For Truth, Justice, and the American Way (or for Stalin, Socialism, and the International Expansion of the Warsaw Pact, depending)

"If familiarity breeds contempt, this character’s seven decades of cultural ubiquity have bred something more insidious. In writing my cultural history of the iconic superhero, I repeatedly encountered a view of the character as a stolid, unremarkable chunk of conceptual furniture. It was one place where the received wisdom of comic book obsessives (who tend to focus on edgier stuff) overlapped with that of the general public (who tend to ignore comics of any provenance). The Big Blue Boy Scout was a safe, unchanging, anodyne fixture of our popular culture. A bore.
"They’re all wrong."

Glen Weldon in The New Republic looks back at seventy-five years of Superman.

As does Larry Tye in the Los Angeles Times.