It's partly because no one's read the comic books where he is shown as incredibly relatable and, despite his alien origins, a very human person with his own set of fears.
Seriously, everyone go out and buy Birthright this very second and tell me again that Superman is a "bland" character.
I've always been a bigger Batman fan though, partly because he was what I first started reading when I got into comic books.
Because he has to compete with Batman for our affections, and Batman is just a mortal man with no powers, who uses his own brains and strength to overcome villians greater than he, while having cool gadgets, vehicles and stuff to help him. When he's not fighting crime he's relaxing in his million dollar mansion with his butler and young male "companion" to sate his every need.
Batman is basically every nerds wet dream, Superman has some gamebreakingly unrelatable characteristics to his person:
First of all Superman is an alien, and that makes him on the surface instantly unrelatable. We will never be Superman, because we've already failed the entry requirement by simply being human, but we can be Batman. Anything Batman can do we can imagine ourselves doing, because it technically is possible.
Secondly Superman never had to work to achieve his powers. Superman is different from most other superheroes. Spiderman, The Hulk, Iron Man, The X-men, Green Lanterns all started out as regular-humans, and then became super-human through a process. Superman started out as this super-human entity, and then... nothing really, he had all his powers and strength from the very beginning.
Not only does this make him quite unrelatable, but he gets the appearance of a 'stale' character, since it does not appear that he is having to constantly improve himself to fight greater foes. Iron Man constantly tinkers with his suit to give it more powers, the X-men find new mutants with new powers, Bruce Banner dicks about with his own genetics to make himself stronger, smarter, more in control, etc. Batman gets new gadgets, and profiles new villians, Superman... just fights a bit harder the next time. It seems like he doesn't deserve his powers since it appears that he never has to work for them. He didn't need to train to get super strong, he was naturally as strong as he is now! He didn't need to undergo a weird experiment to learn how to fly, he developed the ability naturally.
This makes it seem like superman is overpowered, as he has everything from the get-go, it's just a matter of him using his powers, and (especially in the movies) the general plot of any villian is 1) Neutralise superman 2) Conquer world. Where 1 seems to work for a while, superman breaks free, and as soon as he's free he uses his powers to stop the villain in 3 seconds flat. It comes off as contrived, and Superman just looks like no one can stop him.
The real shame in all this is that Superman actually has a really well developed character and personality, we just never seem to get past the initial problems, but I think if a movie were able to capture the real conflicts behind Superman's status and personality it would be as good as The Dark Knight:
Thia interview from Grant Morrison is very relevent:
GB: Superman and Batman are the two defining icons among comic books, and now that you've spent considerable time with both of them as a writer, I'm curious how you've come to view them, both as separate figures and as linked opposites.
GM: Superman is very bright and optimistic. It's all the simple things. He's of the day and of the sunlight, and Batman is the creature of the night. I'm interested in the fact that they both believe in the same kind of things. But Batman is better. He's screwed up. Thats what makes him cool. Even though he's solved all his problems in his own head he is, as I see him, a man with a very dark sense of humor and a very dark view of the world. He has to overcome that constantly. He's forever fighting to make the world better, which means it's never good for Batman. The rest of us have good days. We don't fight everyday. Batman fights every single day. He has that dark Plutonian side.
GB: The public personalities of Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent don't seem as polarized as their alter egos.
GM: Bruce Wayne is a rich man. He's an artistocrat. Superman grew up as Clark Kent on a farm bailing hay, and he's got a boss that shouts at him if he's late to work. He's actually more human; Batman is the fetish fantasy psyche of the aristocrat overlord who can do anything he wants, and that's fascinating. The class difference between the two of them is important.
GB: I've never thought much about the class distinctions between the two.
GM: You're an American; you live in Los Angeles! You don't have to think of class distinction in the same way we Brits do. But there is very much a distinction between the two. People often forget Superman is very much a put-upon guy. Bruce has a butler, Clark has a boss ...
GB: True, but Clark also owns real estate in the Arctic, flies for free and can crush coal into fist-sized diamonds. He doesn't need to have a boss.
GM: Yeah, but he so wants to be like us. He pines after one girl while Batman has a whole host of fetish femmes fatale at his beck and call.
