Early versions of Superman were more morally ambiguous than the clean-cut character that eventually appeared. In 1933, Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster published a short story in the magazine Science Fiction titled ‘The Reign of the Superman’. It featured a character whose superhuman powers were acquired as part of a scientific experiment and who proceeded to use those powers for his own advantage, until they wore off. The plot is reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), or Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). Both were cautionary tales about the dangers of technological meddling with human nature, and the enhanced humans they featured were no superheroes. In the 1930s, however, with war in Europe looming, there was no room for such moral ambiguity. Superman and his fellow superheroes had to be on the side of the angels. Superman, through his alter ego Clark Kent, was meant to embody the virtues of small-town America as much as the enhanced humanity of the Man of Steel. It was his archenemy, Lex Luthor, who represented compromised science.
During the war years, Superman and other superheroes were fully engaged in the fight against fascism. They represented American moral and technological certitude, and the certainty of the American Century. Their superism was an expression of the superiority of the American Dream. The superheroes that emerged in the 1960s, on the other hand, represented a different and less absolute brand of superism. In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, a quartet of Marvel superheroes whose powers were the result of exposure to cosmic rays during a space mission. Their success spawned a number of other heroes in quick succession during the first half of the decade. Both the Hulk and Spider-Man, introduced by Marvel in 1962, were also products of experiments with radioactivity gone wrong. The moral ambiguity of Marvel’s superheroes (it would be difficult to describe the Hulk or Spider-Man, for example, as paragons of virtue in the mould of Superman) mirrored a growing cultural ambiguity about the moral status of science; as the Cold War got colder and the nuclear arms race more vicious, it’s no accident that radioactivity features so large in the origin stories of these superheroes.