superhero

The first modern comic books

The modern comic strip developed in the United States in the late 19th century, with comedic characters such as the Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids giving rise to “the funnies” or “funny papers.” An anthology of Sunday newspaper strips, Famous Funnies #1 debuted as a monthly periodical in May 1934, acknowledged as the precursor to the conventional comic book.

Parallel with the rise of comics and comic books came pulp magazines, which catered to readers craving adventure and thrills. The “pulps” were tremendously popular, particularly in the 1920s through the 1940s. From anthologies like Weird Tales to solo titles featuring mysterious heroes like The Shadow (whose pulp series lasted 326 issues from 1931 to 1949), the pulps offered breathtaking action and suspense.

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These two modes of popular culture eventually converged. National Allied Publications, a publishing house founded in 1935, released New Fun #1 in February of that year. It was the first comic-book series exclusively consisting of comic strips. Adventure-oriented comics with new material followed, most notably Detective Comics #1, released in March 1937 by the publisher that would become DC.

The birth of the superhero

In the first four decades of the 20th century, notable and popular fictional characters foreshadowed and inspired the superheroes to come. The first was Hugo Hercules, who had the strength of his classical namesake, but whose short run (1902–1903) spoke to the limited possibilities of his storyline. Hugo was followed by Zorro in prose and film, Doc Savage in pulp magazines, the Shadow in the pulps and on radio, the Green Hornet on radio, and the Phantom in comic strips. The first masked crime fighter in comic books was the Clock, whom Centaur Publications introduced in 1936.

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DC Comics introduced the first costumed superhero, Superman, in Action Comics #1 (June 1938). Superman’s creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, had unsuccessfully tried to sell the series to newspaper syndicates as a daily strip. DC then took an enormous risk in 1938 by publishing the untried character, but Action #1 sold beyond all expectations. Superman perfectly personified the superhero as defined today: a heroic character with an altruistic mission who possesses superpowers, wears a defining costume, and functions in the “real world” in his or her alter ego. Superman would soon have many successors.

In Superman’s footsteps

Encouraged by Superman’s success, DC introduced the Crimson Avenger in Detective #20 (October 1938), the Sandman in New York World’s Fair Comics #1 (April 1939), and Batman in Detective #27 (May 1939). It published Superman #1, spinning off the “Man of Steel” into his own solo series, in the summer of 1939.

Victor Fox, an accountant for DC Comics, started his own publishing company, Fox Features Syndicate. His first character, appearing only once, was a clear takeoff on Superman called Wonder Man, created by Will Eisner. Fox later introduced the Flame, the Green Mask, and the Blue Beetle.

A publisher that would later become DC’s chief competitor entered the field in November 1939: Timely Comics. Its first superheroes—the first Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and the original Angel—premiered that month in an anthology that bore the eventual name of the company: Marvel Comics #1.

The superhero boom

The years 1940 and 1941 heralded an eruption of new comic-book superheroes. Included among their legion were DC’s the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Starman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman; Fawcett Publications’ Spy Smasher, Bulletman, Ibis the Invincible, and the “World’s Mightiest Mortal,” Captain Marvel; plus Cat-Man, Plastic Man, Midnight, Magno (the Magnetic Man), Daredevil, and the Spirit.

Superhero subcategories also quickly arose. For example, there were the sidekicks, preteen or teenage junior superheroes who worked alongside their adult mentors. Starting this trend was Robin the Boy Wonder, first seen in Detective #38. Robin was introduced by Batman creator Bob Kane as a gateway for young readers to live vicariously through their hero’s adventures and as a means to soften the rather gruesome tone of Batman’s first year of publication, in which the character, originally more antihero than superhero, hurled mobsters off rooftops. Indeed, Batman was the first superhero who lacked extraordinary powers as such, battling villains—usually ordinary criminals—with an advanced arsenal and uncanny logic.

More young heroes followed, among them Toro and Captain Marvel Jr. Superheroines also began to appear in the man’s world of superheroics: Wonder Woman, the Woman in Red, Phantom Lady, Lady Luck, and Black Cat were among the first. These two subcategories dovetailed with the introduction of female sidekicks, such as Flame Girl, Hawk-girl, Mary Marvel, and Cat-Man’s partner, Kitten. And in the winter of 1940, the superteam was born, as the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and other DC superheroes joined forces as the Justice Society of America.

