It is that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817

The nice thing about Coleridge’s explanation of what makes poetry work is that it applies to much more than poetry. Nearly two centuries later, we know that we cry at sad movies, get angry at villains in novels, are thrilled by special effects because we voluntarily suspend our disbelief in all of these encounters, and pretend that what we know to be fiction is real. Unlike a roller-coaster ride in which there is a chance, however slim, that we can really lose our lives, our gasps at a horror or science fiction movie come completely from the success of temporarily believing that we can lose our lives, when we know full well that we cannot. The more effective the presentation in eliciting this grand pretense, the more highly we prize it.

Comic books in general and Superman in particular are no strangers to this wonderful wheeling and dealing with our emotions. A human-like alien from another planet with superpowers is easy for fans to believe. All right, as a kid I always wondered why Superman didn’t use his x-ray vision to look though women’s clothing, but this super-morality was a minor part of an otherwise convincing catalog of super-strength, super-speed, long-distance seeing and hearing, flying and leaping and weakness to Kryptonite. With one glaring exception.

Why didn’t Superman use his powers to stop the German Blitzkrieg and the  …