An imaginary character when one was needed.
It was in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, when men's
overalls cost $0.59 each and work was harder to find than hen's
teeth, that teen-agers Jerry Siegel, a writer, and his artist
friend, Joe Shuster, created a feel-good character that was bigger
than the hard-luck times.
They called him
Superman.
(more history)