Most of these early superheroes had secret identities: they generally obtained their superpowers through accidental, often scientifically based occurrences, or by power-inducing devices; they hid their actual identities behind a mask, a costume, and often a cape; they adopted a flamboyant appellation; they engaged in bizarre or outlandish escapades, and they dedicated their lives and their abilities to fighting crime—or Nazis.

World War II

Superheroes, like ordinary citizens, rushed to join the war effort. Superman, a symbol of American patriotism in his blue-and-red uniform, fought tyrants and dictators and even apprehended both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, who were then allies, in a special comic prepared in 1940 for Look magazine. Captain Marvel and other superheroes also battled Nazi and Japanese soldiers on the covers of their comics, even before the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the conflict.

MU Publications, later known as Archie Comics, introduced the first specifically patriotic superhero: the Shield, in Pep Comics #1 (January 1940), a red-white-and-blue-garbed crime fighter who used his superpowers, obtained from a secret formula, to protect American soil from enemy saboteurs and spies. The best-known patriotic superhero premiered in March 1941: Marvel (then Timely) Comics’ Captain America, who took a government-invented “super soldier serum” to transform into a superhero. The Shield and Captain America were two of a contingent of starred-and-striped heroes who appeared prior to and after America’s entrance in the war: Miss Victory, U.S. Jones, the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy (a kid hero with an adult sidekick), Yankee Girl, and Minute-Man (the One Man Army) were just some of the dozens of superpatriots of the World War II era. Even Uncle Sam, the symbol of U.S. Army recruitment, was a superhero during the 1940s.

Real-life German and Japanese soldiers inspired fictional foes in Golden Age comic books, including Captain Nazi, the Red Skull, Baron Gestapo, Captain Nippon, and Captain Swastika. The Claw, a jaundiced “Oriental” with fearsome fangs, appeared in Gleason Publications’ Dare-devil series, as did Hitler himself in the legendary Daredevil Battles Hitler #1 (a.k.a. Daredevil #1) in 1941.

Comics sell millions

The comic-book industry flourished from a mere six companies in the pre-Superman days of 1936 to two dozen by the early 1940s. A 1943 Newsweek article stated that 25 million copies of comic books were being sold each month. By the mid-1940s, eager would-be publishers were blockaded from entering this expanding field by the paper shortages of World War II. Kids were encouraged to donate their used comics to paper drives, resulting in their rarity and consequent high prices in the 21st century.

Although no one at the time referred to it as such, this era of comics, particularly superhero comics, is considered the medium’s Golden Age. In retrospect, the era is better remembered for its novelty and profusion, not for the quality of its material.

There were exceptions, though. One excellent series was Quality Comics’ Kid Eternity, first seen in Hit Comics #25 (December 1942). Other standouts highly regarded by collectors and historians include the charming Captain Marvel tales whimsically drawn by C.C. Beck, Kurt Schaffenberger, and other artists; Jerry Robinson’s interpretation of the villainous Joker in Batman #1 (1940); Bill Everett’s breathtaking underwater scenes in Sub-Mariner; Alex Schomburg’s bold covers for Captain America and other patriotic series; Will Eisner’s groundbreaking, splash-page designs in The Spirit; and almost anything drawn by virtuosos Jack Kirby, Reed Crandall, and Lou Fine.

The Cold War and self-censorship code

The end of World War II nearly marked the end of the superhero, as the number of superhero titles dwindled. Publishers went out of business, and those that survived pivoted not on superheroes but on new genres of comics like funny animals, Westerns, horror, crime, romance, and science fiction, although sales of such titles were lucky to reach half of the readership generated during the World War II boom.

Common themes also changed. Postwar America was gripped by the fear of nuclear war and the spread of communism, and comics reflected the audience’s awareness of both. The cover of Captain Marvel Adventures #66 (1946) depicts the hero standing amid a decimated city, with warheads sailing his way, its blurb proclaiming, “Captain Marvel Battles the Dread Atomic War!” Superman lamented nuclear warfare, even as radiation-spawned monsters became a recurring theme in superhero comics by the 1950s; Plastic Man fought giant ants, and Batman and Robin were plagued by giant bees. Marvel Comics, which had canceled its superhero comics in the late 1940s, resurrected Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch as “Commie busters” in the early 1950s, and artist Jack Kirby and his partner Joe Simon launched a short-lived superhero parody, Fighting American. Parodies piled atop parodies in another popular comic book, Mad magazine, with characters such as Superduperman and Captain Klutz.

