I agree that it is more likely to be after, but then fans who grow up with those comics become writers and repeat the same trends, maybe even missing the point of the early serious stuff and just doubling down on shallow repetitions of it (like the responses to Watchmen and TDKR), and then other fans eat that up. While it maybe started with writers, at this point it might be a two way street.
I think it's a matter of if the reader/viewer understands and empathizes with the inherent challenges the hero has to overcome. Batman? I can't empathize with him. So to me his moral philosophizing comes across as empty rhetoric and meaningless drivel. Batman doesn't even know what some of his demons are sometimes. It's hard to say he faces them when he doesn't always even know them.
Superman's conflict is that he has this idea of what he should be, a goal that normal people would see as impossible and not even try to achieve. He inspires other people (such as Livewire) by showing them what they could be. But, like with Livewire, that's not as easy as smiling and saying hi to people. In some ways that's harder than what Batman does. Being mild-mannered when dealing with someone who insults you for just being there? That's not easy. It's the sort of tedious challenge that is hard because of how tedious it is.
Also... the bit about them being vigilantes has less weight when(in Justice League) they have a headquarters and PR staff.
Today's controversial Superman opinion: he's smarter than Batman. Easily.
Never actually seen Superman III. May have to give it a look...
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“Look, you can’t put the Superman #77s with the #200s. They haven’t even discovered Red Kryptonite yet. And you can’t put the #98s with the #300s, Lori Lemaris hasn’t even been introduced.” — Sam
“Where the hell are you from? Krypton?” — Edgar Frog
Superman's intelligence when it comes to science is highly dependent on the writer and while he is actually rarely written as an idiot, to say he is as smart as Batman is debatable at best.
My controversial opinion is that fans greatly overestimate Kryptonian intelligence and the desire for them to be smarter than humans is an overreaction to perceived mistreatment of Superman over the years.
So all the fantastic elements from Krypton and the rocket which traveled the cosmos and corrected it's path midflight to dodge event horizons (stationary and roving), asteroids, stars going nova, etc are just because Superman fans have sour grapes over Batman's intelligence doubling every passing year?
I guess the Phantom Zone projector really is just a view master.
They were objectively more advanced than us. Come on.