GB: The ladies love the car, I think.
GM: Of course. He's got everything. I like that. He's our kind of dream of the aristocrat. He's even better than the Tony Stark/Iron Man thing; he's got that as well as the dark side. That's the difference between Superman and Batman. There both interesting to write, but Batman is the sexier one, definitely.
In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We're all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super-pets, our own "Bottle Cities" that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.
I felt I'd really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That "S" is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.
Batman is obviously much cooler, but that's because he's a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy's Superman day and night.
Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard-working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That's actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman's peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He's much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.
He's Everyman operating on a sci-fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.
EDIT: Or for those who don't like walls of text why not watch this clip and hear the big man himself explain one of his many problems with living on earth, and see him matched against one of the many villians that is stronger than him:
From those sources you can get a clear picture of both Batman and Superman, and why they are so different. Batman is the nerd fantasy. The man with everything; girls, cars, money, and a secret life of fighting crime with a cool suit and gadgets. He is the one we come to for escapism, to have a story about self-insertion heroism, a really cool awesome guy doing cool awesome stuff, and that sort of a thing is really easy to translate over to the silver screen, hence the great Batman movies.
Superman is the one we should be coming to to delve a little deeper into the Superhero psyche. What does it mean to be human, and how are superheroes different? how close can Superman get to the life of a regular joe. Is it even right for him to seek romantic relations with a human? What does it mean to walk among man every single day hiding the power of a God? How can his powers help in situations where there is no answer to be gotten through force? What happens when there is no right answer, but you feel like you have to do something?
These questions would be a lot harder to write a movie about, so we generally get some half-baked schlock about flying around the earth so fast you reverse time, and Lex Luthor destroying the world to make an extra couple of dollars, despite having absolutely no need for any more money.
He just rarely seems threatened by anything, and is slightly too perfect/alien to be relatable. This is going from films only though, never been a Superhero Comic reader.
Considering Superman was first published in 1938, that's actually true. His original power set didn't even include flying or the heat vision. As far as I'm aware, the other major Superman-esque character in fiction was John Carter of Mars.
It is very very easy/tempting to write Superman very badly.
Sure, a Superman story could be done well, but generally won't be. Personally, I think he's at his best when he's not the focus of the story, when he's causing something to happen in someone else's story (Batman too).
IMHO, secondary characters tend to be more interesting than the big names.
Like, you have Batman, who is all "This is my city/I own the night/etc". Then you have Huntress, who is trying to be like Batman, but doing a worse job of fitting in, and who never gets the approval she secretly wants from him, while at the same time rejecting much of his ideals. Then you have Nightwing, who is trying to be Batman, but isn't so callous as him, and wants Huntress and Batman to get along better, but doesn't expect them to, and has a thing for Huntress, but doesn't want to let that get in the way of what he is doing, and neither does she. Then you have Oracle, who is ambivalent about Huntress, supports Batman in his disapproval of her, but only to an extent, and had a thing with Nightwing and so is a bit awkward with Huntress, but recognises she's trying to blah blah blah.
Now, I probably got bits wrong, and they changed that even before the reboot ruined everything forever (oh yes it did), but my point is, Batman is useful to the story even if he doesn't show up. He affects the way all the itneresting people relate to each other.
So, with Superman...I'd like to see a Superboy and a Supergirl off together doing things, and Superman is rendered down into the glue that is splattered around to hold them together. Or something.
Largely? He's a boring invincible hero. Justice League did what I felt was some very good work with his character (particularly his fear of becoming the Justice LORD Superman) but even it acknowledged the sheer power-scale difference between Supes and everyone else, with three scenes doing a particularly good job of illustrating it:
The single thing they were most afraid of during Amazo's debut? That the android would analyze Superman and duplicate his powers, because then nobody else could handle it.
Superman's supposed death resulted in musing on the League's part about Superman's nature as their trump card.
Then there's the world of cardboard speech at the JLU finale which both noted that Superman is always holding back out of fear of killing someone, and that Darkseid was essentially the only person he ever felt could take his full power...which is saying something considering that Darkseid is a literal god who is considered one of the most powerful characters in the DC Universe...and also one of the few credible threats to him.
Let me emphasize that last bit again: One of the few credible threats to Superman is a literal god.
