Superman is dead. Not for the first time – he died once before in 1993 – but almost certainly the last. It was on the front cover of all the big papers: the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Daily Planet.

Of course, it was not really Superman, or even Clark Kent; it was Christopher Reeve, the man who shot to fame playing Superman on film, and cheated death himself in the 1990s. For a few hours in the media cycle though, it certainly seemed as though Superman himself was dead. The Man of Steel is gone. What heroes are left that could hope to replace him?

Right now, superheroes have caught the public imagination like never before. The meteoric success of 2002's Spiderman film kick-started the movement, and Spiderman has been joined on the silver screen by many of his Marvel stable mates – the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil. New champions of justice appear on the comic-store shelves with ever-increasing regularity. But though there are plenty of heroes to choose from, they might not be quite what we are looking for.

At the moment, the heroes splurged across cinema-screens and merchandise all have their origins in the Silver Age of comics, the 1960s, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby churned out comics that explored the dangerous burden of heroism. All these heroes are flawed, or tragic; their heroism always has a price to pay.

But Superman's roots are older; he goes back to the Golden Age of the thirties and forties, where heroism was far simpler. Good and Evil were far more clear-cut. And when it came to fighting evil, it was not just Lex Luthor or the Green Goblin that presented heroes with mortal danger.

The Golden Age heroes leaped off the page and into the real world, where they took on global "villainy" – as their creators saw it. Captain America's shield was first put to use fighting the Nazis; one early cover shows him in a fistfight with Hitler himself. Superman showed how he could have ended World War II by dragging both Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations.

In the Silver Age, morals became less clear-cut. Captain America, reborn into the Cold War, witnessed Richard Nixon's suicide in 1973 – a parallel universe's response to Watergate. Marvel's heroes were never going to leap to the call-to-arms of Vietnam; they were all unfortunate by-products of government activity – nuclear testing, experimentation, space exploration. And, whilst their country may have created them, it turned its back on them. Exiled from normal society, it is no wonder they represented the fears and voices of a generation of youths better than the establishment or their parents.

These 60s heroes had evolved from their 40s counterparts; they left the conflicts of the real world behind them. They had enough trouble amongst their own, fighting supervillains; why would the super-men get involved in the conflicts of normal man? The internal debates of Lee and Kirby developed into a pessimistic 1980s, epitomised in Alan Moore's Watchmen, where a generation of superheroes are shown to have become flabby, old and impotent.

This downward spiral ironically culminates in one of the real heroes of our time: Spider Jerusalem. Spider, an investigative journalist, is the anti-hero of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan. The comic depicts a corrupt, decrepit and ugly future society, seen through Spider's eyes. He crusades against the scum of the streets and campaigns against a corrupt government fighting for re-election.

Spider may have had a black heart, and a devil-may-care attitude, but he refuses to stand by whilst society burrows itself further into the dirt. More than Superman, more than Spiderman, this lone man taking a stand with only his words – and a high-powered bowel disruptor – is perhaps the most appropriate hero of a twenty-first century people.

But Ellis created Spider Jerusalem at the turn of the second millennium for a twenty-first century audience. Most of the heroes still in print were born in the middle of the last century. The writers and artists working on today’s superhero comics grew up with the characters and books they now produce. Putting words into the mouth of a childhood idol, one cannot help but make those words idealistic and optimistic. Whatever these books lack, they still have hope.

That is the real importance of superheroes in the modern world. They do not exist to protect us, but to inspire us. If they fail in doing that, it is only because we have grown pessimistic in our old age. Superman harks back to a more idealistic, more moral era, and ultimately, to childhood.

Superman was created in 1935 as America clawed its way out of the Great Depression. From being a symbol of hope for a country in hard times, he became a symbol of hope for the whole world. His lasting impression on the world will always be hope, and it was hope that Christopher Reeve himself ultimately came to embody.

That is why, for a few scant hours in the news-cycle, the top headline all over the news was the death of an actor most famous for a terrible accident he suffered and wearing his pants over his trousers. For, in those hours, it looked like hope had died.