In popular culture

• The comic-book hero Superman, when Jerome "Jerry" Siegel first created him, was originally a villain modeled on Nietzsche's idea (see "The Reign of the Superman").
• Jack London dedicated his novels The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden to criticizing Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch and his radical individualism, which London considered to be selfish and egoistic.
• George Bernard Shaw's 1903 play Man and Superman is a reference to the archetype; its main character considers himself an untameable revolutionary, above the normal concerns of humanity.
• James Joyce utilizes the Übermensch in the first chapter of his novel Ulysses. Joyce makes Buck Mulligan say it: "—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen."
• In The Power (novel), a 1956 book by Frank M. Robinson, the villain consciously models himself upon Nietzsche's Übermensch, and a quotation from Nietzsche serves as the book's motto.
• In real life, Leopold and Loeb committed murder in 1924 partly out of a superficially Übermensch-like conception of themselves. Their story has been dramatized many times, including in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rope, the 1959 film Compulsion based on Meyer Levin's novel, the 1994 film Swoon, the 2002 movie Murder by Numbers, and the 2005 Off-Broadway musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story.
• A character in the show Dollhouse (Season 1, Episode 12; titled "Omega") references Übermensch in relation to Nietzsche when trying to describe a person that had the memories, skills, and intelligence of dozens of people uploaded into their (single) mind by means of futuristic technology.