Superheroes

The war was the superhero's first golden age. Captain America, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, punched Hitler on a cover that reached stands in late 1940, before the United States had entered the fighting. Superheroes sold war bonds, fought caricatured enemies, and told a country at war a clean story about itself. Comics sold in the tens of millions of copies a month. For a few years the newsstand cape was one of the most widely consumed forms of American storytelling, read by soldiers and children alike.

Peace deflated it. With no clear enemy, superhero titles faded, and readers drifted to crime, romance, and horror comics — lurid, cheap, and increasingly gory. That shift is what eventually put the whole medium on trial. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, working with troubled children, argued in his 1954 book that comics were a direct cause of juvenile delinquency, corrupting readers with violence and coded deviance. His claims were more assertion than evidence, but they landed in an anxious postwar moment.

That someone was a small, struggling publisher and a group of extraordinary artists. By the early 1960s Stan Lee had spent two decades writing comics he did not respect, and was, by his own account, ready to quit. Working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he tried something different, almost as a last throw. The Fantastic Four, in 1961, were heroes who bickered, worried about money, and could not stand one another. The formula that followed reshaped the whole genre.

The Marvel innovation was to give the powers a cost. Spider-Man, created with Ditko in 1962, was a teenager who got his abilities through a random accident and promptly used them selfishly — until the failure killed his uncle, leaving him with guilt he could never repay. The X-Men were hunted for being born different. The heroes had bad backs, rent to pay, self-doubt. Where the older figures were fantasies of clean power, Marvel's were people who happened to be stuck with it. Readers, including older ones, recognized themselves in the mess.

For the superhero to become a modern myth in more than a loose sense, it had to escape the comic-book page, and it did so slowly, then all at once. The 1978 Superman film proved a cape could be played straight on the big screen; Tim Burton's 1989 Batman proved it could be dark and enormously profitable. But the decisive shift came in 2008, when Marvel — having licensed away its biggest names for cash in leaner years — used its remaining characters to build a single connected film franchise. Iron Man, a second-tier hero, opened a project that would run for more than a decade.

What the Marvel Cinematic Universe borrowed was not just characters but the structural invention of the 1960s comics: the shared universe, the continuity, the compulsion to see the next installment to understand the last. It industrialized serialized myth on a scale nothing else in entertainment matched. By the late 2010s a superhero film crossing a billion dollars was routine, and the figure had reached the strange position of being simultaneously everywhere and, to some critics, a symptom of a culture that had run out of other stories.

The sedan Superman lifted on that 1938 cover is still lifting. Nearly a century later the same handful of names — a strongman from a dead planet, a grieving man in a bat costume, a teenager who learned about responsibility the hard way — are told and retold to audiences that dwarf anything Siegel and Shuster could have pictured from their Cleveland apartment. The pulp aimed at children became the default vocabulary of global entertainment, and the two men who first sold it away for a little over a hundred dollars never quite got their share.