Human Aliens / Comic Books

• Superman:
  • Superman, Supergirl, and all other Kryptonians are outwardly indistinguishable from humans, despite obvious biological differences. Exactly how close or distant humans and Kryptonians are can vary depending on the work:
  • According to some Silver Age stories, Kryptonians were descendants of humans plucked from Earth by a more technologically advanced race. Some Post-Crisis stories imply this as well.
  • One Superman/Flash story has the duo facing a mysterious alien race that apparently seeded both Earth and Krypton with life, at around the same time, serving as a possible explanation for this trope.
  • In depictions of Superman's origin story, Jor-El and Lara are shown choosing to send him to Earth precisely because humans look exactly like Kryptonians, thus Kal-El can live among them and blend in with little trouble.
  • Lampshaded in an issue of Starman where Jack Knight's journeys through space and time land him on Krypton before its destruction. He is promptly arrested by the authorities, who suspect him of being a member of a Kryptonian rebel group. When Jack tries to argue that he's an alien visitor from planet Earth, his interrogator refuses to believe him, pointing out that he looks no different from any Kryptonian. Jack wonders whether God was feeling unoriginal.
  • Other stories suggested that the human and Kryptonian species actually were directly related.
  • Kryptonians also come in different races. A highly developed civilization of black Kryptonians lived in Vathlo Island, first mentioned in 1971 and depicted in stories like The Krypton Chronicles.
  • Double subversion in Krypton No More. Supergirl tells her cousin they look like Earth people because they were actually born in Earth, not Krypton. However it turns out that she was being coerced into lying to him about their origins.
  • The Elseworld story Superman: Red Son provides a distinctly non-canon explanation: Kal-El didn't come from a distant planet, he time-traveled back from Earth's very distant future following Luthor's victory. In fact, the House of El is a bastardization of "L", from Luthor, making him a direct ancestor of Kal-El.
  • Subverted by alien villain Xviar in Who Took the Super out of Superman?. He looks human because he is a shape-shifter whose real shape is unknown.
  • Dolok from Way of the World is an alien overlord. He is virtually indistinguishable from an Earth human.
  • The Day the Cheering Stopped: The alien world shown in the distant epilogue is inhabited by a sapient race visually indistinguishable from Earth humans.
  • In the Supergirl storyline Red Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl found several human-like races such like Graxians (blue-skinned humanoids with cow-like ears) and Primeenians (orange-skinned, pointy-eared humanoids).
  • In Legion of Super-Heroes, most of the alien races are perfectly humanoid in appearance, although they possess various additional abilities. Post-Crisis, this was handwaved by having them be descendants of humans who were given superpowers in alien experiments (this explanation was later retconned out of existence by the 2010 New Krypton storyline, which tells us they were, in fact, alien races to begin with.)
  • In The Condemned Legionnaires, the Legion finds a race of giant aliens from another dimension who are completely human-looking.
  • "The Unknown Legionnaire": The Llorn who briefly settled in the Protean homeworld looked exactly like humans.
  • Post-Crisis, it was established that Mon-El's people, the Daxamites, are descended from Kryptonian colonists, explaining the similarity of both races.
  • A number of the extraterrestrials introduced in Superboy and the Ravers are rather humanoid, such as the Qwardians who look like pink hairless humans with odd eyes, and the race of the man running the rave looks human outside of their orange skin and pointed ears.
  • In Superman Smashes the Klan, Clark is terrified of his alien heritage and begins freaking out when he sees visions of figures who claim to be his parents but are grotesque and lizard-like. When he finally resolves himself to confront his alien heritage and accept it, they appear as they actually did on Krypton.
• There's a very strong tendency for aliens in The DCU to look exactly like humans:
  • Most inhabitants of New Genesis and Apokolips resemble humans. In one issue where Doomsday arrives on Apokolips, the aliens crewing the ship that brings him there look human.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): A Daxamite is not only the most human looking of the extraterrestrials to aid Diana, she's also the only person in the entire Sangtee Empire to speak English.
  • Natives of Rann seem to be entirely indistinguishable from humans. Indeed, human hero Adam Strange had a child with his Rannian wife Alanna.
  • Blackest Night revealed that Earth was really the place where life began, which might help explain all the humanoid life in the galaxy.
  • The planet Bellatrix from the Green Lantern series has a very human-looking population, but with a refreshing amount of diversity. One of the planet's two Lanterns, Zale, fits this trope, looking like a human of African descent.
  • Tamaraneans like Starfire are nearly indistinguishable from humans, save the solid green eyes, usually exceptional height, and spray-tan color skin, yet are specifically stated to taxonomically be descended from something more feline than ape.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Most of the aliens Diana met in the Golden Age were rather humanoid with little tweaks like those from Venus having butterfly wings, but the Saturnians were pretty much visibly indistinguishable from humans save a handful of their number with green or blue hair.
• The Marvel Universe also has a number of examples:
  • The Kree are divided into two races: the pink Kree (who look just like white humans) and the blue Kree (who look just like humans, save for their blue skin).
