Jerry Siegel sometimes claimed the idea for Superman came to him late one summer night in 1934. He scribbled down a storyline in a frenzy, the tale goes, and in the morning, he ran nine blocks to his friend Joe Shuster’s house to tell him about it.

In more careful tellings, Siegel and Shuster explained that Superman evolved over years of work. They began inventing him in January 1933, during their junior year in high school, when the character appears in their fanzine as an ugly, bald villain. His unnatural powers came from exposure to a meteor, a precursor to Kryptonite. Later in 1933, on a mock-up comic book cover, Superman has become a hero, swooping from the air to stop a robbery (see next page). He’s an

indistinct figure, almost like a genie. Another early sketch shows Superman’s familiar bodybuilder physique, invulnerable to a tommy gun’s bullets, and he’s holding a man in the air — a precursor to his famous 1938 debut on the cover of Action Comics #1 in which he is hoisting a car above his head (see bottom left).

The final breakthrough came that night in 1934, soon after Siegel and Shuster finished high school. “The concept came to me that Superman could have a dual identity, and that in one of his identities he could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do,” Siegel said in a 1983 interview. The story’s heroine “would think he was some sort of a worm, yet she would be crazy about this Superman character.”