By the mid-1950s, only DC’s Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman continued to star in their own titles. It was during this time that Frederic Wertham, a psychologist, published a 1954 book titled Seduction of the Innocent, indicting comic books for causing juvenile delinquency and moral decay among youth. In response, the Senate Judiciary Committee created a Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, which held widely publicized hearings between April and June 1954 to investigate the validity of Wertham’s claims. Rather than fall under the wrath of the federal government, in September of that year the comic-book industry created the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), an organization made up of all comic-book publishers that wanted to get their comic books distributed. The CMAA immediately went to work adopting the self-censoring Comics Code Authority (CCA), whose 41 standards described strict editorial guidelines for depicting sex, crime, horror, and violence within the pages of comics.

Despite the industry’s voluntary self-censorship, most comics publishers went out of business or canceled entire lines of books during the 1950s, while those that remained—most notably, DC—diluted their stories in an effort to meet the requirements of the code and to appeal to a nation in the thrall of strict moral standards. Sales shrank even more as many parents forbade their children to read comics. It was the end of the Golden Age of superheroes.

Saving the genre, revamping past heroes

In 1956 DC Comics, struggling to find new concepts that might attract readers, introduced a “tryout” title, Showcase, in which new characters were introduced and others revived.

Marvel’s rise: the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man

Julius Schwartz indirectly contributed to yet another substantial event: the advent of the Marvel Age of comics. Martin GoodmanMarvel Comics had just a handful of monster and thriller series and needed a boost, and so publisher Martin Goodman directed his staff editor and writer Stan Lee to create a group of superheroes to compete with Justice League. Lee took the mandate as an opportunity to introduce an innovative, intelligent group of superheroes. The result was Lee’s creation, along with artist Jack Kirby, of Marvel’s premier superteam and its flagship title: Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961).

The Fantastic Four’s complex characters—stuffy scientist Reed Richards, a.k.a. the malleable Mr. Fantastic; his shy fiancée, Sue Storm, the disappearing Invisible Girl; her fiery-tempered teen brother, Johnny, better known as the new Human Torch; and Richards’s brusque friend, ace pilot Ben Grimm, the grotesque man-monster called the Thing—each had personality quirks that frequently thrust the “FF” into verbal and physical conflict, yet they set their differences aside in times of crisis. They were a family, and the most realistically portrayed comic-book heroes that readers had ever seen. Fantastic Four instantly became Marvel’s best-seller.

The Fantastic Four may have been inspired by the JLA, but they shared no other traits. The FF was the JLA through a refractive lens. The Justice Leaguers exemplified camaraderie and teamwork, its members (except for Aquaman) concealed their true identities behind their colorful superguises, and its heroes lived in fictional cities (Metropolis, Gotham City, Central City, and others); on the other hand, the FF bickered incessantly, they saw no reason to conceal their superpowers behind alter egos, and they resided in the “real” world city of New York.

Over the next few years, Lee—with Kirby, Steve Ditko, and other artists—unleashed a plethora of problem-plagued powerhouses, including the gamma-irradiated Incredible Hulk; the mighty Thor, god of thunder; the occult-based Doctor Strange; the sightless superhero Daredevil; and the outcast society of mutants known as the X-Men. Golden Age stalwarts Sub-Mariner and Captain America were rejuvenated and fought against and/or alongside the newer Marvel characters. But the breakaway superhero in the burgeoning Marvel universe was the Amazing Spider-Man, who, behind his webbed mask, was actually an angst-ridden teenager named Peter Parker. Marvel’s offbeat, flawed superheroes were embraced by the 1960s counterculture, particularly on college campuses.

