There’s a moment in the final episode of Smallville that a lot of fans had been waiting ten years to see. Clark Kent — farm boy, alien, reluctant hero — finally runs toward the camera, tears open his shirt to reveal the iconic “S” shield, and (we assume) leaps into the sky (off camera) as John Williams’ classic theme swells on the soundtrack. It’s pure wish fulfillment, and it absolutely works. But what makes that moment land isn’t the costume or the music. It’s the decade of emotional groundwork that preceded it. The journey to the roof of the Daily Planet building is the whole point.

Clark Kent becoming Superman is one of the most retold origin stories in all of fiction, and yet it never quite gets old. That’s not an accident. There’s something deeply resonant about the idea of a person — even an alien person with the power to juggle satellites — who has to choose to be heroic. Superman doesn’t just happen. Clark Kent earns him.

Where It Begins: A Baby, a Rocket, and a Kansas Farm

The bones of the story were established way back in 1938, when writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster introduced the world to Action Comics #1. A baby named Kal-El (originally Kal-L) is rocketed away from the dying planet Krypton by his desperate parents, lands in the American heartland, and is raised by salt-of-the-earth farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent (originally John and Mary Kent). The Kents name him Clark, teach him right from wrong, and instill in him the moral framework that will one day define an entire superhero genre.

It’s worth pausing on that for a second, because it’s easy to take for granted. Superman’s powers come from a yellow sun. His heroism comes from Kansas. Siegel and Shuster, two young men from Cleveland who knew what it was like to feel like outsiders, created a character whose extraordinary abilities were almost beside the point. What made Superman super was the man the Kents raised. The powers are just tools. The character is everything.

That’s the foundation, and every subsequent adaptation — whether on the page, the screen large or small — either honors that foundation or suffers for ignoring it.

The Comics: A Mythology Built Over Decades

In the original comic stories, Clark’s transformation into Superman is relatively swift. He grows up knowing he’s different, his parents guide him toward using his gifts for good, and by the time he reaches adulthood, he’s already operating in Metropolis, working at the Daily Planet (originally the Daily Star), and wearing the cape. The early comics weren’t particularly interested in dwelling on the process of becoming — they were more focused on what Superman did once he arrived.

But as the decades rolled on and editors like Mort Weisinger and later Julius Schwartz refined the mythology, the pieces of Clark’s identity became more carefully considered. Weisinger introduced the Superboy era, giving readers years of young Clark’s adventures in Smallville before he grew into the Man of Steel. The Fortress of Solitude, Krypto, alternate forms of kryptonite, Supergirl — all of these filled out the world of a character who was evolving from a two-dimensional strongman into something approaching a genuine mythology.

The most significant reimagining came in 1986, when John Byrne’s The Man of Steel reset the entire Superman origin for the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe. Byrne stripped things back, slowed the process down, and insisted that Clark’s powers emerge gradually rather than all at once. More importantly, Byrne’s Clark didn’t begin his heroic career as a child — he stepped into the Superman role as an adult, fully formed in his values but still figuring out what to do with them. This version emphasized that Clark Kent wasn’t the disguise. Clark Kent was the real person. Superman was the costume he put on to help people without blowing his cover.

That distinction — Clark first, Superman second — would prove enormously influential on everything that came after.

The Silver Screen: Reeve Sets the Standard

When Richard Donner’s Superman hit theaters in 1978, the marketing promised audiences they would believe a man could fly. What audiences actually got was something more valuable: they believed a man could be genuinely good.

Christopher Reeve’s performance is one of the great underrated acting achievements in mainstream cinema. Playing both Clark Kent and Superman in the same film requires a kind of dual physicality — the mild-mannered slouch and raised voice of Clark versus the easy confidence and squared shoulders of Superman — and Reeve executes it flawlessly. The joke is that the “disguise” is absurd, that nobody would believe a pair of glasses could fool anyone. But Reeve makes you believe it, because his Clark and his Superman feel like genuinely different people occupying the same body.

The 1978 film also made a key storytelling choice that has influenced nearly every adaptation since: it gives real emotional weight to Clark’s time in Smallville. The early Kansas sequences with Glenn Ford as Jonathan Kent aren’t just prologue. They’re the whole thesis. When Jonathan tells a young Clark that he was put on this Earth for a reason, the movie is establishing something crucial — that the journey to heroism isn’t about gaining powers. It’s about understanding responsibility.

The film’s depiction of Clark becoming Superman follows a fairly traditional arc: Krypton, Kansas, the Fortress of Solitude where Jor-El’s AI teaches him about his heritage, and then Metropolis. It’s a journey from isolation to identity to action. By the time Clark tears open that button-down shirt in a revolving door, you understand exactly who he is and why he does what he does. That clarity of character is the reason Reeve’s Superman remains the gold standard more than four decades later.

