Older Than They Think / Comic Books

• According to Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, the very medium of comics, which most people assume began with Rodolphe Töpffer in the mid-1800s. Instead, McCloud includes everything from comic books to Egyptian tomb paintings, making the medium Older Than Dirt. However, he does this by using a broad definition that is far from being universally accepted.
• One of the most plagiarized concepts in comics are the misbehaving children playing tricks on adults, teachers and policemen. In Flanders De Vrolijke Bengels and De Lustige Kapoentjes popularized this concept in the late 1940s, but both comics owe a lot to Quick and Flupke (1930) by Hergé, who in his turn was inspired by The Katzenjammer Kids (1893), who in his turn just stole the characters and set-up from Max and Moritz (1865).
• Most people point at Willy Vandersteen of Suske en Wiske fame for popularizing comics in Flanders. But way before Vandersteen started creating comics during the 1940s Flanders already had local comic strip artists in the 1920s and 1930s. It's just that all of these have been forgotten nowadays. Similarly the Netherlands also had comic strips artists almost half a century before Tom Poes became popular in the 1940s.
• When discussing his inspirations for Astro City, Kurt Busiek noted in one interview that comic book readers have a tendency to assume that any comic book trope or character must be inspired in some way by a preexisting one if the two are similar. This ignores the fact that not only are many of these ideas and archetypes very old, but many of the ones that aren't are far more likely to be based on general cultural trends of the time rather than things exclusive to comics. He gives the example of the arguments between DC fans over whether Ace the Bat-Hound is a ripoff of Krypto the Superdog—because the two characters are fairly similar and debuted only a few months apart from each other, one has to be inspired by the other, right? Somewhat more knowledgeable fans will point to earlier instances of the Heroic Dog in comics, such as Rex the Wonder Dog. Busiek argues that this is missing the far bigger picture: all three of the above are far more likely to have been inspired by Lassie, which was at the height of its popularity at the time and predates Krypto and Ace by a decade. Aside from simple Fan Myopia, this seems to result from the fact that while Lassie's popularity came and ultimately went, Krypto and Ace have managed to stick around in some form to this day thanks to Comic-Book Time and Status Quo Is God, meaning that newer readers stumble across these characters in a vacuum and lack the context of an era where there were a lot of crime-solving dogs (of which Krypto and Ace are really the only survivors).
• Another similar point made in Astro City is regarding the The Dark Age of Comic Books. Many fans are surprised and confused that in Astro City, the darkness came in The '70s, this is actually Genius Bonus, when you realize that characters like Wolverine, the Punisher, and Moon Knight actually were introduced in the 70s, and that more violence and mature themes in movies actually started in that decade, not to mention the general malaise and social desintegration in a decade defined by Watergate. The Dark Age of Comic Books were actually an example of Two Decades Behind.
• Batman:
  • While most people acknowledge the Dick Grayson version of Robin to be an older character of the Batman mythos, how old he is tends to surprise people. Most depictions of Batman's career that feature Robin treat him teaming up with Batman as the End of an Age, with Batman having had many adventures beforehand and already encountered many of his greatest villains, usually needing a Morality Pet to drag him out of a dark phase due to everything he's been through. Robin debuted in Detective Comics #38, in 1940—eleven months and eleven issues after Batman's first appearance. The only remotely significant Batman villains to debut in that period were Joe Chill, the Mad Monk, Doctor Death, a nigh-unrecognizable Hugo Strange, and a number of long-forgotten gangsters and mad scientists. Robin as an aspect of Batman's mythos is older than every other member of Batman's Rogues Gallery, and pretty much every other member of his supporting cast apart from Commissioner Gordon. (Yes, Robin debuted before the Joker and Alfred.)
  • Brian Azzarello's wildly popular Joker comic takes place in a more realistic universe, with the Joker depicted as a more believable psychopath. His long messy hair, splotchy "makeup", and Glasgow Grin made him a very unique version of the character.... until The Dark Knight came out. Many people consequently thought that the comic "ripped off" Heath Ledger's Joker, or that the story was outright set in the same continuity as The Dark Knight Trilogy. However, this was just a coincidence, they had already started the story before they even saw what Ledger looked like.
    • The comparison is only appearance based however, as Ledger's Joker and Azzarello's Joker have very different personalities. And the plot of the graphic novel was inspired by the 1989 Christopher Walken movie King of New York.
    • The common thread may be artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who did design work for The Dark Knight and was also one of Lee Bermejo's major influences in the graphic novel.
  • Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns received a lot of mainstream attention and praise as the story which "saved" Batman from harmless camp. However, the comics had returned to menacing form beginning with Denny O'Neil's run in late 1969, long before Miller ever penned a Batman story.
  • The Joker's signature weapon, Joker Venom, debuted in the very first Batman story, published June 1940. It's often believed to be the modern Western origin of the idea of a poison that causes its victims to Die Laughing. However, 3 months before Batman's debut, The Shadow aired an episode called "The Laughing Corpse" that featured a killer who poisoned his victims with a toxin that caused their muscles to contract their face into a grotesque smile and convulsions that made the subject appear to be laughing themselves to death. Of course, this isn't the first time that The Shadow informed some aspect of Batman's creation.
    • The concept of a toxin that makes its victims Go Out with a Smile is in fact taken from observations of real-life strychnine poisoning, and was known as early as Ancient Greece. As far as (Western) pop fiction goes - it's at least as old as the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four (1889).
  • The Batman comics have taken a lot of inspiration from Dick Tracy, if not necessarily intentionally. (Dick Tracy predates Batman by almost a decade.) A guy with his mouth frozen open in a huge grin? That wasn't the Joker originally, that was Laffy, who had many of the Joker's personality traits to boot. (Laffy met a tragic end when he starved to death after his jaw was inadvertently wired shut in an effort to fix his face.) And whom do you picture when you're asked to imagine a guy with a comically long nose? The Penguin, right? Well, he was preceded by another Tracy villain, Ribs Mocca, who is basically a much skinnier Penguin.
  • "Broadway" Bates, a Tracy villain introduced in 1932, not only has a long nose, but formal dress, a monocle and a cigarette holder. The current Dick Tracy writers have lampshaded this by claiming "Broadway" has a brother called Oswald in an unnamed city known for costumed heroes...
  • Spring-Heeled Jack dates back to 1837, predating Detective Comics #27 by more than a century.
  • Deadshot is commonly thought to have debuted in the '70s or '80s due to his reinventions in 1977, and having become a prominent member of the Suicide Squad during that time. He actually debuted in 1950 as a one-off Batman villain, and was a very different character from the Deadshot we know today.