With each new series, the differences between Marvel’s and DC’s titles became progressively apparent. DC’s villains were usually stereotyped scofflaws with gimmicky weapons, whereas Marvel’s were Cold War spies, grandiloquent warlords, and rotten rabble-rousers with superpowers of their own. DC’s heroes usually met as allies when battling a common enemy, but Marvel’s heroes generally clashed within moments of an encounter. DC’s stories were more traditionally based good-versus-evil yarns, while Marvel sometimes dealt with issues like campus unrest and corrupt politicians. Yet certain formulas still held, among them the assumption that ordinary law was insufficient to curb the evil done by supervillains, requiring superheroes who worked outside the law to combat them.

“Batmania” inspires TV superheroes

Batman (1966–68), the TV series starring Adam West in the title role, premiered on ABC in January 1966 to instant acclaim. The show satisfied a wide demographic spread—children, mesmerized by its action; teens, especially girls, for the fashions and heartthrob Burt Ward as Robin the Boy Wonder; and adults, in tune with the camp humor and double entendres. The result was “Batmania” and a flurry of new action series.

Superheroes invaded the television airwaves: Space Ghost, The Green Hornet, The New Adventures of Superman, and Aquaman were among the live-action and animated entries. Many of Marvel’s characters starred in cartoon programs: Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Sub-Mariner rotated days on the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes, and both Fantastic Four and Spider-Man appeared on Saturday-morning TV amid a wealth of related toys and consumer-product tie-ins.

Marvel’s rise to prominence caused changes throughout the industry, especially at DC. Popular artist Carmine Infantino was instated as DC’s art director in 1967, with the mission of making the line’s covers more appealing to readers. Infantino was soon appointed editorial director and ordered to take on Marvel to regain his company’s former stature. He shook up the status quo: Wonder Woman was stripped of her superpowers; Amazing Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko defected to DC to launch the offbeat superhero comics Beware the Creeper and The Hawk and the Dove; and superstar artist Neal Adams began to transform Batman from a masked detective to a dark avenger of the night.

But Marvel’s superheroes still continued to outsell DC’s at the end of the 1960s. DC ended the Silver Age with the same dilemma it faced at the beginning of the era: how to make its superhero comics popular again.

Minority characters: a growing diversity

After World War II and into the 1950s, superheroes evoked a more unified worldview, echoing the ever-growing postwar civil rights movement. Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick in the Western series, received his own comic book from Dell (1951–59), which appeared on the stands with Magazine Enterprises’ Straight Arrow (1950–56), starring a Native American protagonist who fought rustlers and white thieves. Superman and Batman joined England’s Knight and Squire, France’s Musketeer, South America’s Gaucho, and Italy’s Legionary in “The Club of Heroes” in World’s Finest Comics #89 (1957).

There were exceptions to this growing depiction of diversity. Blacks mostly disappeared from comics, and the spread of communism made villains of Russians and Chinese, trends that continued into the 1960s. Prize Comics’ Fighting American (1954–55) lampooned Soviets with bad guys like Poison Ivan. Marvel even devoted a short-lived series to an “Oriental” villain: The Yellow Claw (1956–57), starring a sinister mastermind who embodied every negative stereotype ever assigned to Asians. Yet the series also introduced a positive Chinese American character: FBI agent Jimmy Woo, a highly trained and resourceful lawman dedicated to bringing the Yellow Claw to justice.

A growing sensitivity continued in the 1960s. After writer/editor Stan Lee inaugurated the Marvel universe with the publication of Fantastic Four #1 (1961), he placed his superheroes in New York City instead of a fictional metropolis, and Marvel’s artists started drawing people of color into the comics. At first, the multicultural inclusions were subtle, like a Black pedestrian in the background, but by the mid-1960s, nonwhites ascended to positions of prominence, reflecting the impact of the civil rights movement. In Fantastic Four #50 (1966) Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Native American Wyatt Wingfoot, who became a long-standing supporting-cast member in the series. In issue #52 (1966) Lee and Kirby created Prince T’Challa, better known as the Black Panther, the first Black superhero in mainstream comics. Marvel’s first African American superhero, the Falcon, followed in 1969. And agent Jimmy Woo returned in Marvel’s Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., engaging in high-tech espionage epics that borrowed heavily from the James Bond movies.

