Superman’s co-creator Jerry Siegel originally conceived of the character as representing humanity perfected through biological evolution.
In Superman’s debut comic book story in Action Comics #1 (1938), Siegel wrote that he “had come from a planet whose inhabitants’ physical structure was millions of years advanced of our own.”
In Superman #1 (1939), Siegel wrote that he “came to earth from the planet Krypton, whose inhabitants had evolved, after millions of years, to physical perfection!”
And in Superman’s first newspaper comic strip (1938), Siegel wrote that Krypton was “a distant planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen — beings which represent the human race at its ultimate peak of perfect development!”
One of Siegel’s pre-debut versions of Superman (1934) was not an alien from Krypton, but a time-traveling super-evolved human from Earth’s future.
For elaborations of these episodes, see my previous post “On the Evolution of Superman.”
The use of the word “Superman” stems from the writings of Friedrich Nietzche, who also conceived of the Superman as humanity perfected and transcended, just as humanity itself is a perfection and transcendence of our pre-human ancestors.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzche wrote:
“I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.”
If, per Nietzche and Siegel, the Superman is an evolution of man, then man could similarly be considered “The Super-Ape” or “Super-Prehuman.”
In 1968, thirty years after Superman’s debut, Superman’s publisher DC Comics published a story that did just that. Showcase #74 featured a Stone Age character named “Anthro,” which means “human.” Anthro, dubbed “The First Boy” was portrayed as the first of the Cro-Magnons (now known as early European modern humans), born to Neanderthal parents.
As Superman performed super-human heroic feats, Anthro did heroic deeds that Neanderthals could not do. As Superman was “The Man of Tomorrow,” Anthro the First Boy was the Neanderthal of Tomorrow. As Superman was a superhero among men, man was a superhero among pre-men.
In 2008, forty years after Anthro’s debut, the character’s superheroism was further explored by Grant Morrison in Final Crisis #1.
At the beginning of that story, Anthro encounters a mysterious luminous figure seated in a floating chair who says to him: “Man. I am Metron. Have no fear. Here is knowledge.” Metron—one of the DC super-characters known as “New Gods”—presents fire to Anthro with a burning bush. The scene evokes the Biblical story of Moses’s encounter with God via the Burning Bush as well as the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods for mankind.
Meanwhile, Anthro’s people are being massacred by an enemy tribe. As the enemy leader—an immortal hominid supervillain who will later be known as Vandal Savage—kidnaps a beautiful young woman, Anthro appears holding a burning branch, which he uses to repel the invaders. Anthro uses the superpower of fire to save his people from evil, thus becoming something new among Neanderthals: the first boy, the first man, the first superhero.
As Morrison explained in an interview:
“We have big ambitions for Final Crisis, and the Anthro scene was a way of laying down a kind of primal creation myth for the superhero concept. Anthro (which means ’man’ of course) is equivalent with Adam, the First Boy, encountering an ‘angel’ or higher intelligence which gives him an incredible new weapon, technology, or ‘power’, which then makes him more than human and moves him to defend his tribe against the forces of chaos and lawlessness. We’re seeing a kind of aboriginal genesis of superheroism itself here, so it has resonances with various creation stories, Biblical and otherwise.
And, yeah, I know there are glaring anachronisms (fire was probably first tamed by Homo Erectus over a million years ago) used by in the scene but I just couldn’t resist having DC’s Anthro character be the one to first use fire as a weapon against evil, so I hope early history buffs will permit me to plead poetic license in this case. I wanted to suggest that being blessed with the gift of fire would be as outrageous as being handed a Green Lantern ring.”
The discovery of fire, like all technological innovations, was a cultural advance rather than a biological one. Within our lifespans at least, it is through, not physical, but spiritual evolution that we transcend what we were before. And humanity advances through the example and leadership of individual innovators, forerunners, heroes.