Follow The Leader / Comic Books

• Superman is the Trope Maker for the genre of modern superhero comic books. While there were super-powered characters before him, none of them included all of what are now seen as the "classic" Comic Book Tropes the way Superman did. Every superhero ever written since follows in his footsteps.
  • The Golden Age of Comic Books also had a secondary trend of vigilantes with ill-defined omnipotent powers, who'd fight street crime without much regard for ethics. See Doctor Fate, Green Lantern, The Spectre, Black Widow (No, not that Black Widow), the Hangman, and so on.
  • In the early days of the genre, there were a lot of characters who were recognizably just clones of Superman, usually only differing in the origin, the name, and a few costume elements. The Fighting Yank, Captain Courageous, Wonder Man (Fox), Dynaman... the most famous of all, of course, being Captain Marvel.
• Krypto was introduced as Superman's super-powerful pet in "The Super Dog from Krypton" (March, 1955), kicking off the trend of super-heroic pets. Only three months later, The Batman books introduced Ace the Bat-Hound. Adventure Comics #229 (October, 1956) introduced Aquaman's pet octopus Topo barely one year later. Other heroes like Supergirl would also get her own pets (Streaky the Super-cat was introduced in "Supergirl's Super Pet" (December, 1959) and Comet the Super-Horse in "The Super-Steed of Steel" (1963)). Eventually, most of them formed the Legion of Super-Pets.
• Robin might as well be the Trope Namer for the Kid Sidekick, and his popularity in the Golden Age led to a string of similar kid partners. Captain America and Bucky, Green Arrow and Speedy, Blue Beetle and Sparky, Black Terror and Kid Terror, Mr. Scarlet and Pinky, Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr.... the list goes on an on.
  • Then during the Silver Age existing characters Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman got their own teen counterparts in Supergirl, Wonder Girl and Aqualad.
  • Speedy in particular was a very blatant rip-off of Robin. This has led to several Mythology Gags in shows like Teen Titans and Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
• In the Silver Age, all comics followed trends, to the point where it was an in-joke among comic writers and fans, for example an EC story about hiring Jack Kamen includes the line, "Jack, you old son! I haven't seen you for two trends!" EC followed trends religiously for a while, then started their own, Horror Comics.
• Of this, Martin Goodman, publisher of Timely/Atlas and then Marvel was the most notorious for this, endless ordering his nephew, Stan Lee, to endlessly follow any trend as soon as they came up like Westerns, Romance, Kaiju monsters in rapid succession. Finally, when superheros were back on the upswing with the massive success of DC's Justice League of America, Lee was sick to death of his boss' endless copying dictates among other irritations at work and was ready to quit. Fortunately, his wife, Joan, convinced him to try writing a comic the way he wanted to for a change, since he had nothing to lose. With that, together with artist/co-writer Jack Kirby using his old Challengers of the Unknown concept for a template, they created Fantastic Four. With that, Lee found himself setting the trends in comics for a change.
• Marvel Comics' success, particularly with Spider-Man, the first teen superhero, had many publishers trying for a more teenager-friendly product; sadly, these often faded into Totally Radical. On the subject of Spider-Man, his comics were also one of the first to illustrate the "normal" side of the hero, along with Fantastic Four. Rather than filling the issue with one action sequence after another, part of the issue would illustrate Peter taking on everyday tasks such as getting to work on time, experiencing relationships, dealing with school bullies, and so on. Even nowadays, polls and streets interviews indicate that the main reason people like Spidey so much is because "he's a regular guy like the rest of us." It has since become standard for comics to portray the everyday side of the superhero, with the character, like Peter, being portrayed as someone the target audience can relate to. Unfortunately, under worse authors, this often results in myriad forms of This Loser Is You.
• DC revamped their line in the late 60s to try and cash in on the success Marvel had found with marketing to a young adult audience. Unfortunately, these results were often Totally Radical, such as Brother Power.
• Social issues were rarely dealt with in DC books before Green Lantern / Green Arrow. Now it seems like a staple in many comics to feature issues that are a Very Special Episode.
• After Captain America was retitled Captain America and The Falcon, there began a trend of giving superheroes Token Black Friend or partner. Among the most notable ones would be James "Rhodey" Rhodes and John Stewart, although the latter was more of a reservist who is supposed to be Green Lantern Hal Jordan's backup when he is not available. Rhodey also arguably popularized the Affirmative-Action Legacy trend, especially with his burst of popularity in the 90's. Afterwards we saw an explosion of minority replacement characters like Steel, Cassandra Cain, and Connor Hawke.