None of Lee’s series better advocated cultural tolerance than X-Men. First seen in 1963, the X-Men were mutants—the next step on the evolutionary ladder—who fought to protect the humans who distrusted them. While a ground-breaking metaphor for racial harmony, X-Men originally played it safe, making each of its mutant characters Caucasian. Despite the multicultural inroads paved by Lee and other Marvel writers during the 1960s, Cold War stereotyping had yet to fade: Iron Man’s origin was rooted in the Vietnam War, and the hero battled the Chinese troublemaker, Mandarin, and a Vietcong villain named Wong Chu. Despite occasional unflattering portrayals, Marvel’s comics depicted a world of color and diversity, even with the company’s misfit heroes, the green Hulk and the orange Thing.

When ABC’s live-action The Green Hornet (1966–67) TV show debuted, its producers expected its lead, Van Williams, to become a heartthrob, but Asian import Bruce Lee, playing sidekick Kato, stole the show with his dazzling martial arts abilities. Lee was one of the few nonwhite actors on television at the time, but before long people of varying ethnicities became more visible, with DC Comics in particular sounding calls for ethnic tolerance.

Gardner Fox

Superheroes become socially “relevant”

Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (1970) was a revolutionary step forward for DC Comics. It borrowed from Marvel Comics’ propensity toward argumentative superheroes, but with “GL” and “GA,” their struggles were ideological debates. GL, a power-ring-wielding intergalactic cop, represented the conservative right, while GA was a hero of the people. With artist Neal Adams, O’Neil took this groundbreaking series into realms political, radical, and racial, but the market was unprepared for its level of sophistication, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow was canceled with issue #89 (1972). Green Lantern/Green Arrow proved, however, that superheroes’ exploits could involve matters beyond skirmishes with supervillains.

For the first few years of the 1970s, contemporary thematic material—dubbed “relevance” by those in the business—became common in many DC books: Robin the Teen (formerly “Boy”) Wonder left Batman for college and took on campus unrest, Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon went to Washington, D.C., to tackle crime as a congresswoman, and the Justice League of America battled polluters. Having revitalized long-running DC heroes from the Flash to Batman, editor Julius Schwartz now took charge of Superman. Superman #233 (1971) started a new era for DC’s flagship hero, updating his alter ego, Clark Kent, to a television reporter and eliminating his weakness to kryptonite, but those changes were short-lived. Schwartz also oversaw a revitalization of Batman for the second time. Batman’s tales, in his own series and in Detective Comics, shied away from this relevance trend and veered more into gothic terrain, returning the hero to his original, baleful nature.

Marvel breaks new ground: from the undead to Wolverine

A three-issue, anti-drug story Stan Lee penned for The Amazing Spider-Man #96 through #98 (1971) was rejected by the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Lee lobbied Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to resist the CCA and print the issues, which Marvel did without the Code’s seal of approval. It was the first time a major comic-book publisher had exercised such defiance. The CCA, in response, relaxed some of its requirements to more adequately address societal changes.

One of those liberalizations permitted the depiction of the undead, which had been taboo since the implementation of the CCA in the mid-1950s. Marvel took full advantage of this, fostering a 1970s horror-comics fad with titles including Ghost Rider, The Son of Satan, Man-Thing, The Tomb of Dracula, and Werewolf by Night. (DC published its applauded Swamp Thing series during this period.)

Marvel steered two other Bronze Age industry movements: “sword and sorcery,” beginning in 1970 with its adaptations and continuations of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy hero Conan the Barbarian; and Kung Fu, through Master of Kung Fu, Iron Fist and others. And a cinema trend—“blaxploitation,” low-budget action films starring Black actors—inspired Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #1 (1972), the first comic book to headline an African American superhero.

Marvel continued to push heroes with “real” problems. In the controversial The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973), Gwen Stacy, the girlfriend of Spiderman’s alter ego, Peter Parker, died at the hands of the villainous Green Goblin. Just eight issues later, in The Amazing Spider-Man #129 (1974), the superhero was targeted by the assassin-for-hire called the Punisher, a dangerous enemy of organized crime whose methods were sometimes more brutal than his enemies’, and later that year, in The Incredible Hulk #181, the Green Goliath battled the feral Canadian superhero Wolverine. Brandishing retractable claws forged of the unbreakable metal adamantium, Wolverine was the living embodiment of violence, even if committed in the name of justice. The Punisher and Wolverine were perfect antiheroes for the cynical generation of the 1970s.

