Superman is a DC Comics character created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster and first published in Action Comics #1 in 1938. He is Kal-El, an alien sent to Earth as a baby just before Krypton was destroyed. Raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent in the farming town of Smallville, Kansas, he moves to Metropolis under the name Clark Kent and works as a reporter at the Daily Planet.

He is widely seen as the archetypal superhero and as the most powerful protector of Earth. What drives him is what the Kents taught him about doing the right thing, and a belief in the goodness of people and in second chances. He holds that killing is wrong under any circumstances, and he has said that it was Krypton that made him Superman but the Earth that makes him human.