    • Deadshot has also been accused of being a lesser version of Deathstroke despite debuting thirty years before Deathstroke. Part of this confusion is the fact that Deathstroke appeared and was treated as a major villain from the start, while Deadshot was created to be a one-off villain who was only reused a handful of times until John Ostrander's Suicide Squad brought him into the spotlight. The superficial costume similarities, such as Deadshot's mask sometimes being drawn with only one visible eyehole, also don't help things. But even then, again, Deadshot's mask had that feature before Deathstroke was even created.
  • Barbara Gordon is usually considered the original Batgirl; however, six years prior to Babs appearing in Batman (1966) there was already a "Bat-Girl", Betty Kane, who was a sidekick to Batwoman and more of a direct Distaff Counterpart to Robin. Betty Kane was scrapped three years prior to Barbara Gordon's debut along with most of Batman's supporting cast at the time but reappeared in 1977 as a member of Teen Titans West, and the two Batgirls coexisted for a while, even appearing in the same story in Batman Family #16 (though they didn't interact), only for Betty to be retconned out of existence after the Crisis on Infinite Earths universe reboot. She was later reintroduced as "Bette Kane" and made into Flamebird. DC initially ignored her run as Bat-Girl and Barbara Gordon was considered the first Batgirl, but it has since crept back into continuity and as of the continuity reboot Rebirth Bette is technically the first official Batgirl once again, but fans tend to ignore this.
  • The Scarecrow isn't the first Batman villain to use Fear Gas. It was originally created by Hugo Strange◊.
  • Cluemaster is a D-List Batman villain who today is best known for being the father of Ensemble Dark Horse and Batfamily member Stephanie Brown, better known as Spoiler (and sometimes Batgirl). Some might be surprised to learn that he was introduced in 1966, a full 26 years before Spoiler first appeared.
  • Picture this: A Batman story arc where Batman's back is broken, forcing the hero to seek a replacement to don the cape and cowl now that he's out of action. Sounds like the story Knightfall, right? Wrong! This story arc occurred in the Batman newspaper comic strip in 1969, 24 years prior to Knightfall and the introductions of Bane and Azrael.
    • Bane himself: His backstory seems like the kind of excessively dark edgelord nonsense that could only come from the Dark Age of comics, right? Well, it turns out it's based on The Count of Monte Cristo, a Proto-Superhero (ironically enough).
  • Knightfall wasn't the first time a villain sent Batman into a Heroic BSoD, nor was Batman: No Man's Land the first time Gotham was closed off from the rest of the world; the plot of Batman: The Cult featured both.
  • Some adaptations like Batman: The Telltale Series, Batman Begins, Gotham and The Batman (2022) have been criticized for stating (or at least implying) the Waynes' deaths were a deliberate assassination rather than a random robbery-homicide. In actuality, this idea goes all the way back to 1956's Detective Comics #235 which reveals that Joe Chill was ordered to kill the Waynes by a mob boss named Lew Moxon who blamed Thomas Wayne for him getting arrested and jailed. This story was even written by Bill Finger himself!
  • A juvenile delinquent is adopted by Bruce Wayne, becomes a second Robin and is killed in the line of duty. Are we talking about Comic Post Crisis Jason Todd? Actually, we are talking about Lance Bruner who debuted in The Brave and The Bold, fourteen years before Jason Todd was created.
• Superman:
  • Before Superman's birth in 1938 you already had the inhumanly strong Popeye, created in 1929. And many mythological stories from The Antiquity also talk about powerful heroes, just think about Heracles/Hercules.
  • The K-Metal from Krypton: Superman fans who dislike the comics focusing on his Kryptonian heritage often argue that Superman not finding out about his origin until 1949 is evidence that Krypton should be irrelevant, since it means his creators never intended for his homeworld to be more than an excuse for his powers. As proved by this rejected story, though, Superman's creators intended him to learn about Krypton in 1940, when the character was beginning his career. Likewise, during the Silver and Bronze Ages (1955-1985), older Superman fans denounced the quantity of Krypton's fragments landing on Earth and the number of K-related plots as proof that the character had lost his Golden Age essence. Yet still, Siegel wrote a K-focused plot featuring two Kryptonite meteors making their way to Earth in the early Golden Age.
  • An in-universe example has Superboy saying to Superman "Second star to the right and fly till morning." When Superman says "Peter Pan. How appropriate." Superboy replies "What are you talking about? Captain Kirk said that." in reference to Kirk's closing line at the end of Star Trek VI where he was clearly quoting Peter Pan.
  • In 1939 Superman gained a bald arch-villain. His name? The Ultra-Humanite. Lex Luthor was created in 1940, and his signature Bald of Evil look didn't appear until later. (In fact, the change in Luthor's design is believed to have been an accident.) The Ultra-Humanite himself may be based off a short story made by Superman's creators in 1933, titled "The Reign of the Superman".
  • If you ask someone who the first superhero to die and come back to life is, many will cite Jean Grey in the The Dark Phoenix Saga. However, it was a whole 19 years earlier in Legion of Super-Heroes storyline The Death of Lightning Lad that Lightning Lad first died and came back to life.
  • Many fans of Superman & Lois believe X-Kryptonite is an invention of the show, but it first appeared in 1959 story "Supergirl's Super Pet".
  • Most Superman fans are unaware that "The Condemned Legionnaires" introduced the idea of Kryptonite being also harmful to humans, predating the "Lex Luthor's Kryptonite ring gave him cancer" plotline for nearly thirty years.
  • "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is a classic for many reasons, but it wasn't actually the first time that Mr. Mxyzptlk was portrayed as a deadly threat. "The Doom of the Super Heroes", first published in 1963, set the Legion of Super Heroes (including Superboy) against the godlike powers of the mysterious "Mask Man", who after picking off everyone except Superboy unmasked himself as Mxyzptlk V, descendant of the Boy of Steel's future adversary. That time, the future imp's actions were undone with his banishment, with Superboy being the only one to remember.
  • During his stint on Supergirl, Peter David featured Buzz, a smarmy, cigarette-smoking Englishman with a punk hairdo who would call people "luv" and cause trouble for Supergirl. This led to a huge backlash in 1998 as fans would tear at how the character was a total rip-off of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thus, nearly every letter column would have David having to calmly explain that he created Buzz a full year and a half before Spike showed up on Buffy.
• Many moviegoers have accused the Fantastic Four movies of ripping off The Incredibles.
  • Likewise, the Watchmen movie.
  • There are some people who claimed Aldrich Killian from Iron Man 3 was a rip-off of Syndrome from The Incredibles because they both had similar Start of Darkness moments. In reality, the "I'm a bad guy because the hero was supposedly a dick to me when we were younger" plot is a fairly standard stock supervillain origin, dating at least back to Lex Luthor (in How Luthor Met Superboy) and Doctor Doom.
