Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero by Larry Tye

(Random House, $27)

Every generation gets its own Superman, said Ethan Gilsdorf in The Boston Globe. In an “exhaustive reporting effort that would impress Lois Lane,” Larry Tye has pieced together “the backstory, front-story, inside dirt,” and everything else a reader could possibly want to know about the Man of Steel. Born in 1938 as a foil to wife-beaters and small-time crooks, he rose to the occasion when Hitler and Stalin mounted threats to democracy’s survival, then moved on in the 1980s to battling corporate raiders. What a biographical subject: Reinvented countless times, Superman was even killed off in the 1990s—only to be resurrected.

Superman isn’t Tye’s only protagonist, said Michael Cavna in The Washington Post. “The best origin story” pulsing through this Superman is “not the one about the Krypton-to-Kansas alien baby,” but the one about the superhero’s “all-too-mortal creators.” Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster grew up as outsiders in 1930s Cleveland and fashioned their hero in their own image, from his nerdy alter ego Clark Kent to his Hebrew-sounding given name, Kal-El. The whole story has been told before, but Tye “does his homework well,” detailing how Superman’s creators sold all rights to the character for a measly $130, then endured decades of hard times while their brainchild soared.

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Tye’s account brims with supersize irony, said James Parker in The New York Times. Halfway in, he provides a “sizzling portrait” of Mort Weisinger, a “brutal bottom-liner” at DC Comics who was also the editor responsible for some of the franchise’s most potent myths. “The story lessens in excitement the closer it gets to the present: the predictably gritty reboots of the comic book, the megabucks ’70s and ’80s movies.” Still, you have to admire Superman’s pop-culture invincibility. Next year, he’s due, at age 75, to be reinvented again, for another film. “Mighty, solitary, wearing his underpants on the outside as if in an endless anxiety dream, he flies on.”