Repopularized heroes

The Bronze Age also reintroduced heroes of yesterday, bringing them newfound popularity. DC’s noir interpretation of The Shadow won acclaim, as did its Shazam! series (starring the original Captain Marvel) and its superteam title Freedom Fighters (with Uncle Sam, Phantom Lady, and others). Marvel, meanwhile, published Doc Savage, one of the forebears of modern superheroes.

Despite lackluster sales in the industry, a few other publishers launched superhero comics during the Bronze Age. Atlas Comics produced a diverse but short-lived comics line in the mid-1970s, including superheroes Tiger-Man and the Destructor, and longtime player Charlton Comics published King Features’ jungle hero The Phantom and introduced a wry superhero parody, E-Man.

DC vs. Marvel

Though DC’s Infantino-steered accomplishments narrowed the sales gap between his company and its competitor during the 1970s, Marvel still dominated the decade. A 1976 project, however, united the publishers on equal ground. Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, a 100-hundred-page, tabloid-sized special edition mixed up DC’s and Marvel’s top superheroes in a momentous clash followed by “the greatest team-up of all time.” Infantino worked with Marvel’s Lee to nurture the bestseller, but before a sequel could be brokered, Infantino and DC parted company. The quality of DC’s titles suffered later in the decade, and the company’s content expansion—the highly promoted “DC Explosion” in 1977—led to a market glut and a devastating “DC Implosion” in 1978.

Both DC and Marvel benefited from multimedia visibility of their superheroes during this period. Mego Toys’ eight-inch action figures called “World’s Greatest Super-Heroes” gathered icons as diverse as Superman, Spider-Man, Conan, and Wonder Girl into a shared commercial line. The Justice League ventured into animated television in ABC’s Super Friends; The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and The Amazing Spider-Man were weekly CBS dramatic series; and the multimillion-dollar theatrical blockbuster Superman: The Movie (1978) set box-office records. Spider-Man and Superman both appeared in newspaper comic strips. The merchandising of superheroes became big business, though readership of the comic books themselves continued a gradual decline.

By the end of the 1970s, most traditional outlets for comics like newsstands and drugstores stopped carrying comic books, since their low profit margin offered little incentive for shelf display. Television (broadcast and cable), special effects-laden movies, and the emerging video game and computer technologies now competed with printed comics for a young audience.

Multiculturalism becomes mainstream

By the 1970s, multiculturalism had hit the American mainstream. Nonwhite actors appeared on TV programs as diverse as Star Trek (1966–69) and Hawaii Five-0 (1968–80) and in movies like Shaft (1971). Superhero comics followed suit: the African American Falcon became the partner of Captain America; Wonder Woman learned martial arts from a Chinese teacher named I-Ching; and Green Lantern and Green Arrow traveled the country to combat racism and other social cancers.

Marvel’s The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, a black-and-white magazine-sized comic, introduced the White Tiger, the first Puerto Rican superhero. Also appearing during this period was Mantis, a Vietnamese member of Marvel’s conventional superteam the Avengers, appearing in print, quite unusually, at the height of the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1970s, superhero comic books had become fully multicultural. The X-Men, for example, were reintroduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975) with a new roster, including Cyclops (Anglo American), Colossus (Russian), Storm (African), Banshee (Irish), Wolverine (Canadian), Sunfire (Japanese), Nightcrawler (German), and Thunderbird (Native American).

Multimedia superheroes and the digital revolution

Superheroes received a boost in new venues. Beginning with director Tim Burton’s blockbuster movie Batman (1989), superheroes maintained constant visibility in film, on television, in video games, on apparel, as toys, and on Internet sites. This media awareness both hindered and helped superhero comic books. Negatively, superheroes in mass media fed the entertainment options that lured consumers away from reading comics. Positively, the income generated by the licensing of comics characters allowed the comic-book business to stay alive; under new ownership, Marvel emerged from bankruptcy in 1998.

Sales of collected editions have been healthy ever since, with trade paperbacks entering the bookstore market and with new comics publishers emerging in the late 1990s and 2000s. To complement print sales, publishers such as Marvel and DC have released their comics in digital formats. But the biggest change for the superhero genre in the 21st century was its conquest of movies and television, through which classic comics heroes won a far greater worldwide audience. Most significantly, major movie companies took control of the “Big Two” in superhero publishing, DC and Marvel.

