The Superhero - An American Invention

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Radio and Southwest Airlines. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we also love to hear your stories. We feature them routinely.

Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. Jeffrey Johnson is a World War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. He's also the author of Super History, Comic Book Superheroes, and American Society. He's here to share this story. Let's take a listen.

My name is Jeffrey Johnson. I have a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University. I was always drawn to comic books since I was, I guess, about 10 or 11. And then I stopped reading them and then I picked them back up during the late 80s and the early 90s. And then when I started my PhD in, I guess, 2004, I started reading them again. And it really just struck me just how cohesive the narrative is and how I very much speak to the American experience in the way that King Arthur does for England and Beowulf does for the ancients and the Greek gods do for the Greeks and the Roman gods for them. I mean, they're this mythological force and they're a narrative driver that speaks to these heroes that a certain society needs at a certain time, that speaks to their hopes and their dreams and their fears. And they're a real mirror to what is always going on in the greater U.S. mindset and the background of how we live, which is an amazing thing to have to track, basically how the American society changed from 1938 until now through these superheroes. The first comic book superhero was Superman, and he debuted in June 1939, was the cover date of Action Comics No.

1 when he came out. There were comic strips and comic books before that. The first comic strip, which was a newspaper strip, came out in 1896 and it was called the Yellow Kid. But it was a different art form than what comic books are because comic strips were different for comic books because comic strips came out daily in the newspaper and they were three, four, five panels and a strip every day. And they often touched on politics or things of the day at the early start.

And then they would follow the daily adventures of somebody. And they were, from the beginning, really highly respected. And the people who created them became pretty famous and pretty wealthy pretty quickly because they were read by so many people in the newspaper every day. And most of the people who went into that sort of artwork, the kind of cartooning artwork, really wanted to get into comic strips. But in the early 1930s, there were these pulp magazines and then the early precursors to the comic books were these little pamphlets that were put out at newsstands that were very much cheap paper, very quickly made stories, and often they were reprints of the comic strips that had been put in the paper.

But the real first major difference of what a comic strip and a comic book could be was in 1938 Action Comics number one came out and the superhero was introduced. That was the first appearance of Superman and the creators of Superman were two teenage boys from Cleveland, Ohio. Their names were Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

Jerry mostly wrote the stories and Joe mostly did the art. And they worked together on Superman and they came up with the idea just while that they were trying to think up a comic strip for the newspapers because they really wanted to be comic strip guys because that was where all the money and all the fame were. And these were two teenage boys who felt like they were outcasts. They didn't really do particularly well at school. They wanted to have girlfriends but they didn't. They were a little bit nerdy.

They were two people who really felt like they needed a champion for them, someone who could stand up for people like them. And one of the really interesting things is that Jerry Siegel's father had been murdered during a robbery and he had always carried that with him. And so in some ways he said later that he created Superman because he didn't want people to feel like he felt in this fictional world that he created and he couldn't do anything about his father's murder and he couldn't do anything at actual time. But he could create this world in which this super-powered hero could actually fight for the common man and could be this larger than life force who actually worked for real people and who tried to avenge the wrongs and tried to stop crime and make up for things that went wrong. It's fascinating that two teenage boys created Superman, this first superhero who created this entire industry that we're still talking about today.

I mean it came out of nowhere and yet it's this amalgamation of all of these different background things. I mean you have Superman who's you know dressed in this costume that's very much taken from like these circus acrobat performers and strongmen, very bright and colorful and stem type costume. And then you have all of these different pulp heroes like Doc Savage and the Phantom, Zorro, Tarzan, The Shadow who all have these secret identities and they fight crime and they're in the shadows. But they weren't really Superman because they didn't put it all together.

I mean you had strongmen like Popeye and you had Avengers like Zorro or you had people who went on adventures like John Carter from Mars and you had all of the elements were there but no one ever put them into one person because it was too fantastical. When Siegel and Shuster first came up with the idea they first tried to make it into a comic strip and put it into the newspapers and nobody wanted it. Then they went around and they tried to get every comic book publisher to take it and nobody wanted it because nobody believed that anybody would want to read something that was this unbelievable, that was this super. And so they finally found a comic publisher that was run by two guys named Harry Donofield and Jack Leibowitz who started what was at that kind called National Comics but it later became known as DC Comics and they were looking for filler for this new comic book they were creating called Action Comics number one. And you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story of comic books and where it all really began and not superheroes because they'd been around Greek mythology to the present but in 1938 a couple of young guys teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and they had more than an idea they wanted as Jeffrey said to create a champion for sort of nerdy outcasts like themselves.