And of course things like this certainly didn't help:
Granted, that kind of corniness was kinda par for the course at the time, but it still managed to highlight a certain flaw: the authors were trying far too hard to make superman perfect, and their greatest failure was that they came too close to success. Supes often came off less as a hero and more of a god, and that's a good deal of his legacy. A few writers do make him interesting, but it's too easy to flub it.
Have you ever read the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?" It's a story about a perfect society and how no one believes it exists until they realize that perfection is built on a foundation of deliberately inflicted human misery; the life-long torture of a single child. Once that horror is described, then people believe that a place like Omelas can exist, even though it's never explained how that torture accomplishes anything. So long as something is rotten, people will believe it.
I think Superman strikes people as an unbelievable character because he lacks that foundation of rottenness. Superman is (or at least was, before the relaunch of DC's properties) a metaphor for hope. He had enough power to enslave all of humanity at any moment despite what precautions anyone else might take, yet instead of fulfilling those fears, he lived up to what we hoped he would be, and became a protector of humanity who never believed himself any better than anyone else and therefore never exerted his will to enforce his sense of morality over that of the public.
Superman exists as to serve as a beacon of hope. If your back is against an alley wall and a gun is your face, you hope that, somehow, you'll get out of it well; and Superman's appearance fulfills that hope. Everything turns out okay.
That is where the difficulty in writing Superman lies. Superman has the ability to make everything turn out okay, and drama depends on the reasonable threat that things won't be okay, that something bad will happen that the protagonist might not be able to overcome. Superman's power level makes this threat unlikely, so one has to either look elsewhere for the drama in the story or else just take pleasure in seeing how the story unfolds before its inevitable and largely predictable end.
Honestly, the idea that Superman is a boring character is nonsense to me. A character is defined by how he's written, so complaints ought to be leveled against how a given writer presents him, not how the character himself behaves. After all, he can't behave in any fashion except how a writer tells him to.
I dislike superman for the same reason I dislike Elminster and began to dislike Drizzt (though for him I am interested in seeing what happens in the transitions books and beyond. Anyway, back on topic).
Regardless of how powerful they make the enemies out to be, the basis for the character is too overpowered to be interesting to me.
The honest truth about Superman is that I really can't find anything to like about him.
Hes too overpowered and his powers are uncreative.
Unrelateable.
Bland personality.
In fact I dislike him so much, I usually root for Lex Luther instead, I'm pretty sure that isn't supposed to happen?
I think the issue with Superman is that he is too much of the symbol he is supposed to be. Superman makes sense as an incarnation of hope, truth, justice, and basically all of humanity's good qualities, but he doesn't really make sense as a character. That makes the interesting parts in all of his story's become how the rest of society deals with the mere fact of his existence.
The only superman comic that I have is Red Son, and it's really good because it actually makes that the focus. It makes Superman a Communist hero and then basically watches the rest of the world react to that.
Superman isn't usually popular among teenagers and young adults, but it's not really his fault. Children and adults tend to like Superman a lot more. Children because Superman is "Mr. Happy Ending." The guy who is good enough and powerful enough to guarantee the boogeymen won't win. Adults like him because of that the stories where he doesn't win, at least not right away. His failures just make his victories that much more meaningful, which to an adult reminds them to keep hoping for a brighter tomorrow.
Teenagers and young adults are usually far more cynical and jaded, and thus find the notion of such a powerful person being righteous and good to be unacceptable. They like to be reminded of the cruelty of the world, and while most of them still want to see the good guys win, they want to see him suffer for it. Batman appeals to this notion in many cases.
It's not all-inclusive, of course. I love Superman, and count him as my second favorite superhero of all time (behind the Flash) and I'm only 22. Children can love Batman, blah blah. I'm just speaking to trends that I've noticed. If you think I'm completely wrong, well, fuck it. I tried.
I also want to point out that most people, regardless of age, don't HATE Superman. He's the epitome of good, to hate him would certainly make you seem... not-so-good. People find him boring or uninteresting, but you'd be hard pressed to find many people who outright HATE Superman, especially if they like other superheroes. Superman is the ORIGINAL superhero (at least in the way we know them). All other heroes have a at least a little Superman in them.
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