In 1989, DC’s parent company shifted from Warner Publishing to Warner Bros., the film and television studio. Its superheroes began to be regularly translated to film, TV, and video. Examples include the live-action movie Batman (1989) and its many sequels and such TV series as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–97) and Smallville (2001–11), about Superman’s early years. Smallville’s ten-year run constitutes the longest-running science-fiction series on television to date and the longest-running superhero series on American TV. When Warner Bros. then restructured DC in 2009, DC Comics became a subsidiary of the company DC Entertainment, which now handles DC’s characters in all media, including comics.

Marvel Studios, founded in 1996, coproduced films based on Marvel characters in partnership with other film studios. X-Men (2000) from Twentieth Century-Fox and director Sam Raimi’s blockbuster Spider-Man (2002) from Sony Pictures were highly successful, as were their sequels, such as the Marc Webb-directed Amazing Spider-Man (2012). Other movies featuring Marvel Comics stars have included Daredevil (2003), Hulk (2003), Elektra (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), and Ghost Rider (2007).

Marvel Studios has also independently produced such major motion pictures as Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Thor (2011), and Captain America: Brave New World (2025). After the Walt Disney Company bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, it began distributing Marvel’s independently produced films, including The Avengers (2012) and Iron Man 3 (2013). The union of Disney and Marvel linked two great traditions in American popular entertainment and cartoon art, giving attention to relative newcomers such as Deadpool, now with a popular film franchise that in 2024 included a pairing with Wolverine. Some critics complained that Hollywood’s energies were being channeled disproportionately into formulaic franchise superhero films rather than in fresh, non-comic-sourced properties.

Global, cultural diversity in the genre

Sir Ian McKellen, the distinguished British actor who portrayed the evil mutant Magneto in the live-action blockbusters X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003), remarked favorably of the X-Men’s message of harmony at the 2003 British Independent Film Awards: “X-Men and its story about mutants, about people who feel disaffected with society, and whom society is hard on, appeals most to young blacks, young Jews, and young gays.” In this, as throughout their history, superheroes have reflected changing times and cultural mores.

Superhero teams in the modern age have been built specifically around ethnicity or a cultural connection. DC’s Global Guardians, for example, are superheroes assembled from around the world, including Africa’s Doctor Mist, Israel’s Seraph, and Brazil’s Green Flame (a.k.a. Fire of the Justice League). TV’s Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990) assembled a group of teenage environmental protectors, summoned from different regions of Earth by the goddess Gaia. A 1996 CD-Rom comic unveiled the Jewish Hero Corps, led by Menorah Man, and Mystic Comics’ Tribal Force #1 (2002) introduced a little-known group of Native American superheroes. The decidedly flawed superheroes who make up the Mystery Men in the parodic 1999 film of the same name find their commonality only in that all-too-human problem of not fitting in anywhere else and bonding as fellow outcasts—who, in the spirit of these other multiethnic superteams, include Black, Native American, and Jewish characters.

Non-Anglo superheroes have increasingly starred in their own comics as well, including El Diablo (Latino), the vampire hunter Blade (Black), and Shaloman (Jewish). In 2006 the Kuwaiti Teshkeel Media Group published the widely popular superhero comics series The 99, based on Islamic culture; the series was available in English in the United States and in Arabic in the Middle East. The comic’s writers were veterans from Marvel and DC. The title refers to the 99 names, or attributes, of Allah, but while the superheroes’ culture is clearly Islamic, the specific religious faith of the characters, many of them teenagers around the world, is not made explicit in order to emphasize universal values. The first theme park based on the 99 opened in Kuwait in 2009.

Gay superheroes have also come to the fore. Marvel’s first gay superhero was Northstar, created by writer/artist John Byrne in 1979, as a member of Alpha Flight. Additional gay characters followed, including Hulkling and Wiccan in Marvel’s Young Avengers. The first superhero at DC who was clearly intended to be gay was Extrano (1988). He was followed by other gay superheroes, including a new Batwoman (Kate Kane), a new Question (Renee Montoya), and Apollo and Midnighter of WildStorm’s The Authority.

In all their manifestations and with both superpowers and human weaknesses their constant companions, renewed generations of superheroes seem destined to endure into the 21st century—and to endure in culturally diverse ways, appealing to ever-changing audiences.