Historical Domain Character / Comic Books

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• Albert Einstein: Time Mason stars in the comic as a time-hopping ass-kicking hero working for an organization called the "Time Masons" to protect the timeline.
• American Dreams (2021) features occultist Aleister Crowley, inventor Thomas Edison, and escape artist Harry Houdini as major characters, and also features appearances by lesser-known figures like journalist Nellie Bly and rabble-rouser Emma Goldman.
• Aquila: Queen Boudica and Emperor Nero appear as major characters.
• Julius Caesar frequently appears in Asterix. Less frequent, but still recurring, are Cleopatra and Brutus. Pompey's the main villain of one story, and Vercingetorix is only shown a couple of times from behind but is extremely significant in the backstory. More obscure figures occasionally show up, like Cassivellaunus.
• The first issue of Back to the Future relates the story of how Doc was brought into the Manhattan Project while teaching at CalTech in 1943, and features J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, Vannevar Bush, and Robert Millikan as characters. A later story, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, brings back Groves as a character.
• Batman:
  • In the Elseworld Dark Masterpiece, Leonardo da Vinci inspired a Renaissance Batman.
  • In the Elseworld Scar of the Bat Eliot Ness becomes a 1920s Batman!
  • Another Elseworld, Detective #27, features Theodore Roosevelt, Allan Pinkerton and Kate Warne as founders of "The Secret Society of Detectives". Later, the story includes Babe Ruth (leading to an inevitable pun on "bat-man" and a subtler one on All-Star #3), Sigmund Freud, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Black Dynamite:
  • One recurring character is Alex Haley, best known as the author of Literature/Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
  • Various celebrities in attendance at the LA Forum in Issue #4 include boxers Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and Larry Holmes; singers Ike and Tina Turner; Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Howard Cosell. Evel Knievel also helps perform a stunt.
  • The antagonists of that issue are Chuck Taylor and Jack Purcell, two white athletes best known for lending their names to famous shoe brands.
• In Code Name: Gravedigger, Joseph Goebbels is the Big Bad: obsessed with finding and stopping the activities of the black One-Man Army who is wreaking havoc with Nazi operations across Europe.
• Conan the Barbarian: The historical Babylonian king Shamash-shum-ukin shows up in "Citadel at the Center of Time" as a time-traveling sorcerer.
• Die Abrafaxe, which has been relating adventures across time since 1976, is filled with this. A partial list includes Albertus Magnus, Alcibiades, Francis Bacon, Nicolas Baudin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Anne Bonny, Catherine the Great, Francis Drake, Nicolas Flamel, Matthew Flinders, John Franklin (as a young midshipman), Frederick Barbarossa, St. Gertrude the Great, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Leichhardt, Louis XIV, Queen Nefertiti, Isaac Newton, Peter the Great, Marco Polo, Ferenc Rákóczi, Socrates, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Wilhelm II.
• Elsewhere (2017): The basic premise relies on a lot of this, starring Amelia Earhart and D. B. Cooper. The big reveal of Issue #4 is that Lord Kragen, the Big Bad, is also one, being Amelia's navigator Fred Noonan who she spends the entire story up to that point looking for.
• Gilles de Geus has the historical Dutch prince Willem van Oranje and admiral Lumey among the main characters, while the Big Bad is the historical Spanish Duke of Alba. Other characters from Dutch history also show up from time to time, most frequently the inventor Cornelis Drebbel.
• In The Heathens an Aftershock comic by Cullen Bunn, Pirate Queen Ching Shih is returned from the Hell and tasked with having Infernal Fugitives go and get Dragged Off to Hell. Her latest assignment is to take on Jack the Ripper, so she's given a team that has Billy the Kid, rival gangsters Lucky Luciano and Bumpy Johnson plus the thief Sophia Bluvstein.
• Invincible includes Abraham Lincoln as the modern-day superhero "the Immortal", who returns to life after any manner of destruction. The character goes through periods of changing outlook and personality, starting aloof and irritable, before making a successful effort to improve his disposition. He eventually helps to lead humanity into the interstellar age at the end of the series.
• JFK Secret Ops stars John F. Kennedy. It's set in an Alternate History where he survived being shot, and is on a mission to track down everyone who was involved in the assassination attempt.
• Plenty of Hollywood stars and historical figures from the 1960s appear in Jupiter's Circle, like Ayn Rand, J. Edgar Hoover, Katharine Hepburn and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, by Don Rosa, sets its main character in various decades from the 1870s to the 1940s, featuring such characters as Murdo Mac Kenzie, Wyatt Earp, and Theodore Roosevelt.
• Lucky Luke has met many historical figures of the Wild West: such encounters are one of the main drivers of the series and whole albums are devoted to his confrontation with Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane and many others. In an early album, he opposes the Dalton gang, whose fictional cousins Joe, Jack, William and Averell later become his collective nemesis.
• Marvel 1602 has Elizabeth I, James VI and I, and Ananias and Virginia Dare. 1602: Fantastick Four features William Shakespeare.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: Practically every single famous Spanish politician of the second half of the 20th Century has appeared in more than one volume. A lot of foreign politicians and world leaders, such as the US Presidents (from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama), Fidel Castro or the European Prime Ministers, appear quite often too.
  • Adolf Hitler sometimes appears in the comics.
    • For example, in "El racista" he has just talked with two Jews, one of which says that Hitler is preparing something to keep them warm next winter...
    • In "Mundial 78" about the 1978 World Cup, there was a fictional match (the finals) between Spain and Germany. The political authorities in the seats of honour were Adolfo Suárez, Spanish Premier at the time... and Adolf Hitler, who was waving at the reader.
  • Ronald Reagan shows up in several albums written in The '80s ("El Cacao Espacial", "La Perra de las Galaxias" and "Los Ángeles 84").
• George W. Bush appears in Pax Americana #1. Since this universe seems to have had its own run of presidents, Dubya's appearance might be a symptom of inter-reality bleed.
• Rebel Dead Revenge depicts the death of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and his re-animation to lead a zombie Confederate army. Jackson's wife Anna and daughter Julia are also present.
• Various historic storylines worked into The Sandman (1989), especially the "Distant Mirrors" arc, which features Augustus ("August"); Maximilien Robespierre ("Thermidor"); Emperor Norton ("Four Septembers and a January"); and Harun Al Rashid ("Ramadan"). William Shakespeare also appears, cameoing with Christopher Marlowe in "Men of Good Fortune" and then getting two stories of his own — "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest", the latter being the series epilogue and featuring a cameo by Ben Jonson.
• Jonatan Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D.. Every single scientific genius since Imhotep was a member of the Ancient Tradition of The Shield. And, as of the 1950s, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Nostradamus still are.
• Homer appears in the Smite comic.
• Superman:
  • The Living Legends of Superman has several historical figures: Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Moses, William Shakespeare, Jeanne d'Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson.
  • In "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali", Jimmy Carter is the incumbent president, and former heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali is one of the main characters.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The first issue of Ultimate Origins features Franklin D. Roosevelt, ordering to start the "Project: Rebirth" program. He also debriefed Captain America about his mission in Europe.
  • Steve Rogers saw Adolf Hitler in a newsreel in the local cinema. The newsreel also mentioned then-vice president Harry S. Truman.
  • In Ultimate Comics Thor, Zemo asks Heinrich Himmler for troops.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The entire point of the Golden Age's "Wonder Women of History" feature is to have a short interlude in the fantastical superhero story to have a quick comic about a famous woman from history and get across a bit of her early life and then what makes her historically important. There are some creative liberties taken (Amelia Earhart is implied to have ended up on Paradise Island), but usually these are very minor and due to the limited space and format.

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