Superman, having passed his 85th birthday this June, has meant a lot of things to a lot of people over the years. He's been a standard bearer for American ideals, a universal symbol of American pop culture, and the other side of the long-lived argument about who would win between Batman and Superman. Throughout all of this, though, one of the stories that has stuck with the Man of Steel is that of the immigrant. Clark Kent looks and sounds like an all-American guy, but he wasn't born in the United States. He wasn't even born on planet Earth. He was born on the planet Krypton, sent via spaceship to Earth as the planet collapsed beneath his parents' feet. This story even sticks with Supes in his latest iteration: Adult Swim's My Adventures with Superman.

History has shown that any number of changes can be made to the Superman character--his outfit, his skin color, where he crash-landed, what year he arrived on Earth--but he always begins life as a boy from Krypton who crash-landed onto Earth. He has always been an immigrant, even when stories handled that aspect differently--think of Red Son, when Superman's pod crashed into Russia instead of America, or Flashpoint, when he was kept underground as a lifelong prisoner of the government.

Now, My Adventures with Superman has found some important new ways to explore this idea.