Henry Cavill’s take in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel is a deliberately more complicated version of the journey. This Clark is uncertain, conflicted, and operating in a world that doesn’t yet trust him. The film deconstructs some of the mythology’s rosier assumptions — what would it actually feel like to grow up with these powers in a world full of people who might fear or exploit you? — and Cavill brings genuine vulnerability to the role. It’s a different kind of heroism: hard-won rather than instinctive. Whether that approach resonates probably depends on what you want from a Superman story, but it at least takes seriously the question of how a person becomes a hero rather than just assuming it happens automatically.

Television: The Long Game

Television, by its nature, has always been the medium best suited to exploring Clark’s journey. A two-hour film can sketch the origin. A ten-season series can actually live inside it.

Adventures of Superman in the 1950s starred George Reeves in a version of Clark that was competent, authoritative, and already fully formed — a Superman who happened to wear glasses at the office rather than a Clark Kent still working toward his destiny. It was enormously popular and established many of the character conventions that would persist for decades.

The animated Superman: The Animated Series (1996-2000), with Tim Daly providing the voice, offered a sleek, confident Clark who was largely comfortable in his heroic identity. Bruce Timm’s animated DC universe had a particular gift for distilling characters to their essentials, and this version of Clark is defined by a kind of calm moral certainty — he knows who he is, and that certainty is both his greatest strength and occasionally his greatest blind spot.

But the series that took the journey most seriously — and stretched it across the longest possible timeline — was Smallville, which ran from 2001 to 2011.

Smallville: The Ten-Year Road

What Alfred Gough and Miles Millar set out to do with Smallville was audacious: tell the story of Clark Kent becoming Superman without ever actually showing Superman. Tom Welling was cast not to play a superhero, but to play a teenager trying desperately to be normal while the universe kept insisting he was anything but. He signed on to play Clark Kent, and he was adamant about that distinction from day one.

That commitment shapes everything about the show. Smallville‘s Clark isn’t confident. He’s not assured. He makes genuinely bad decisions, lets his emotions override his judgment, runs away from his problems with some regularity, and spends roughly six seasons pining for Lana Lang in ways that would try the patience of a saint. He is, in other words, a person — which is exactly the point.

The show understood something important: that heroism is learned, not given. Clark’s powers emerge gradually over the series, but his character develops even more slowly. The death of Jonathan Kent in the 100th episode is the pivotal moment, the point where the creators essentially said that Clark the boy has to make way for Clark the man. The mentor who buffered him from the full weight of the world is gone, and now Clark has to figure out what he’s made of without a safety net.

By the time the series finale arrives, Clark’s decision to finally embrace the Superman identity isn’t presented as a magical transformation. It’s a culmination. Everything — the losses, the failures, the relationships, the long and painful process of learning to balance his human heart with his Kryptonian heritage — has been building to that moment where he runs toward danger and becomes the person he was always capable of being.

Welling’s performance throughout is quietly exceptional. He never plays Clark as a hero in waiting. He plays him as a person who keeps choosing, again and again, to do the right thing even when it costs him enormously. That’s what makes the finale work. We’re not watching someone finally unlock their potential. We’re watching someone finally accept who they already are.

What the Journey Is Really About

Across every medium and every era, the story of Clark Kent becoming Superman keeps returning to the same essential question: What does it actually mean to be a hero?

The answer the mythology consistently offers is that it has almost nothing to do with power. Any number of characters in the DC universe have powers comparable to Superman’s. What separates Clark is the choice — made over and over again — to use those abilities in service of others, at personal cost, without expectation of recognition or reward. Jonathan and Martha Kent didn’t raise a superhero. They raised a good person. The cape is just how that goodness presents itself to the world.

Jules Feiffer once argued that Superman’s real innovation was the Clark Kent persona — that the meek, mild-mannered reporter was the genuine creation, not the caped figure who emerged from behind the glasses. And there’s real truth in that. Clark Kent is the person who chooses to be ordinary, who limits himself, who keeps his head down and does his job and saves the world on his lunch break. That discipline, that choice to remain grounded even when you could simply fly above every problem, is arguably the more impressive feat.

The journey from Krypton to Metropolis, from baby Kal-El to the Man of Steel, is ultimately a story about identity — about figuring out who you are, where you come from, and what you owe to the world around you. It’s a story that resonates because most of us, at some point, have felt like outsiders trying to figure out how to be useful. Most of us have had mentors who shaped us and losses that forced us to grow. Most of us have had to decide, in ways large or small, what kind of person we’re going to be.

Clark Kent just makes that decision while also being able to bench-press a continent. Which, honestly, makes the choice even more impressive. He could do anything. He chooses to do good.

That’s the whole story, really. Everything else is just the costume.