What was and continues to be appealing about Superman comics?

the series is on it's 700th issue, with the same character, the same storyline, the same adventures though still it sells. Batman has always had changes, deaths, evolutions, different Batman's but there has mostly been only one Superman.|||I just wanted to point out that Superman, like Batman, is not in the same continuity as in the '40s, 50s, etc. Today's Batman, Superman, etc. have been around for 20, 25 years. (Granted, with all the different origin stories and Crisis Whatevers of recent years, this may have changed, but I doubt it.)



While Superman, like the others, has obviously had multiple storylines over these years, Superman is an especially difficult character to write. It's not that his comics endure, but the character endures, and the idea of Superman endures. In the end, we need to believe that there's someone out there that can do anything, and with that power, does the RIGHT thing.|||Superman is a really NICE GUY. He is also a product of super-scientific evolution. This is BOTH true within the story line and in real life. Siegel and Schuster were heavily influenced by a satirical novel about a morally ambiguous "superman" called Gladiator, by Philip Wylie. The earliest versions of the character were somewhat darker, however they made a conscious choice to get away from that.





When Superman passed on to DC he fell under the sway of editors Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz. Siegel and Schuster were science fiction fans. Weisinger and Schwartz were SUPER science fiction fans. Most of their friends were in the field or readers and these included a large number of professional engineers, or trained ones (Robert A. Heinlein was a military engineer until he was invalidated out of the service with tuberculosis). People, and especially engineers, of that generation faced what we call the War Effort. I. E., the Nazis. We needed and were willing to work together in a social contract to get things done. The old kleptocracy had collapsed in 1929 leaving us with ten years of hardship (good question when the new kleptocracy is going to collapse). These were young men and women who didn't believe you could do anything without cooperation. Superman's character was VERY influenced by both the heroes and the readers of REAL SF. I actually said suddenly in the last sentence but it really wasn't a break -- he'd been a little of that before and just became moreso. Since Schwartz's retirement this has mostly slipped under the radar even at DC but at various points -- even in the sixties when everybody was at least suspicious of the army and the government, Superman would find himself working with them as a matter of course and even today often comes across as someone who has connections. They aren't exactly connections, though. They are a consequence of him sharing the values of what Bush called "the greatest generation" and being smarter than most people give him credit for. He's awesome, in other words.|||sorry i dont know