  • The Shi'ar, who are basically humans with avian forefathers, birdlike physiology (yet Non-Mammal Mammaries), and enhanced physical abilities. For most Shi'ar, the only visible sign of their avian ancestry is that they have feathers instead of hair... and Depending on the Artist, it's not even always obvious that it's not just oddly-shaped hair. This is lampshaded in Excalibur when the Shi'Ar warrior Cerise first arrived on Earth and encountered Nightcrawler and Excalibur's alien frenemies the Technet, a team of bounty hunters composed of various alien members who do not fall under this trope, and Nightcrawler is a mutant with an inhuman appearance. Cerise demanded to know which one of them best resembled the dominant lifeform on this planet, to which Nightcrawler replied, "Ironically fraulein, you do."
  • The Xandarians and the Spartoi all look exactly like humans.
  • The Mighty Thor: Asgardians, which are basically much stronger and longer living humans with access to mystical powers. If you believe some questionable sources (namely Loki) they are actually something much weirder; namely, living myth and metaphor. They look human because, well, they originate on Earth where Most Writers Are Human.
  • Karolina Dean of Runaways looks exactly like a normal human as long as she wears a bracelet made from a special material that dampens her powers. When she takes the bracelet off, she looks more like a human-shaped rainbow . It turns out that her parents come from the planet Majesdane.
  • The title character from Omega the Unknown, who was created by another alien race to be the perfect Übermensch.
  • The Galadorians of Rom Spaceknight.
  • The people of Homeworld in Micronauts. It was eventually explained that they and the Rubber-Forehead Aliens of the Microverse are descended from humans from the future.
  • Nebulans from The Transformers (Marvel).
  • The people of Zenn-La look the same as humans. The men are all bald, but that could be cultural.
  • This is all explained by the fact that the Celestials based all dominant life forms on the same template
• Invincible: The Viltrumites, of whom main character Mark is a human hybrid, are basically humans with superpowers, and, if they're male, mustaches. All of them. And that's it. It's later revealed that Viltrumites are almost 100% biologically identical to humans, and in crossbreeding the Viltrumite powers are so heavily dominant Mark himself is nearly pure Viltrumite. Facing extinction, the surviving Viltrumites relocate to Earth to breed.
• The Wildstorm Comics 'Verse has Kherubim, super-powered humanlike immortals who can even interbreed with Homo sapiens. It's eventually revealed that this is because Earth and other planets were seeded with devices designed to spread the Kherubim genome across the universe in a form of bloodless conquest. Not that they were averse to the bloody kind on occasion either, being a Warrior Race.
• In the Mark Waid comic Axiom, the two superheroes Axiom and Thena both look like humans despite being aliens. Subverted later on when Axiom slips and reveals this to be a shape he assumed, and his actual appearance, while still anthropomorphic, is grey-skinned, red-eyed and a more alien-looking facial shape.
• The many worlds of the CrossGen universe seem quite prone to humanity as a dominant population. Possibly explained by Geromi in Crux, who mentions a mass exodus from Earth at some point that led to many other worlds being colonized, and that nobody's a true human any more. Discussed in the world-hopping storylines of Sigil and Mystic, when Sam and Giselle encounter humans on a variety of strange worlds (in fact, it initially takes Giselle a while to realize she's not on Ciress any more). It is worth noting that Solusandra apparently created many of the worlds depicted and populated them according to whatever theme had struck her fancy at the time. Whether she actually created the human inhabitants as well or simply transported them from elsewhere in the diaspora is unstated.
• The title character from Superlópez.
• Examples from girl's comics include "Mindreader Mina" from Bunty, "Stella Starr" from Mandy and Xenia of "Almost Human" from Jinty.
• The Therns in Warlord of Mars physically resemble humans the closest out of all other Martian races, who either have exotic skin coloring or are straight up monstrous. So much so that the main protagonist, a human from Earth, is mistaken for one by other people. The Tarids from Thuria also qualify.
• Khaal: The Chronicles of a Galactic Emperor: The main protagonist and the human-like beings from Empyreon call themselves "humans", but its made clear they do not come from Earth, but rather they belong to a very ancient and long destroyed civilization that spanned over the galaxy.
• Vampirella was originally presented as an alien from the planet Drakulon, which was populated by a human-like race that subsisted in blood that flew like water in their world. Dracula was revealed to have been from the same race as Vampi until he was banished, instead of being native from Earth. Later publications retconned Drakulon being a place inside of hell instead of an alien planet, though recently the comic has overlapped between the two.
• Mekkans from ManTech.
• Star Trek: Early Voyages:
  • In "Our Dearest Blood", the Rigellians are physically identical to humans.
  • In "Immortal Wounds", the Neydans are likewise identical to humans.
• The Image Comics adaptation of Battle of the Planets explains the Spectrans' human appearance. Apparently the original Spectrans are extinct, and the Energy Being who ruled them decided to grow a new race of Spectrans from human genetic material. Those weird animalistic uniforms they wear are meant to resemble the long-dead original Spectrans.

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