Who is the Hero of Today?

A musing driven by a love for Comic Books.

I’ve been reading comic books since I was six years old. I was raised on the 1992 version of the X-men cartoon. I have worked at a comic book company and many times been offered to work at a comic book store (humble brag). Currently I sit on the board of Skybound, which was founded by one of my favorite comic book creators.

Long story short, I think about comic books fairly often. I read comic books fairly often, and I collect comic books fairly often. I’m on a persistent treasure hunt for reasons that comic books are important, and I’m always trying to translate that importance to others.

I recently had an epiphany about comic books. I was talking to my son about super heroes, and realized that there are actually a limited number of ways that super heroes acquire super powers:

• Exposed to radiation (Spider-man, Hulk, Fantastic 4)

• Born with the powers (X-men, Magneto, Rogue)

• Alien that comes to earth (Superman, Martian Manhunter, Omni-Man)

• Powers created through Magic (Dr. Strange, Shazam)

• Discipline and money (Batman, Iron Man, Green Arrow)

• Gods (Thor, Loki, Hera)

So those are the six ways that you can get super powers. Some of you are probably brilliant and you knew this early because your brain organizes things really well, and mine forces me to earn it over a 38 year time period.

Sometimes in todays world, Marvel/DC/Skybound super heroes are everywhere and some people probably feel drowned by their presence in your house, on your clothes, on your screens. But their origins are very relevant to the history of the social pressures throughout the US history.

In the 1960s, Stan Lee (The most heroic creator of Superheroes) hit absolute home runs with characters that represented the social pressures of the day. At this time frame in the United States, we were going through the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Hidden from the headline narrative of the day, was a more subtle movement of characters driven by those pressures in the comic books of that age.

Exposure to Radiation: All the radiation stories were broadly driven by the Cold War (1947-1991) The fear of a nuclear strike was real! Fantastic 4, Hulk and Spiderman were all created right in the middle of that time frame (1960s). The concept of radiation was a real fear in the population, and children reading the comic books suddenly loved seeing the positive outcomes of radiation. In early Hulk comic books you can even see the villains be very real fears Russian spies.

Another movement that was happening in the 1960s, you can probably guess was the Civil rights movement, a nation-wide conversation around race. This provoked many new concepts in the world. In the world of comic books, one idea that stuck was the X-men. This comic book which revolved around super heroes who were born with the “X” gene that gave them unknown powers struck a chord in the population.

The last one that I will talk about is Iron Man. When I met Stan Lee, this was the character that energized his focus around the social conversation of comic books. He said:

“In the 1960s, because of the Vietnam War, no one liked war and no one liked business men… So I created a super hero, who was a war-profiting business man with a injured heart!” - Stan Lee

His follow up was “It was the best selling comic for female readers!”

By defining what the social movements were of the day, Stan Lee had been able to create heroes the represented the conversation in the world and translated it to a super hero reading world. The success was driven by the pressures of the age, and the constant fear driven conversations. He created heroic stories out of the fears of the age.

If we fast forward to today, there are many similar fears. I think it’s important to think about what the heroes will look like. What diamonds will be created from the pressures of today, and what memetic characters could be created.

Who do you think the hero of today would be?

One of the reasons I believe that the Invincible series (by Skybound) is performing so well on television is that its a conversation around a father and son, and what world they will lead to make the universe a better place.

We have generational pressures, we have war pressures, we have market pressures. What heroes will be created!?