"The Reign of the Superman" (January 1933) is a short story written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by Joe Shuster.

High school friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster tried selling stories to magazines in order to escape Depression-era poverty.

[10] A chemist named Professor Ernest Smalley randomly chooses raggedly dressed vagrant Bill Dunn from a bread line and recruits him to participate in an experiment in exchange for "a real meal and a new suit".

The Super Man vanquishes the equally evil Smalley, who had intended to kill Dunn first as a dog-eat-dog attempt to give himself the same successfully-tested super powers, Dunn realizes that this was a horrible mistake by not keeping Smalley alive to torture and interrogate the secret formula from him, and instead found himself desperately using his low-level knowledge to recreate it.

As the story ends, Dunn's powers wear off and he realizes he will be returning to the bread line to be a forgotten man once more.

Siegel thought that a superman who was a hero could make a great comic character, and conceived one bearing little resemblance to his villainous namesake.