He is portrayed...

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... a white horse during most of his career. Another similarity was that Reeves’ often rode with a Native American companion who was a tracker and a posse man. A large number of the criminals arrested by Reeves were sent to federal prison in Detroit. The Lone Ranger radio show originated and was broadcast to the public in 1933 on WXYZ in Detroit where the legend of Reeves was famous only two years earlier. I left out one other fact about Bass Reeves which is a similarity he does not share with the Lone Ranger, he was an African American who was born into a life of slavery in 1838.

Works Cited

Miss Cellania, mental_floss.com. January 17, 2013

Siegel, Jerry (w), Shuster, Joe (a). "Superman" Action Comics 1 (June 1938), Detective Comics, Inc.

Fleisher, Michael L. The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes Volume 1 Batman Collier Books 1976 ISBN 0-02-080090-8 p. 31