The first ever Superman comic appeared in 1938. With his pale white skin, chiselled features, moving in a world of serious White men in business suits, this Superman can now seem like a relic of a bygone era.

Superman moves with the times. Today the mantle has passed to his son, Jon Kent, whose looser style place him squarely in Gen ZShort for Generation Z, meaning people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s.. And now he is embodying his more liberal era in a new way, after DC Comics revealed yesterday that he is bisexual.

DC is not the only media giant putting a new focus on the diversity of its characters. Sony's Into the Spider-Verse, released in 2018, was the first full-length film featuring Miles Morales, a biracial Black and Latino teenager who succeeded Peter Parker as Spider-Man in some comics. 

One of the latest instalments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, depicts airborne hero Sam Wilson coming to terms with being the first Black Captain America. And the character Valkyrie will be revealed as bisexual in the forthcoming Thor: Love and Thunder.

Supporters of these changes argue they allow readers from a range of backgrounds to identify with the characters.

To some extent, this is the role that superheroes have always played. The original Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, is a shy, timid office worker who is ignored by his peers. Peter Parker was a working-class schoolboy whose intelligence went underappreciated. Readers who felt their talents were going unnoticed in their own lives could tell themselves that they, too, were hiding something special that the world simply could not see.

And throughout his history, Superman has drawn on a current of progressive politics. Even the original Superman was widely understood as a champion for immigrants in the USA, thanks to his extraterrestrial origins. His early villains were crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous landlords who owned run-down tenementsLow-income apartment blocks found in many US cities in the 20th Century.. In 1946 he took on the Ku Klux KlanAn extremist white supremacy organisation which has existed since the 1860s.. In the 1980s, he was depicted as suffering from AIDSAcute Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It interferes with the immune system, leaving sufferers more vulnerable to common diseases. Around the world, almost 40 million people are believed to be living with the disease., to raise awareness about the disease.

Some think superhero stories can never be a vehicle for change. They are written by titanic media companies whose only real interest is in making money. They do not care about representation, only about drawing in new readers.

For others, the problem is still more serious. They claim that the whole idea of superheroes is fatally flawed. The role of a superhero is to protect the status quo, often by using overwhelming force against ordinary people with no way of defending themselves. They cannot be held accountable, no matter what collateral damageAny death, injury or other damage inflicted accidentally on civilians in the course of a conflict. they cause.

Comic artist Alan Moore's famous Watchmen series, and the more recent The BoysA comic and TV series that shows superheroes as savage, petulant puppets of a vast corporate machine., are satires of the superhero genre, exploring how simply having superpowers would inevitably corrupt those who wield them. That is why some think it is wrong to encourage people to identify with superheroes at all.

Yes, say some. Levering diverse identities into comic books is nothing more than shallow corporate posturing. Comic book readers, of whatever identity, are looking for escapism and fantasy, not for commentary on social issues that they already have to live with every day.

Not at all, say others. Comic books have always championed progressive causes, and their whole purpose is to provide readers with characters they can admire and identify with. Adding more representation into the stories is important for making them accessible to more readers.