The Reign of the Super-Man


 * The subject of this article is not to be confused with the Reign of the Supermen storyline published by DC Comics. For that subject, see The Death of Superman.



"The Reign of the Super-Man" (January 1933) was a short story written by  Jerry Siegel and illustrated by  Joe Shuster, a writer/artist duo who would later become famous for creating the  fictional  superhero Superman. This short story marked their first published use of any form of the name Superman. Although hyphenated as Super-Man in the story's title, the term is Superman within the story's text.

Publication
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 Super-Man" in 1932. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of an  Übermensch,  Siegel's original story featured his first Super-Man as a powerful villain bent on dominating the entire world. Siegel's short story appeared in Science Fiction, the Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3 with accompanying art 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 name Superman originated in the English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's statement, "Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen" ("I will teach you the Superman"), in his 1883 work Also sprach Zarathustra. George Bernard Shaw popularized the term 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.