• Fantastic Four: Thing is often accused of being a Hulk ripoff, which is quite an accomplishment, seeing as how the Thing was created first — by the same people.
  • Doctor Doom is also sometimes accused of being a Darth Vader ripoff - despite premiering 15 years before the original Star Wars. Not to mention that Doom is reportedly an inspiration for Vader!
• See Pietà Plagiarism, which is often thought of as coming from the Phoenix or Supergirl issues.
• Wizard magazine, the most "mainstream" magazine on comic books, once contemptuously referred to the immortal supervillain Vandal Savage as "a cheap Ra's al Ghul knockoff". Actually, Vandal Savage predates Ra's by 28 years — 1943 and 1971, specifically.
  • The year before Vandal Savage appeared, America's Greatest Comics had Bulletman fighting the Man of the Ages, a man who had been causing evil for a million years.
  • Ming the Merciless (1934) has been referred to as "a cheap Ra's al Ghul clone" as well. Ra's and Ming are knockoffs of Fu Manchu, who wasn't the first Yellow Peril villain either.
• It's a meme among Fantastic Four fandom that Trelane from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Squire of Gothos" was ripped off from FF villain Infant Terrible, apparently for no more reason than being child-like and omnipotent, even though there are hundreds of examples of this combination going back at least to the 1920s.
• Many people seem to think that Aquaman came before Namor the Sub-Mariner, even though Namor predated him by two years. This may be because Namor went out of print during The Interregnum, while Aquaman held on as an Action Comics backup. Even then, Aquaman is also predated by the Shark, a similar aquatic hero who actually debuted the same month as Namor, but who has since faded into obscurity.
• The DC Comics skull-faced supervillain Doctor Destiny is often called a knockoff of Skeletor, despite the fact that he predates him by several decades. Besides appearance and the fact that they're both villains, these two characters have absolutely nothing in common. And a skull face is not exactly a new or unique concept to start with.
• X-Men:
  • Many fans of misfit superhero teams who are hated and feared by the public they protect, are led by charismatic wheelchair-bound men, and are antagonized by a group with "Brotherhood of Evil" in the name often think that DC's Doom Patrol is a blatant ripoff of Marvel's more popular X-Men. Other comics fans who know a little more about the books' histories know Doom Patrol was actually published first, and assume the theft went the other way around. In fact X-Men followed Doom Patrol by only three months, and given the lead time involved in the production of comics it's most likely no plagiarism was involved. However, some artists and writers worked clandestinely for both companies, and it is possible that information flowed one way or the other. Kurt Busiek put forth the case that, rather, both teams are heavily based on the Fantastic Four (seen in the shared hero uniforms, characters being ugly and shunned for their powers, and lineup including a super-strong brawler, a guy with energy powers, a girl, and a less combative genius leader).
  • Adamantium is most famous as the fictional metal Wolverine's bones and claws are made of, and indeed the X-Men movies are credited with bringing the term to the general public. What fewer people know is that adamantium actually predates the creation of Wolverine by several years, as it was first introduced in an issue of The Avengers back in the 60's as the material Ultron's body was made of.
  • On the subject of the X-Men, the concept of superpowered mutants predates them even at Marvel. The second issue of Yellow Claw from 1956 features six mutants with psychic abilities who are manipulated into using their powers to help the Claw's evil schemes.
    Jimmy Woo: Yes, I said mutants, chief! People with deviations...in either mind or body...or both!
  • On a more general focus there had been superpowered mutants even earlier in science-fiction novels, notably Stanley G. Weinbaum's Adaptive Ultimate (Astounding Stories, November 1935, adapted into the movie She Devil in 1957). And Wilmar H. Shiras wrote a series of pulp stories about superpowered mutants persecuted by a world that fears and hates them starting in 1948 under the general title Children of the Atom. Homo superior, the species name given to mutants, was also coined by Olaf Stapledon in his 1935 novel Odd John.
  • Longshot, an Artificial Human from the Mojoverse introduced in the 1980s, is commonly thought of as being the first non-mutant to join the X-Men. While he was the first long-serving non-mutant member to be fair, he's not actually the first overall, but the second. The first was in the '60s during Stan Lee's original run, with the character Mimic (a human mutate; think like Spider-Man). Since he was part of the largely forgotten original run, his tenure was brief, and he isn't commonly used (because of the inherent Story-Breaker Power he possesses, think what Rogue would be if she didn't need physical contact), one would be forgiven for thinking Longshot was the first to hold this honor. Also, this was before the use of mutants as an analogy for Civil Rights really solidified, which means little attention was actually brought to the fact that Mimic wasn't a homo superior. Funnily enough, Mimic also holds the honor of being the very first recruit after the original five X-Men, which means he was the first new X-Man in general.
  • Psylocke is commonly thought to have been introduced in 1987. While that's when she first appeared as Psylocke, she's actually a decade older than that. Originally, she wasn't a superhero at all, but a supporting character to her twin brother Captain Britain, which debuted in 1976. Those comics however were only released in Britain, at a time where internet wasn't available, so this is understandable. It's funny now when one considers that Psylocke is perhaps the most iconic British superhero in comics, far eclipsing her brother that she originally was just a supporting character to.
• Several death related tropes:
  • When discussing early deaths of mainstream superheroes, characters like Jean Grey and Captain Marvel are often brought up. At the earliest, people may cite Bucky Barnes, who used to be included in the saying "The only people who stay dead in comics are Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben." The first published superhero to die was actually the Comet, a since-forgotten Archie Comics hero who was Killed Off for Real in 1941.
  • When it was first written, Avengers Disassembled was viewed as incredibly shocking, as it showed the team being utterly decimated and several of its members dying, before ultimately leading into a new roster. Walt Simonson already wrote a memorable storyline with the same basic premise back in The '80s, which saw Roger Stern's Avengers line-up (Monica Rambeau, She-Hulk, Namor, Marrina, Black Knight, Thor and Doctor Druid) being decimated so that Simonson could introduce his own roster. Even before that, Justice League of America did a very similar storyline during the Legends crossover, which saw a few members of the team (most notably Vibe and Steel) killed off or maimed in order to make way for the new Justice League International line-up.
• A couple of Alan Moore's Super Hero Deconstruction plots were used by the novel Superfolks first. To be fair to Moore, he had way fewer puns.
  • Moore also cited Harvey Kurtzmann's Superduperman as his all-time favorite comic. This MAD magazine parody had Clark Bent in a Two-Person Love Triangle with Lois Pain, and who after finding out his secret identity dumps him because "once a creep, always a creep". Superduperman also battled Captain Marbles causing much property damage, and Captain Marbles (a Shazam! Expy) was a former superhero who posed as a businessman and whose antics were driven to make money. Moore said that Miracleman and Watchmen were Superduperman Played for Drama, taking the same Deconstruction approach but making it dramatic and poignant rather than hilarious and parodic.