• Before All-New, All-Different X-Men, most superheroes were WASPs. X-Men pioneered the concept of diversity (at least the token kind) in superhero comics.
  • And it's even Older Than They Think; the first international multiracial hero team was Cyborg 009, though it didn't achieve the success in the West that the X-Men did.
  • The X-Men, along with the New Teen Titans, set the gold standard for angst and melodrama in superhero comics, as well as telling more personal, character-driven stories that didn't rely on A-list characters who had their own books. The widely-reviled Justice League Detroit was basically DC's attempt at trying to make the JLA into an X-Men clone by replacing most of the A-listers with younger, more diverse characters who didn't have solo titles.
  • In the 90's, a lot of team books tried to cash in on the massive popularity of the X-Men. The Justice League Task Force adopted uniforms for all of its members, while The Avengers ditched most of the A-listers and started doing more character-driven stories. Oh, and everyone on the team started wearing bomber jackets with "A" logos for some reason.
• Marvel's Marvel Mangaverse imprint was a rather blatant attempt to cash in on the success American networks had found with shows like Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam, and Pokémon.
• Some fans claimed Marvel did this with Spider-Woman by giving her a more practical, female-friendly redesign after DC hired Brenden Fletcher, Babs Tarr, and Cameron Stewart to implement a similar redesign and revamp for Batgirl (2011). However, Kris Anka claims he designed the costume a few months before DC debuted the new Batgirl, and the fact that the new Spider-Woman design was unveiled shortly after the positive reception Batgirl received is a complete coincidence.
• Nobody who's written Batman in the past 20 years has been able to escape the influence of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This case is particularly hilarious because the single greatest influence on Batman's character wasn't even canon. Even Batman's entry in the All-Star series, which was supposed to throw out all the complicated backstory and let the DC heroes have more Silver-Age-style adventures, was written by The Goddamn Frank Miller himself, and Batman was even more cranky and psychotic than ever.
  • One especially influential aspect of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is the blow-by-blow First Person narration. Apparently inspired by Taxi Driver it was distinctive when Miller first did it. Then all Batman comics had it. Then all of DC. Marvel soon followed suit. Now it's universal in mainstream comics, whether it suits the book's tone or not.
  • The ever-hilarious YouTube series Marvel/DC Happy Hour parodied this by having the second season's Story Arc involve the Joker using nanotechnology in an android named Lance to brainwash heroes like Superman, WonderWoman, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Wolverine into thinking that their loved ones died horribly right in front of them so that they would be more dark and brooding, like Batman, except that they would break his one rule in pursuit of Justice. The only heroes he couldn't brainwash were Ghost Rider, The Punisher (because he was already a dark, brooding, homicidal vigilante), and Spider-Man (because the events of One More Day had already altered his perception of reality, and he has lost everything but never loses his optimism).
• In the early 80's, mainstream American comic books lagged behind some of their British counterparts which featured more sophisticated and literary dialogue and story concepts. Then, after Alan Moore reinvigorated DC's poorly selling Swamp Thing, DC editors quickly signed up other emerging British writers such as Jamie Delano (Hellblazer), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman (1989)) and Grant Morrison (Animal Man). This proved so successful that the "British invasion" of DC continues to this day.
  • This was parodied in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Sky Pirates, which reveals Bernice Summerfield to be the author of a bizarre Vertigo-style comic called The 45 Second Piglet; said comic having been commissioned simply because she was in a big building in New York with a British accent.
    • Bernice was created by Paul Cornell, a British writer. Guess who he ended up writing comics for?
• Isaac Baranoff's Horndog inspired a number of knock-offs. Baranoff even got in on the act himself by introducing Here Wolf, which was not substantially different from Horndog, except for having human characters (it since differentiated itself though).
• The old Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers comic book parodied this in the form of having the Rangers encounter a few other rescue groups made up of small animals (one of whom was revealed to be working for Fat Cat).
