Ever since I could remember as a kid, Superman’s greatest threat and vulnerabilities were either Kryptonite or secret identity exposure, as in someone, his enemies, seeing through his Clark Kent disguise and threatening the people he loves and cares about the most. A long time ago, when I discovered DC Comics and Superman, it was the early 1970s and comic book 

Superheroes from DC were extremely sophisticated in both art illustration and storytelling, far more than anything any fan of the genre had seen since their creation in the 1930s. No sooner I had discovered Superman at that bookstore, than Batman followed, it was just a visit a few weeks later to the bookstore and on the rack was another comic book superhero, Batman, that wasn’t when I purchased my first ever Superman issue.

I am not sure if the bookstore owner had just started getting deliveries of the DC titles or if they already stocked them but I just didn’t notice them the first time around.

And I found scores of them, bound together in big hardcover tomes, each one was a collection of 20 to 30 issues, professionally glued and bound, adorned with a full-color reproduction of the cover of one of the comics in the collection.  The big drawback? They werent always sequential in issue dates but, hey, many of them were.

Funny enough, it would more than a year or more before I would get my first Flash issue.  So for a while I was scouring the market, looking for back issues of Batman and Superman (all from the 70s) than the current editions sold at my neighborhood bookstore.

In those days, Superman’s arch enemies counted Brainiac, accidental replicas of Superman himself, giant alien creatures living underneath the earth’s surface, alien visitors from the future or far away galaxies and of course Lex Luthor, the perennial favorite evil doer, a deviously murderous twisted genius looking to uncover any leverage against the Man of Tomorrow.

Finally, both Lois Lane and in some instances another woman (guest co-worker, someone from Superman’s or Superboy’s past or something) with similar instincts and suspicions would be periodically featured as Superman’s weakness and nipping on his heels eager to unmask his secret identity.

Over the course of decades the Superman Identity weakness became a crutch of sorts, not just for the character of Kal-El, but for the writers creating the storylines for DC.  After all, Superman is one of the most powerful dudes ever, not just in the world of DC and Marvel, not just in our galaxy, but in the entire cosmos.

To the writers, they stopped trying to invent a really tough dilemma for him, his identity became the go-to issue.