• Will Eisner's The Spirit is considered one of the most innovative comics in the medium and a touchstone for Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman and Bruce Timm.
  • Miller noted that his take on Daredevil was inspired by The Spirit and noting that stuff like the gritty crime drama nature of the stories, the real-life setting of New York City, a mysterious The Man Behind the Man type villain (The Kingpin / The Octopus) and the Femme Fatale who have Dark and Troubled Past connection to the hero (Elektra / Sand Saref) can be sourced there.
  • Neil Gaiman during his run on The Sandman also cited The Spirit, namely the fact that most of the stories in Eisner's run kept the protagonist a Supporting Protagonist, with many of the stories focusing on one-shot characters who are Hero of Another Story, and likewise a few having A Death in the Limelight. He cited this as a justification for his run on The Sandman where a few of the Story Arcs and one-shot tended not to focus on Morpheus / Dream at all.
  • Alan Moore also cited Eisner's humanism in his balance of Muggle and Superhero stories in V for Vendetta (where V, like the Spirit, is largely a Static Character and as symbol, and the real drama is in the supporting characters and villains) as well as Watchmen where the supporting characters like Malcolm Long and the Street Vendor have prominent arcs.
  • Bruce Timm describes the Lower-Deck Episode in Batman: The Animated Series such as Joker's Favour and The Man Who Killed Batman as Homage to Eisner in that Batman barely shows up in these stories and the plots focus on average nobodies in the crazy world of Gotham.
• Name a character:
  • raised in small town America;
  • gifted with strength far beyond an ordinary man;
  • a man "of iron" with skin so tough that it can withstand anything short of an exploding artillery shell;
  • able to jump so high it's like he's flying;
  • imbued with a high morality and sense of justice;
  • who hides his true ability from everyone;
  • fights a wrestler for money;
  • singlehandedly builds a fortress in a wilderness;
  • has adventures where he lifts a car, and rips the door off a bank vault...
    • The character is Hugo Danner, Gladiator, from a book published in 1930, before Superman or Spider-Man. Siegel & Schuster have admitted to taking inspiration from it when they created Superman.
    • Even better, Marvel later created a character named Gladiator as a Captain Ersatz of Superman for their own universe, bringing it full circle. Read more about that here: [1]
    • DC, which published a few stories of the original Hugo Danner (as did Marvel), gave Danner a son named "Iron" Munro who filled in for Golden Age Superman in the Retcon patchwork that The DCU's World War II history became Post-Crisis, when many of the formerly Golden Age heroes were given new, recent origins. Now, the adventures that happened to Superman During the War, mostly happened to Munro instead.
    • Other early superhero characters sharing most of those traits (but set in Japan rather than America) include the Japanese superheroes Golden Bat (debuted 1930) and Prince of Gamma (debuted early 1930's). In these cases, the uncanny similarities to Superman and Batman are even greater, including tropes like full Flight, Super-Speed, The Cape, Bat Signal, alien Super Hero Origin, etc.
• More than a few fans balked at Jane Foster becoming Thor and to a lesser extent Mary Jane Watson as Spinneret in The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows since both are civilian female Love Interests to male heroes. Neither of them are the first instances this happened. Indeed in the case of Shiera Hall, the Golden Age Hawkgirl, it's often forgotten that in her first appearances she started out as simply the civilian girlfriend of Carter Hall. Only after they started dating for a bit very early on did writer Gardner Fox decided to make her Hawkwoman and Hall's confidant and superhero partner in equal measure. Thanks to her appearance in Justice League, Shayera Hol (as she was styled there) has actually displaced and overshadowed the character for whom she was fashioned as a Satellite Love Interest.
  • There was also Charlton Comics' Doll-Man and Doll-Woman, and Elongated Man's Sue Dibny (who didn't have powers like her husband but was still his crimefighting partner in their solo stories, as they were both detectives). And the idea of Jane Foster becoming Thor or Mary Jane fighting crime alongside Spider-Man had been explored previously in Alternate Universe stories.
• Shuma-Gorath predates his appearances in the Doctor Strange and Conan the Barbarian comics, all the way back to a mention in one of Robert E. Howard's Kull stories. The story was published in the 1960s, but could not have been written later than the mid-30s. This is also a case of Adaptation Displacement.
• DC's Deathstroke has often been criticized as a Deadpool rip-off, despite the fact that not only does Deathstroke predate Deadpool by over a decade, Deadpool was originally created to be a rip-off of Deathstroke (though he later became a character in his own right).
  • Deathstroke himself is based off of Taskmaster, a Marvel villain that debuted a few months before him. Not surprising, since George Pérez created both of them. All three characters have diverged. Deathstroke is a Lawful Evil mercenary played dead seriously. Taskmaster is a Lawful Neutral Punch-Clock Villain slash Punch-Clock Hero who is slightly quirky (albeit a Consummate Professional nonetheless) and Only in It for the Money. Deadpool is a competent but ''very'' quirky (i.e. insane) Lovable Rogue who toes the line between Chaotic Neutral and Chaotic Good.
• A number of comic book fans commented that the spaceship◊ in the European comic book Valerian was plagiarized from the Millennium Falcon. Except Valerian and his ship were created in 1967, and Star Wars was made in 1977.
  • Others commented that the flying cars seen in one of the Valerian stories were plagiarized on The Fifth Element — forgetting that the idea of flying cars has been around since... well, the invention of the car. The story was published years before the movie was made, and the director is a Valerian fan who specifically asked the series' artist to work on the design of the movie.
• Ultimate Spider-Man contains an in-universe example when Peter finds a video from his father discussing how he'd planned to use the Venom symbiote to cure cancer.
  Richard Parker: The first recorded mention of cancer is around 1600 B.C. Egypt. A lot of people don't know that. They think cancer came along with cigarettes and food preservatives.
• Some have claimed Watchmen's ending, in which the world unites against an alien threat after New York City is destroyed, is an attempt to capitalize on post-9/11 feelings. However, not only does Watchmen predate 9/11 by 15 years, but the eerie similarities between 9/11 and Watchmen's climax have been noted by more than a few people, especially in regards to whether Ozymandias' plan to bring about world peace would work even temporarily in real life given that world sympathy for the United States was temporary and only lasted until the United States invaded Iraq.
  
  The ending is very similar to The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Architects of Fear". This is acknowledged in the ending (it's the episode playing on Sally Juspeczyk's TV).
• Years before Nick Fury Jr. was introduced as a member of the Secret Avengers, Larry Hama had tried to introduce his own iteration of a "Fury Jr." character in the series that ended up becoming G.I. Joe. When the series was finally launched, Nick Fury Jr. was ReTooled into Duke.
