In the prehistoric days before Parallel Worlds – i.e., last Sunday — the Post ran a piece I did on Superman’s relevance in the 21st century, this being his 75th anniversary and all.

A lot of you might have missed it, so if you’re interested, you can read it here.

Included was a sidebar on DC’s Superman Unchained by Scott Snyder and Jim Lee, which debuts this Wednesday and a rating of the various iterations of Superman over the decades.

As a little bonus on this Saturday, here’s a quick Q&A I did on the subject with Larry Tye, whose “Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero” was published by Random House last year.

Q: With the world embracing ever-darker heroes or antiheroes, how relevant do you think Superman is in the 21st century? Is he really now just a corporate logo?

A: We already have plenty of dark heroes like Batman and more than enough fraught heroes like Spider-Man. Our world — with its persistent economic woes and endless overseas entanglements — happens to look a lot like the troubled world of 1938, when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced us to Superman and fans from Boston to Buenos Aires embraced him.

The Man of Steel may seem to some too old-fashioned and Dudley-Do-Rightish, but that constancy and purity are reassuring. They are what make Superman not merely the oldest of our superheroes but the most transcendent. He is, to me at least, timeless as well as ageless.

Q: Which version of Superman (social crusader of the 30s, patriotic symbol of the ‘40s, the Silver Age god among men, the affable Christopher Reeve/John Byrne boy scout of the ‘70s and ‘80s) do you think worked the best and why? Is that version now an anachronism?

A: I am most drawn to Jerry and Joe’s butt-kicking New Dealer of the 1930s. It’s partly that that early vision seemed so suited to that era, and that today we seem to be yearning for precisely that sort of crusading Champion of the Underdog.

Over the last 75 years, each generation has gotten the Superman it needed and deserved. And each change in the hero offered a Rorschach test of the pulse of that time and its dreams.

Q: What do you think of today’s Superman comics? Do you read the New 52? Why or why not?

A: I like his ongoing evolution, even when it has him abandoning the newspaper world I devoted most of my career to. Superman as blogger? How fun.

I don’t read his comics as much as I’d like to, however, because I am deep into research on another book on another of my childhood heroes (Robert F. Kennedy).

Q: With “Man of Steel,” do you think fans will respond to a more questioning Superman, one who is more of a seeker?

A: If Warner Bros. stays true to Superman’s essence — his instinctive grasp of right and wrong, his sense of the limits of his powers and his understanding as to how he should use them, and the reassuring predictability that, in the end, he’ll come out on top — then I think fans will respond big-time. Superman has always been a seeker and questioner, but within the limits of his getting what the world is about and what his role should be.

Q: Are you going to see the movie?

A: YES, hopefully first in line.

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