18 Years Ago in TIME

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Superman Returns, the new installment of the man of steel's big-screen story, out this week. Does he still stand for truth, justice and box-office brawn? At 50, SUPERMAN was soaring high

It was a heroic scenario: the explosion of the doomed planet Krypton, the miraculous escape of the infant son of a Kryptonian scientist, the discovery of the baby's spaceship by an elderly couple near the Midwestern town of Smallville. And the gradual revelations of the child's superhuman strength, the foster parents' exhortation that he "must use it to assist humanity," the youth's adoption of a dual identity--the mild-mannered, blue-suited newspaper reporter, Clark Kent, and the red-caped, blue-haired Superman, the man of steel ... [He] is a figure who somehow manages to embody the best qualities in that nebulous thing known as the American character. He is honest, he tells the truth, he is idealistic and optimistic, he helps people in need ... Not only is he good, he is also innocent, in a kind and guileless way that Americans have sometimes been but more often have only imagined themselves to be. TIME, March 14, 1988

With reporting by Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Kathleen Kingsbury, Sarah Lilleyman, Clayton Neuman, Elisabeth Salemme