• After the fairly obscure character The Question became the Ensemble Dark Horse of Justice League Unlimited, many people declared him to be a rip off of Rorschach. In fact, Alan Moore only created Rorschach because he was told he couldn't use The Question, the character he had originally planned to use in Watchmen.
  • In fact, Word of God has it that virtually all of the characters Moore created for Watchmen were originally to have been Charlton Comics superheroes that DC had recently purchased the rights to; when he couldn't get permission to use them (i.e. the Question), he created pastiche versions.
• The mix of ancient characters with original creations in stories about characters like Marvel's Thor and Hercules and DC's Wonder Woman and Hercules leads to an understandable amount of both Older Than They Think and Newer Than They Think. Notable examples include reviewers thinking a character was being antisemitic for calling Hercules's wife "Hebe" (that's her name, from classical Greek mythology, and it's pronounced differently to the modern anti-Semitic slur).
• Imagine a team of proactive, even dictatorial Justice League of America Expys using their power to take over Earth in the wake of a catastrophic alien invasion. Sounds like The Authority if you were born after 1992, but Bronze Age readers will recognize it as the plot of Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme.
  • Similarly, Squadron Supreme has some similarities to Watchmen such as a superhero with nuclear powers accidentally giving their friends and family cancer.
  • And it maps very closely to the plot of Kingdom Come, as both involve the Justice League/an expy of them deciding to take a more proactive approach to fixing the world due to a past mistake (Superman retiring in Kingdom Come, the Squadron being brainwashed by a villain in Squadron Supreme), as well as Batman/a Batman expy allying himself with a group of villains to take down the League/Squadron, whose methods are criticized as going too far. Alex Ross even drew a cover for Squadron's trade paperback!
  • And finally, the Justice League two-parter "A Better World" does the same thing, and was followed by the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game. However, in those cases, the more extreme League are the antagonists, not the protagonists.
• In general, superhero comics' Darker and Edgier turn has often been exclusively credited to (or blamed on) The Dark Age of Comic Books and the trend's Bronze Age origins overlooked. (And those origins aren't just in the earlier work of later Dark Age stars like Alan Moore. Witness the hero apparently confessing to off-screen torture, then gloating over his fallen enemy as he slowly and deliberately batters him to death on screen ... in "Spawn" from New Gods ... by Jack Kirby, in 1971!)
• James A. Owen received a lot of hate mail for "stealing" the characters of Titania and Oberon from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series for his own Starchild series. It got so bad that, as a favor, Neil wrote the intro for the collected anthology explaining that James did not, in fact steal anything that wasn't already stolen.
• Spider-Man: Some fans have accused Norman Osborn (aka the Green Goblin) of being a rip off of Lex Luthor since both are corrupt businessmen who work behind the shadows and who have political aspirations. However, Norman has been an evil businessman since he debuted in 1966, while Luthor was a traditional Mad Scientist from his appearance in 1940 until his reinvention as a businessman in 1986. Of course the modern concept of Osborn as a Marvel-wide villain (Head of HAMMER, SHIELD, Thunderbolts) who enters high political office despite being a known villain is certainly inspired by Luthor's time as President Evil in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and even then, the concept of villain as head-of-state with diplomatic immunity is more or less something that Doctor Doom has copyright on.
• Masked crimefighter who is actually a blind man whose work includes court trials. You are probably thinking about Daredevil, who is actually Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer. But years before him, in 1939, there was another character like that: blind DA Tony Quinn AKA The Black Bat.
• Speaking of Daredevil, in Marvel Team-Up Annual #4 he enters police offices through a window to talk with a police lieutenant and just as the lieutenant in question turns around to thank him for his help, he's nowhere to be found. Then, the lieutenant yells "Blast him! He always does that to me!" If this sounds familiar, keep in mind the story was published back in 1981, and it would be many years before Jim Gordon would endure the same indignity.
• Doctor Mid-Nite, a Golden Age DC character, is a blind superhero and a doctor of superheroes long before Daredevil and Night Nurse were a thing.
• "The Star Beast", the introductory story for Doctor Who Magazine recurring villain Beep The Meep, a Killer Rabbit alien war criminal posing as a harmless Alien Among Us, looks blatantly like a parody of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and even more so of Alan Moore's 2000 AD series "Skizz". But it actually predated both works.
• Alpha Flight was launched by great fanfare with a major selling feature being it was the first major superhero title featuring Canadian characters. In fact, Captain Canuck had been running for a number of years by that point, and the Alpha Flight character Guardian bore more than a passing cosmetic resemblance to the Captain (Guardian was introduced in 1978, but Captain Canuck had debuted in 1975).
• Ant-Man riding one of Hawkeye's arrows is arguably one of the most iconic moments in Avengers history, and has been recreated in adaptations like The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Captain America: Civil War. However, DC actually beat Marvel to the punch on this, as Green Arrow and The Atom pulled the same trick in an issue of Justice League of America back in 1963.
• A villain whose modus operandi is leaving riddles. Sounds like the Riddler? Actually before that was Doctor Riddle, a hunchbacked Bulletman villain who first appeared in 1942, while the Riddler first appeared in 1948.
• Batgirl Cassandra Cain was the first Asian-American member of the Batfamily (and the Batfamily's first hero of color in general), as well as DC's first Asian character to have her own ongoing series Batgirl (2000). About a year or so before she debuted, John Byrne pitched an idea for a new Asian-American Batgirl, though it never came to fruition.
• The superhero's arch-enemy, a bald scientist, turns out to have to have a tragic backstory, where he was originally trying to use his inventions to do good. That is not referring to Lex Luthor, it is referring to Doctor Sivana, arch-enemy of Captain Marvel. This was revealed in Whiz Comics #15, from 1941.
• Ever heard of that superhero who has mechanical bracelets full of web fluid and uses them to shoot web lines to swing around on and catch bad guys? Of course I'm referring to Fox Features' The Spider Queen, first appearing in September, 1941. And a month later, DC published their own web-spinning hero, the Tarantula, though he actually used web guns (itself Hilarious in Hindsight, as there are now two alternate versions of Spider-Man that had web guns - the Amalgam Universe's Spider-Boy and What If's Punishing Spider). Spider-Man is from 1962.
• Wonder Woman
  • Many incorrectly believe that Wonder Woman was the first female superhero. In fact, there were dozens of female superheroes prior to Wonder Woman. One of the earliest is Ritty, who debuted in late 1939, two years before Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman isn't even the first female patriotic superhero. She was preceded by USA, Miss Victory, Miss America, Miss Patriot, Pat Patriot and War Nurse. Most notably Hawkgirl was introduced prior to Wonder Woman, first as Shiera Sanders, Hawkman's love interest, in Flash Comics #1, then as Hawkgirl in All Star Comics #5, June, 1941. Wonder Woman first appeared in All Star Comics #8, 1941. It would be more correct to say that she is the first female superhero to headline her own series.
