So, have you bought him a birthday card yet? It’s the least he deserves given that he’s saved the world a gazillion times. And it’s not every day you celebrate your 80th birthday, is it? Especially not by fighting off an alien invasion by Khund warriors, helping overcome a mind control plot by Braniac, stop the odd mugging and still meet your Daily Planet deadline. Come to think of it, maybe we should give him an extra slice of birthday cake.

Yes, it’s Superman’s birthday. May 2018 marks the 80th anniversary of his first appearance and DC Comics are understandably in a celebratory mood. They’ve even brought the celebrations forward a little to coincide with the publication of the milestone 1000th issue of Action Comics, which has been home to Superman since April 1938.

In the same week that it was announced that no less than Steven Spielberg is joining the DC universe with a plan to film one of the company’s lesser known titles Blackhawk (about a squadron of Nazi-bashing fighter aces) Superman’s birthday bash is still the big news.for its owners.

Well that and the revelation that DC are bringing back his famous red underwear which has been, umm, hidden away in recent years in the Superman comics.

Action 1000, then, is a celebration of the original superhero in an age when the superhero is no longer laughed at for wearing his underwear outside his spandex and instead is at the very heart of the culture. Or turning up in your local Cineworld.

The origin story of Superman was an act of wish fulfilment. He was the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two shy, bullied teenage Jewish boys from Cleveland. The last son of Krypton was everything they weren’t – superstrong, handsome; a jock, perhaps, but a kindly, good-mannered one.

Siegel and Shuster, however, also created an alter ego for their hero, Clark Kent, a bumbling, bespectacled reporter. Kent was an alter ego for readers too. They could imagine that if they just took off their glasses that maybe they, too, could be faster than a speeding bullet.

Siegel and Shuster’s Superman was a Roosevelt-era liberal. His first ever superheroic act is to save an innocent woman from a lynch mob, and he was soon tackling corrupt politicians, munitions manufacturers, and wife-beaters. In his third appearance, Superman forces a greedy mine owner to improve the working conditions of his employees by trapping him in his mine to experience the conditions first-hand.

In short, he was no ubermensch. Superman was the antithesis of Nazi notions of superior beings. Joseph Goebbels, no less, denounced Clark Kent’s alter ego. In the US Superman was used to sell war bonds and fought Nazis in the pages of Action throughout the war years.

When they first approached DC with the idea Siegel and Shuster sold the rights to the character for a derisory sum and it took years for DC to begin paying them proper compensation.

In the meantime, the character went from strength to strength, always reflecting the world around him. By the 1950s he was a character well suited for the Eisenhower era. He was almost domesticised, with a superdog (Krypto), a supercat (Streaky, who first appeared in 1960) and a super-powered cousin, Kara Zor-El, or Supergirl to comics readers.

By the 1970s the character’s establishment credentials were beginning to be a bit of a problem (even though in the comics themselves Superman became something of an environmentalist), and by the 1980s Superman was even being sold as a Reaganite patsy in Frank Miller’s Batman reboot The Dark Knight Returns.

To combat this, the regular Superman comic was relaunched with Clark Kent reimagined as a yuppie jock with a Schwarzenegger physique.

Since then Superman has married Lois Lane, been killed, been reborn, starred in a successful TV series and a couple of underwhelming and underperforming movies and struggled at times to overcome a popular perception that he’s not that cool. If your dad was a superhero and all that … A notion perhaps not helped last year when Donald Trump Jr posted another Trumped-up fake cover of Time magazine featuring his dad as Superman.

A bit much given that Superman is the ultimate immigrant and would probably be subject to a Trumpian travel ban in the real world.

And yet, despite all this, Superman is still out there saving the world. Not bad for an octogenarian.

In Action 1000 he battles the aforementioned Khunds, has a run in with Lex Luthor and gets pummelled by a new villain Rogol Zaar who has a big sword and a bit of a dislike towards Kryptonians. The issue ends with a cliffhanger.

But Superman will be back next issue, you imagine. He’s not hanging up his red underwear yet. Well, he has just looked it out again.