• A large portion of The Dark Age of Comic Books was in some ways an extended attempt at following the leader by creating comics in the vein of The Dark Knight Returns and its contemporary, Watchmen, in an attempt to reflect the complexity and depth of these works. However, many critics — including, amongst others, Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen — accused them of only copying the superficial details, mainly represented by the '90s Anti-Hero, rather than the storytelling complexity and experiments with medium that these works pioneered, with the result that most comics of this period were no more deep or original than the earlier works they were moving away from — they were just nastier.
  • See Alan Moore's Tom Strong, a reaction to the darkness that followed the Watchmen comics.
• Batman: Year One was the Ur-Example of origin stories in the more recent eras. Now both Marvel and DC produce Year One stories, with varying degrees of success, although none of them could match Batman's.
• This article suggests that most of the nostalgic turn of recent superhero comic books can be tied to the popularity of Kurt Busiek's Marvels.
• The design of Death's Head II is clearly "inspired" by the works of Rob Liefeld.
• At the height of the popularity of Spawn, Marvel tried to cash-in rather shamelessly with Nightwatch◊. DC did the exact same thing with their post-Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! relaunch of Manhunter◊.
• Avengers Arena has not been shy about the fact it is inspired by other death match/grim series with child protagonists such as The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Battle Royale.
• Carl Barks's Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics were popular enough to spawn other Funny Animal duck comics. One of the most infamous ones was Super Duck (not to be confused with one of Paperinik's localized English names), a comic that started out as a Wartime Cartoon superhero animal. However, after a couple issues, the comic was retooled as a comedy slice-of-life comic in order to emulate Carl Barks's Donald Duck's stories better. "Supes" had a nephew who looked like a bargain bin Huey-Dewey-Louie and there were many Dog Face extras who looked like Goofy. Not being superhero-themed any longer, the name "Super Duck" quickly became a very blatant Artefact Title.
• Tintin: Especially in Europe and in the Belgian Comics and Franco-Belgian Comics industry Hergé's style has been copied immensely to the point that it received a distinctive name: "The Clear Line".
• The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 1980s spawned a massive boom of independently-published, black-and-white comics. And just like TMNT, many of them also featured martial artists, Funny Animals, or both.
• After the success of Diabolik, Italian comic books were invaded by series starring an obviously evil murderous thief, gifted with great intelligence and whose name included the letter 'K', such as Kriminal and Satanik. While most of them have disappeared, Diabolik is still going on, and so are two of the followers: Cattivik (a very funny and nonsensical Shallow Parody, with a protagonist that is not intelligent but Too Dumb to Live) and, from Disney, Paperinik (an alter ego of Donald Duck who started out as avenger of himself, later turned to Unscrupulous Hero and then to full hero, if a bit sadistic. Best known internationally for Paperinik New Adventures).
• While writing West Coast Avengers, Steve Englehart revamped former Ant-Man Hank Pym from a costumed superhero into a science adventurer known as "Dr. Pym," who was very obviously inspired by the popularity of Doctor Who. Pym even started wearing a coat and scarf that looked suspiciously like the ones sported by the Fourth Doctor.
• In-Universe in Kick-Ass, Marty becomes Battle Guy after being inspired by Kick-Ass, before finding out that his best friend Dave is Kick-Ass; they later bring Todd in on the action and he keeps coming up with names derivative of "Kick-Ass", which Dave and Mart call him out on.
• The success of Batman '66, a comic book continuations of the old live-action Batman show led to DC applying the premise to many of it's older media properties.
  • Wonder Woman '77 for the Lynda Carter 70s Wonder Woman show. This one actually crossed over with the Batman'66 comic in Batman'66 meets Wonder Woman '77.
  • Batman '89 for the Tim Burton films of Batman (1989) and Batman Returns.
  • Superman '78 for Richard Donner's Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve
  • Marvel even got in on it with X-Men '92, a continuation of the '90s X-Men: The Animated Series cartoon.
• Marvel launched a comic adaptation of the Marvel: Contest of Champions video game after the success of DC's Injustice: Gods Among Us adaptation.
• Hawkeye: The surprise success of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (2012) with David Aja and Annie Wu led to Marvel and DC launching a number of "quirky," more subdued books with more intimate tones and unconventional art styles, such as Warren Ellis' Moon Knight run. A lot of the new titles for All-New, All-Different Marvel and DC's DC You relaunch were very obviously inspired by Hawkeye.
• Likewise, the success of Ms. Marvel and the above-mentioned Batgirl revamp inspired a slew of books that featured more diverse casts and dealt with social issues while remaining somewhat Lighter and Softer than the usual superhero fare.