  • The earliest (comics) superheroine is probably Olga Mesmer, the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, who appeared in a back-up comic series in the pulp magazine Spicy Mystery Stories starting in August 1937. That's right, she got into print before Superman. Olga Mesmer also was super-strong and the daughter of an alien queen (belonging to a subterranean race that originated from Venus), but her feature only lasted a little over a year. Considering the title of the magazine in which she appeared, it's probably no surprise that Olga did not fight in a colourful costume, but mostly in her underwear. Fun fact: Both Spicy Mystery Stories and Action Comics were published by Harry Donenfeld.
  • Some fans mistakenly believe that Hippolyta had blonde hair prior to Post-Crisis. In reality, Hippolyta had black hair since her debut in the Golden Age.
  • The Wonder Woman comics frequently draw criticism for sanitizing the Amazons. However, the Amazons being murderous misandrists is one of several takes of them from the myths which were constantly being re-told. There is also some real life historical findings that suggested that the Amazons of myth were based on real people and that what was said about them by the Greeks wasn't entirely true.
  • Wonder Woman has drawn criticism for using a sword in recent years but the Golden Age Amazons also used swords on occasion.
  • Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman has drawn both praise and criticism for having Ares as an ally to Diana. However, Ares has a long history of being either an ally or antagonist to Diana since post-crisis. He pulled a Heel–Face Turn at the end of George Perez's run, was an uneasy ally in Rucka's run and even served as a mentor of sorts to Cassie Sandsmark, the second Wonder Girl.
  • The decision to Retcon Diana’s origins from being a clay doll animated by magic to Hippolyta and Zeus’ biological daughter in New 52 was and remains controversial. However, a similar origin was originally teased in the DC Animated Universe, where Hades implies that he is Diana’s father, although it is never revealed if he’s telling the truth or not.
  • William Messner-Loebs's run famously introduced Artemis, a red-haired Amazon from the Bana-Mighdall tribe who temporarily replaced Diana as Wonder Woman and was much more abrasive and violent than her predecessor. However, key elements of Artemis's character were seen in three other Pre-Crisis era Amazons:
    • During the Bronze Age, Jack C. Harris wrote a two-issue story in which Diana was replaced as Wonder Woman by a red-haired Amazon named Orana. Like Artemis, Orana was characterized as arrogant and ill-tempered, and even died as well. The main difference is that Artemis came back to life shortly after death. In fact, Orana is one of the earliest Anti Hero Substitutes in superhero comics.
    • Artemis is not the first Amazon to be named after the Greek goddess of the hunt. Back in issue #298 of the first Wonder Woman volume, Dan Mishkin introduced an Amazon named Artemis who was a former Amazon champion of the gods until she fell from grace.
  • Byrne's run established that Hippolyta was sent back in time to the 1940s where she joined the Justice Society of America as their Wonder Woman, leading to a new timeline where Hippolyta was Wonder Woman before Diana. The idea of Diana being a Legacy Character was divisive among fans, but as the entry above with Artemis shows, Diana having a predecessor as Amazon champion is not a new idea.
  • The Blue Snowman is one of many ice-themed supervillains in The DCU, most of whom are more well-known than her. It may surprise many to know that the Blue Snowman actually predates every ice-themed villain of the DC universe, including known Freeze Ray-users, Captain Cold and Mr. Freeze.
  • DC Infinite Frontier marks the debut of Yara Flor, a member of the Esquecida Amazon tribe who reside in the Amazon Rainforest. The idea of "Amazons from the Amazon" is not new to the Wonder Woman mythos: back in 1984, Dan Mishkin introduced a splinter tribe of Amazons from the Amazon Rainforest in issue #314 of the original volume. These Amazons also predate the Bana-Mighdall as a separate tribe of Amazons who left Themyscira.
  • Many assume that there weren't non-white Amazons until the creation of Nubia in 1973. This is far from the case; back in 1949, Robert Kanigher wrote "The Riddle of the Chinese Mummy Case" (Wonder Woman Volume 1, #37) which saw the discovery of an ancient Chinese statue dedicated to Princess Mei who inexplicably has an Amazon shield. Diana goes on a trip through time to meet the living Princess Mei, who reveals herself to be a descendant of the Amazons who conquered Asia Minor. Mei's tribe of Amazons predate even the Bana-Migdhall.
  • The original Wonder Woman comic series introduced the Saturnites, Telepathic Spacemen from Saturn in #10. This was fourteen years before the debut of Saturn Girl, an alien telepath from Saturn's moon.
• Black Panther is often said to be the first black superhero, but that honor actually belongs to Lion Man, an obscure Golden Age hero who appeared in the sole issue of All-Negro Comics back in 1947. And if we're not explicitly talking about superheroes, the gunslinger Lobo was the first black character to have his own comic book series, while Waku, Prince of the Bantu, had his own feature in Atlas Comics' Jungle Tales anthology series back in 1954.
• Attilan, the hidden city of The Inhumans, was first mentioned in a Tuk the Caveboy story back in 1941.
• Many people think the Affirmative-Action Legacy trope is a modern concept that was designed to appeal to more "politically correct" 21st century sensibilities. At the earliest, they tend to think it started in The '90s with characters like Steel, Connor Hawke and the aforementioned Cassandra Cain. In reality, the first major instance of this trope at Marvel or DC was John Stewart, the black Green Lantern, who debuted all the way back in 1971.
• Relatedly, John Stewart is often said to be DC's first black superhero. He's actually predated by Mal Duncan, a member of the Teen Titans who debuted in 1970.
• Related, but in the 21st century, Captain America had two very high profile instances where he was replaced. First was by Bucky Barnes after Civil War, and then again by Sam Wilson in 2014. The first major instance of this happening was back in the '80s during Mark Gruenwald's run (when Steve Rogers was replaced by John Walker), and even before that, J.M. DeMatteis had pitched a story where Cap would have been killed off and replaced by Jesse Black Crow, a young Native American man who had previously appeared in his run. Meanwhile, the '70s run of Captain America and The Falcon briefly featured a young man named Roscoe Simons as the new Cap after Steve Rogers abandoned the mantle in favor of becoming Nomad.
• You might think that having Cyclops (mutant terrorist) on the cover of Rolling Stone in All-New X-Men was a reference to the controversy surrounding Rolling Stone's "glam Boston Bomber" cover; however the first comic where it appeared came out at least six months before the actual bombing, much less the magazine cover.
