Superman
Action Comics #1, June 1938. The dawn of the superhero coincides almost exactly with the onset of WWII. This was a cultural response at a time when the world needed positive figures who could do what humans couldn’t, in a moment when what humans could do to each other had become catastrophic.
Superman can fly. This is his most mythologically loaded power. Not his strength, not his invulnerability, but the ability to escape the ground entirely. Here, instantly, flight is the ultimate freedom. Flight is the refusal of earthly limitations.
Shifting Attitudes Between Wars
The success of aerial combat in WWI, followed by the first transcontinental, transatlantic, and transpacific flights of the late 1920s and early 1930s, had transformed flight from miracle to fact. Superman arrived in a cultural space where his power of flight empowered those who couldn’t access it to feel like they one day might. Remember, the S on his chest stands for Hope.