• Even though the book itself wasn't a huge seller, the fandom that rose up around Kelly Sue Deconnick's Captain Marvel is often credited with the explosion of female-led titles that occurred at Marvel after its release.
• Zipi y Zape: It has been argued that the strip started out as a rather unsubtle rip-off of The Katzenjammer Kids before eventually growing into its own thing.
• The Age of Apocalypse, which started and ended with one-shots labeled respectively "Alpha" and "Omega" and replaced the main X-Men titles with four issue mini-series inspired similar gimmicks in The Clone Saga, with "Maximum Cloneage" starting and ending with one-shots likewise labelled "Alpha" and "Omega" respectively and the Spider-Man titles replaced with Scarlet Spider mini-series.
• New 52 caused several other comic book companies to try rebooting their series to varying lengths of success, including Archie Comics slamming the reset button in 2015. On another note, the Archie reboot no doubt led to the creation of Hanna-Barbera Beyond.
• The general insanity in most Italian comic books can be traced to Benito Jacovitti's immense production of crazy comics (as shown by this relatively sane panel◊) and relative influence.
• The success of The Death of Superman resulted in a number of stories where something happens to the hero and is replaced including Emerald Twilight for Green Lantern (Hal Jordan going insane — later retconned to be possessed by an alien entity — and replaced with Kyle Rayner; fittingly, it has its root in the destruction of Hal Jordan's hometown, Coast City, by Mongul and Cyborg-Superman in Reign of the Supermen), The Contest for Wonder Woman (Hippolyta holding and rigging a new contest to replace Diana with Artemis after getting visions of Diana's death), The Crossing for Iron Man and The Avengers (basically Marvel's Emerald Twilight with Iron Man being retconned into a Manchurian Agent for Kang and the young replacement being a young, alternate reality Tony; undone much quicker than ET), and the aforementioned Clone Saga for Spider-Man (Peter Parker retiring and handing off the reins to Ben Reilly). However, according to then-Batman editor Denny O'Neil, Knightfall, which saw the same thing happen to Batman (getting crippled by Bane and replaced with Azrael), was in development around the same time as and independent of Death. That said, The Crossing and Emerald Twilight didn't end the same way the others died (the original hero recovered and/or back in action^note And in the case of The Clone Saga, that's due to fan and creator backlash) and had other stories to bring the original Tony Stark and Hal Jordan back.
• Sheena, Queen of the Jungle was the Trope Codifier for the Jungle Princess, and spawned a large number of imitators, including Rulah, Jungle Goddess.
• Youngblood (2017) is essentially Image Comics' attempt to rejuvenate the Youngblood (Image Comics) franchise, celebrating its history while bringing in new fans, not unlike DC Rebirth, which started roughly a year earlier. The first arc is even called "Youngblood Reborn".
• The success of the back-to-basics approach for the Justice League of America in JLA (1997) led to similar revivals of Justice Society of America and Teen Titans in the respective forms of JSA and Titans (1999). Both revivals were even tied to JLA with the JLA storyarc "Crisis Times Five" acting as a Poorly Disguised Pilot for JSA and Titans spinning off of JLA/Titans: The Technis Imperative. Marvel even had its own Alternate Company Equivalent for The Avengers with The Avengers (Kurt Busiek).
• Cashing in on the success of Batman: Black and White, there were several copycats put out by both DC and other publishers. These included:
  • Superman: Red and Blue, Harley Quinn: Black + White + Red, and Wonder Woman: Black and Gold for DC Comics.
  • Wolverine: Black, White, and Blood, Carnage: Black, White, and Blood, and Deadpool: Black, White, and Blood for Marvel Comics.
  • Red Sonja: Black, White, Red for Dynamite Comics.
• Four months after the return of Ben Reilly and the beginning of The Clone Saga, Superman was involved in Dead Again!, his own event storyline straddling all of his titles in which the appearance of an additional Superman ('s corpse) creates the possibility that the hero we've been following for the past few years may be a clone. Amusingly, both stories ended with The Reveal that the whole storyline was an attempt at Gaslighting the hero by a classic villain thought long disposed of, despite Dead Again! ending almost two years before anyone at Marvel Comics figured out that the Big Bad of the Clone Saga was Norman Osborn.

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