• Spider-Man occasional ally, occasional antagonist and master thief Black Cat is a beautiful, athletic woman who dresses in a skintight black catsuit, has no powers but lots of practice, a cat motif, and a flirtatious relationship with the hero. This has frequently led to accusations that she is a Captain Ersatz of DC's Catwoman, but Catwoman has had several revamps over the years, and Black Cat appeared about a decade before Catwoman was portrayed in this manner. (Then again, both appearances are preceded by Catwoman's black leather outfit in the Adam West series...)
• The basic idea for a Spider-Gwen-like character was actually conceived by writer/producer Lisa Joy for an aborted Spin-Off of The Amazing Spider-Man Series. The idea was basically conceived as a way to bring Emma Stone back to the franchise after the original Gwen had been killed off in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
• When Pacific Rim was released in the UK, Judge Dredd Megazine reprinted Detonator X. Cue indignant fan letter complaining about how Guillermo del Toro didn't acknowledge his inspiration from a little-known British comic, to which the editor replied that giant robots fighting giant monsters had been a mainstay of Japanese monster movies and anime for decades.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch originated in 1962, making it predate both I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. It, and especially its 90s live action adaptation, often get mistaken for a ripoff of said shows.
• Heroes Reborn actually did a number of things before Ultimate Marvel line and the Marvel Cinematic Universe did them:
  • The Avengers, or an Avengers-like team, is assembled by S.H.I.E.L.D. to help stop villains instead of forming on its own. Sound familiar? Granted, it's regard by most fans as an Audience-Alienating Era and hence most have chosen to forget about it, but Heroes Reborn, which saw print in 1996, was the first to use the concept of S.H.I.E.L.D. being the ones to bring together the Avengers, five years before The Ultimates did it and 16 years before The Avengers movie used it (and that was likely borrowed from The Ultimates).
  • Similarly, Galactus's arrival being heralded with several heralds instead of one, and each one establishing and protecting a machine at distant places of the world instead of a single machine in New York that The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes used? Also used in Heroes Reborn, which came 14 years before.
  • The first post-Liefeld Captain America issue mildly retconned Cap's backstory to reveal a World War II Super-Soldier was defrosted during both The Korean War and The Vietnam War, only to put him back under when their mental conditioning started to buckle. Sounds like Bucky Barnes following becoming the Winter Soldier, right? Nope, replace the Soviet Union with the United States and you've got Heroes Reborn Captain America's backstory. That said, in the case of Heroes Reborn, this turned out to be part of a series of lies for HR!Steve told by an LMD of Nick Fury in the penultimate issue.
  • Heroes Reborn also came up with the idea of The Falcon being a former soldier with a military flight suit, which was later reused for his Ultimate portrayal and his depiction in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
• An aircraft pilot named Hal Jordan, appearing in a superhero comic book? It happened in a Golden Age Timely/Marvel comic book starring Sub-Mariner, in 1945. Coincidentally (or not), his look is very similar to his more famous namesake's, who showed up 10 years after.
• Underground Comics: Often associated with Robert Crumb, though he wasn't the first artist to draw comics tackling sexual and political taboos. Jaxxon's "God Nose" (1964) is seen as the oldest example. And in the 1930s and 1940s anonymous comic strip artists made pornographic parodies of well known comic book characters, nicknamed "Tijuana Bibles".
  • When the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse fell into public domain at the start of 2024, there were lots of jokes about exploiting the situation by making porn featuring Mickey, seemingly unaware that Tijuana Bible creators beat them to the punch by about 90 years (Mickey and Minnie Mouse in sexual situations being a common theme in the old booklets).
• Many Black Canary fans think of her as a relatively new character, maybe from The '70s or The '80s. Black Canary is actually a Legacy Character, the older incarnation of which — namely, Dinah Drake — first appeared in 1947. Black Canary was one of the first female members of the Justice Society of America and first debuted in Flash Comics alongside Hawkman. She also had a love interest, Larry Lance, over twenty years before she became associated with Green Arrow, which was also around the same time that she got her iconic Canary Cry (before then she fought with martial arts only). The later and more well-known incarnation by far, Dinah Lance, was introduced during the Bronze Age as Drake's daughter who inherited her superpower.
• Tales of the Jedi: The comic itself is the first EU appearance of the Old Republic Era (taking place 4,000 years before any of the films), but most fans know it from the Knights of the Old Republic games, which were released around the time of the prequel films. It also contains the first appearance of the double-bladed lightsaber, the Jedi Council, and the Sith Rule of Two later seen in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
  • Dark Empire II by the same creators had a scene which showed a conference room in an ancient Jedi citadel. The room looks identical to the Jedi Council Chamber that would appear in the prequels (with the sole exception of the center of the room being occupied by a crystal monolith). This comic was published in 1995, four years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
• Ms. Marvel (2014)
  • A lovable, idealistic young South Asian Muslim female Marvel superhero whose family relationships are deliberately warm and supportive, in opposition to anti-Muslim stereotype, and who is an unashamed fangirl of the older-established Marvel heroes? Could be Kamala Khan, but before her it was Faiza Hussain.
  • Speaking of Kamala, she's also not the first teen hero to follow Carol Danvers' footsteps. Ultragirl filled a similar role in Avengers: The Initiative and was even given Carol's old Ms. Marvel costume, before Dark Reign cut that plot thread short.
  • Related, but there's a tendency to refer to Kamala as the second Ms. Marvel, or maybe third if people are counting Moonstone's use of the name when she was part of the Dark Avengers. The second was actually Sharon Ventura, a Thing supporting character who joined the Fantastic Four as the new Ms. Marvel after Carol Danvers became Binary. The fact that Sharon later became known as She-Thing, and her lack of usage by later writers, have contributed to her part in the Ms. Marvel legacy largely having been overshadowed.
• Teen Titans:
  • Beast Boy debuted as part of the Doom Patrol series in the 1960s, but most people know him from The New Teen Titans comics of the 1980s or its 2003 cartoon adaptation Teen Titans. He was even in an original Teen Titans issue but was denied a position on the team because he couldn't get adult permission.
  • Most people would associate the name Starfire with Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran. However, the first character to use that name was Leonid Konstantinovitch who debuted in Teen Titans #18 (1968). He later changed his codename to Red Star.
    • Koriand'r isn't even the second character with that name. Adventure Comics #402 - #407 had Supergirl fighting a crimelord named Starfire in 1971. In 1976, DC debuted the third Starfire and gave her her own ongoing which lasted only eight issues. Like the more well-known Titans character, this Starfire was also a scantily-clad alien female warrior.
• The decline in superhero comic books sales dates to the 90s, or possibly the late 80s at the earliest, right? Wrong, the sales figures of superhero comics have been in a steady decline since the early 1960s, with the Silver Age titles selling significantly fewer issues than the Golden Age titles. It was this decline, much more than the 1971 revision of the Comics Code, which lead to the sudden reappearance of mainstream horror comics.
