My personal feeling about Superman is that the interesting stories to tell about him tend to be in contrast to something, be that the Morrison run on JLA's "OMG I've grown up in a world that has Superman and Batman in it and now I'm sharing an office with them" attitude, or the Infinite Crisis-associated "1930s Superman thinks current version is a pathetic failure, current version thinks 1930s version is a tyrant who sees everything in overly simplistic black and white" story, or a number of excellent Superman-Batman stories. The reason I am so strongly attached to Red Son and use this icon so much is that for two and a half of the three issues it was a solid and convincing examination of what it would mean for someone with superhuman powers, integrity, intelligence and compassion to be brought up as Stalin's heir, and to genuinely believe in Communist ideals and be able to implement them. [ The second half of the last issue wimps out on this, but like everything else that has or will happen in the DC Universe ever, this can now be blamed on Superboy Prime punching the timeline. ]