Superman's creators sold him for $130
SUPERMAN first appeared in June 1938 in Action Comics number one, which cost ten cents. He was invented by two teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who sold the character and all their rights to the publisher for 130 dollars. A copy of that comic sold at auction in 2024 for six million dollars.
BATMAN arrived the following year. Where Superman came from another planet, Batman had no powers at all — just training, gadgets and a great deal of money — and the pairing of the two set up a contrast still used today. ROBIN was added in 1940 partly to give Batman someone to talk to.
The Hulk was grey and Wonder Woman had a lie detector
The HULK was grey when he first appeared in 1962. The printers had trouble keeping the grey consistent from page to page, so by his second issue he had turned green, and stayed that way.
WONDER WOMAN was created in 1941 by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who had worked on an early version of the lie detector, measuring changes in blood pressure. His heroine's golden lasso forces anyone it binds to tell the truth.
Heroes with ordinary problems
In 1962 the writer Stan Lee and the artist Steve Ditko made a teenager the hero rather than the sidekick. SPIDERMAN — properly Spider-Man — worried about homework, money and his aunt, and the idea that a superhero could have ordinary problems changed comics. The X-Men, first published in 1963 with their enemy MAGNETO and joined in 1975 by WOLVERINE and STORM, were mutants feared by ordinary people, and their stories have often been read as being about prejudice.
BLACK PANTHER, created in 1966, was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. The 2018 film became the first superhero film nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture.
Superman used to jump, not fly
In the first comics Superman could not fly. He could leap an eighth of a mile, which is where the phrase leap tall buildings in a single bound comes from. When the Fleischer studio made animated Superman cartoons in 1941, the animators found the leaping looked silly on screen and had him fly instead, and the comics followed.
Kryptonite, the green rock from his home planet that weakens him, was first introduced on the Superman radio show in the 1940s rather than in the comics. Giving the hero a weakness made stories more exciting, and it is said to have let the show write Superman out of episodes for a while, so the lead actor could take a break.
Gods, films and the rest of the team
THOR and LOKI are borrowed from Norse mythology, though the comics changed a great deal — in the old stories Loki is Thor's companion rather than his adopted brother. Our Norse mythology page has the originals. IRONMAN, in 2008, started the long series of connected films that led to the AVENGERS, with THANOS as the villain.
The rest of the grid holds more heroes and villains: AQUAMAN, the FLASH, VENOM, CATWOMAN, ANTMAN, DAREDEVIL, HAWKEYE, DEADPOOL and GROOT, who can say only three words.