  • The 90s Comics Crash wasn't even the first really significant one, which was the 1978-1979 crash. A mixture of rising prices, competition at traditional venues like newsstands, and so on resulted in a significant cratering in sales. This caused the DC Implosion (a massive die-off in DC's lesser-light series), and Marvel largely only managed to hold on by virtue of owning the license for Star Wars. In fact, the '78 crash is largely considered the reason that comics are mostly sold in direct-market shops.
• One of Spider-Man's foes decides not only to "kill" him, but become a Superior Successor show that they could be a better Spider-Man than Peter Parker ever could. Sounds like Superior Spider Man, right? Well, it actually happened before, as part of Kraven's Last Hunt had Kraven pretending to be Spider-Man after drugging and burying him alive to show himself as Spidey's superior.
• Synergy between comics and their adaptations. The practice really came to prominence (and controversy) in The New '10s, when Marvel began aggressively trying to sync their comics up with the movies and shows of the MCU, but it was already around way before that. Not only was it already a thing with previous Marvel movies ^note Among MANY other examples, Blade's enhanced strength comes from the Wesley Snipes movies, while both Mystique and Toad got redesigned to resemble their counterparts from the first X-Men film, with Toad's prehensile tongue also coming from the flick, but it has arguably been going on as long as adaptations of comic books have. Superman's flight came from the Fleischer cartoons, while both Jimmy Olsen and Kryptonite originated in the radio show.
• Many people who come across The Shield comics by Dark Circle (a subset of Archie Comics aimed at darker superhero stuff than their typical fare) think that the titular superhero is a Gender Flipped expy of Captain America. The Shield actually predates Captain America by several months, though the modern 2015 version is a new Legacy Character.
• One of the biggest accusations towards Secret Empire was that turning Steve Rogers into an unapologetic fascist character was a slap in the face towards his co-creator Jack Kirby, who was Jewish. As others have pointed out, there was already a story years before where Captain America was turned into a fascist character. By Jack Kirby, except Kirby did that for a short moment and not an extended event title.
• While Miles Morales, created in 2011, is the first Afro-Latino character with the powers and title of Spider-Man, he is neither the first Hispanic nor the first black Spider-Man. The Irish-Mexican Miguel O'Hara in Spider-Man 2099 beats him by nearly twenty years, and Hobie Brown, a black teen, temporarily took on the role even farther back in 1970.
• Alan Moore again. His Cthulhu Mythos comic Providence has a big twist at the end where Cthulhu is revealed to be a Half-Human Hybrid. It sounds like just the sort of deconstructive Crack Fic Moore is known for writing... but in truth, as the comic itself lampshades, it’s actually supported by Lovecraft’s own writings; Cthulhu was the only one of his fictional gods that he always depicted as humanoid, and given that pretty much nothing else in the mythos looks even remotely human...
• Marvel is often believed to have started introducing young/teen superhero teams post-2000 to capture young readers, with titles like Runaways, Young Avengers, and more recently, Champions being cited as their big pushes towards that in effort to capitalize on the same market that Teen Titans appeals to. In reality, Marvel successfully did that back in 1982, with the New Mutants being the official answer to the Titans. In fact, New Mutants was where the iconic Deadpool originated, being an antagonist and rip-o — err, homage of iconic DC villain Deathstroke. They also introduced as a second youth-oriented team with the New Warriors in 1989, which fit the "non-X related young heroes team".
• Speaking of Young Avengers, while the book was published in 2005, the concept existed beforehand as something Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino proposed to Marvel in 1992. This proposed team would've consisted of a very different lineup, namely Namoria, Speedball, Vance Astro, Firestar, and Torpedo (Richard Rider after he lost his Nova abilities). Along the way, it would've introduced Combat, Cougar, Brahma, Lynx, Rebound, Gridlock, Spectra, and Photon. It was ultimately rejected, and the latter characters were introduced in Image Comics works like Youngblood (Image Comics) and Shadowhawk.
• While the lack of Venom's classic white spider emblems was decried in Venom (2018), there actually is basis via the Ultimate Spider-Man comics as the Ultimate version of Venom only had the logos on the covers of his initial arc and the end of the video game.^note Where it was actually Eddie, anyway; The Ultimates 3 opened with an Ultron-created copy attacking the team and said copy did sport the white spider logos.
• Spider-Gwen being in a band was thought by some after the Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors as a way to have Gwen sing because she's being voiced (again) by Dove Cameron. Actually, Spider-Gwen being part of a band is part of her civilian life in the comics.
• Fantastic Four:
  • The name of the lab at the end of Fantastic Four (2015) being "Central City" was mistaken by some as a reference to The Flash. In actuality, Central City was the name of the city they operated in during the comic's Early-Installment Weirdness (and is still canon as Reed's hometown).
  • The infamous use of Letters 2 Numbers in the stylized version of the title of the 2015 film (Fant4stic) is often attributed to being a creation of this movie. Marvel actually did that back in late 2012◊ as part of the Marvel NOW! line.
  • Alicia Masters, longtime girlfriend of the Thing, got a Race Lift for 2005's Fantastic Four, but the first time this happened was in Marvel Mangaverse: Fantastic Four, three years prior.
  • The Fantastic Four in general seem to have had a lot of their early concept and setup recycled from the Challengers of the Unknown: a four-man team of Science Hero adventurers in matching jumpsuits whose origin involves a spaceship accident. The two books even shared an artist.

• Whilst fans complained that the Re-Power Spider-Man underwent to give him organic webshooters was based on the Sam Raimi Spider-Man Trilogy (and the Wolverine Claws were just an all-around terrible idea), the truth is that the idea of a Spider-Man with organic webbing (and claws!) was first used in the original Spider-Man 2099.
• Done In-Universe For Laughs in an Archie Comic when Veronica gets into collecting antique appliances like a hand-cranked beater and a clothes iron that you heat on the stove. Archie and Jughead are enamored by this "cool cutting-edge technology that doesn't need electricity and lacks cords to get tangled."
• Stan Carter is not the first Marvel villain to go by the name Sin-Eater. Two years before Carter debuted in The Death of Jean DeWolff, Ghost Rider featured Ethan Domblue, a villain who went by the name of Sin-Eater.
  • In the 2020 story arc Sins Rising, Carter is resurrected by the villain Kindred who imbues Carter with the power to banish people's sins and manipulates Carter into thinking he is doing God's will. This is yet another area in which Domblue precedes Carter; in Domblue's first appearance he was granted the ability to "eat" people's sins by the villain Centurious who took advantage of Domblue's obsession with having a sinless congregation to create a slave army made of the people Domblue had left passive after taking their sins.

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