Siegel and Shuster's 1933 fanzine story made 'the Super-Man' a villain; the heroic version debuted in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938, sold for ten cents, and is now the most valuable comic in existence. Siegel's later accounts tied the strip to the 1932 murder of his father during a robbery. Scholars read the Moses pattern, hidden infant, alien heritage, double identity, and the golem lineage into the origin, and debate how much was conscious.
The name invites Nietzsche: Ubermensch translates literally as superman, and critics from the 1940s onward accused the character of fascist undertones. Defenders counter that Siegel's Superman fought for the little guy, and that the creators' own politics were New Deal liberal, not Nietzschean.
Esoteric readers note the structure: a sun-powered being sent from the heavens, dying and returning in the famous 1992 arc, worshipped in-story by a Kryptonian cult of Rao. The superhero as secular messiah is either the genre's open secret or its core mechanism.
A refugee child rocketed from a dying world, hidden under a mild identity: whose story is that, and why did two sons of immigrants need to tell it in 1938?