The Reign of the Superman

"The Reign of the Superman" (January 1933) is a short story written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by Joe Shuster. It was the first published use by the writer/artist duo of the name Superman, which they later applied to their archetypal fictional superhero. The title character of this story is a telepathic villain rather than a physically powerful hero. (Although the name is hyphenated between syllables due to it being broken between pages on the story's opening spread, it is spelled Superman in the magazine's table of contents and in the story's text.)

High school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster tried selling their stories to magazines in order to escape Depression era poverty. With their work rejected by publishers, 18-year-old Shuster printed the duo's own typewritten, mimeographed science fiction fanzine titled Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, producing five issues.

According to a 1983 interview with Siegel, he first wrote the short story "The Reign of the Superman" in 1932. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of an Übermensch, Siegel's original story featured his first Superman as a powerful villain bent on dominating the entire world. Siegel's short story appeared in Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization Issue #3, with accompanying artwork by Shuster. For this publication, Siegel used the pen name Herbert S. Fine, combining the first name of a cousin Herbert with the maiden name of Siegel's mother.

The term "Superman" derives from a common English translation of the term Übermensch which originated with Friedrich Nietzsche's statement, "Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen" ("I will teach you all the Superman"), in his 1883 work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The term "Superman" was popularized by George Bernard Shaw with his 1903 play Man and Superman. The character Jane Porter refers to Tarzan as a "superman" in the 1912 pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Siegel would later name Tarzan as an influence on the creation of his own Superman.

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