And by the way the book is super history comic book superheroes in American society go wherever you get your books Amazon or the usual suspects. And when we come back more of the life of comic book superheroes and how they mirror American life here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told but we can't do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to but they're not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American Stories coming.

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Designed to thrill. And we're back with our American stories and Jeffrey Johnson who is a World War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and he's also the author of super history comic book superheroes and American society. We'd left off with him talking about two teenagers in Cleveland Ohio and this idea for a character and a cartoon and a comic book called Superman. Let's pick up where Jeffrey last left off. Although everybody remembers Action Comics number one is the first appearance of Superman there were multiple stories in there about detectives and crime and there was a magic story and there was all of these different formats were basically pushed in this one episode and Superman was basically added to this first issue because they needed something to put in there that was a story and this was Siegel and Schuster's last chance and so when Action Comics came out with the cover date of June 1938 they did put Superman on the cover and there's this incredible cover of Superman picking this car up and he's smashing it and you see these guys in the background with fear on their face and running around and I mean it's not what people think of Superman now it's this you know person who fights crime and he's you know nice to children he saves cats from trees and that sort of thing I mean this is somebody was terrifying the people on this cover of this first issue and the story inside is much the same way I mean you know Superman goes around and he he fights these kind of petty street criminal type crime and he you know he fights corrupt politicians there's a portion of Action Comics number one with the villain is a lobbyist who's who's corrupt and Superman basically holds him upside down on a wire and tries to scare him to death that's very different from the Superman that most people think of who pushes planets around a guy who's worried about a lobbyist who's kind of make a bad backroom deal but I mean that's what Superman was in the beginning he was someone who stopped petty thieves and he stopped corrupt slum lords and he he took on gambling dens that put slot machines for children to use I mean he worried about street level crime because that's what Siegel and Schuster were worried about they were worried about the things that they saw every day I mean this was 1938 this was in the midst of the Great Depression right things were going terribly in the U.S. economy they crashed back in 1929 so you have almost a decade of bread lines and soup lines and massive amounts of people out of work so when it came out Harry Donofield and Jack Leibovitz printed 200,000 copies and they printed it as an overprint they thought they'd have a lot extra sent back and then it immediately sells out and the retailers are asking them for more so they printed more for issue two and they sold out of that and they printed more for issue three but nobody knew that it was Superman selling the issues because there were so many different stories in there and then by issue six they finally got numbers and they were able to figure out that it was Superman and they went around and they talked to a newsstand dealers and they said the kids don't know action comics they they asked me for the one that's got Superman in it and by action comics number six they were selling about 500,000 copies each which was up from that 200,000 print run for the first one that they thought was wildly optimistic I mean Superman took off in a way that I don't know if American culture has ever seen before it became a mania of just how popular how quickly he became he got a Macy's Day Parade balloon like within a couple of years pretty soon he gets his own show on the radio and he's got radio adventures and I mean and then really quickly in the summer of 1939 he gets his own comic book Superman number one comes out basically a year from the first issue of action comics number one I mean this was grassroots this wasn't marketing nobody went out and asked people what they wanted or you know tried to do these surveys or tried to you know come up with something that people wanted this was a vision of these two kids who changed the entire world in some way by creating these superheroes there were soon dozens and dozens of knockoffs of Superman and one of the first Superman knockoffs was actually done by DC itself I mean when that they saw how popular Superman was they quickly talked to writers and tried to figure out if they could get another superhero to make more comics about and so they talked to a guy named Bob Kane is the story and he came back after a weekend with this idea for Batman and Batman couldn't be any different from Superman they wanted a Superman knockoff but I mean Batman is not super powered he's a millionaire playboy who is everything that Bob Kane the writer who created him wanted he wanted to be rich and popular and be able to do all these things he's wished fulfillment for Bob Kane in the way same way that Superman was for Siegel and Shuster but in the exact opposite way so you have this really interesting dynamic now that you have these two DC superheroes that couldn't be any different you have Superman who's eventually shown as being this Kansas farm boy who's from a place that's so quaint and so middle America that it's called Smallville he's adopted by this wonderful couple who teach him values and who teach him that he's supposed to fight for right and for truth and justice and all this stuff and I say the other stuff because they didn't start saying the American way until the adventures of Superman TV show with George Reeves came about in 1953 and then you have Batman who who sees his parents murdered and he's got all of this money and all of the things that he could want but he but he's in this city that basically the crime of the city killed his parents and now he has to start this war on the city and the crime that that's in it so I mean you have these two heroes but they do reflect these two sides of this American mythology that's been around since the very start of who we are what's fascinating about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster is they were immigrants as were almost all of the early creators of comic books they both had parents who fled different countries because of the anti-semitism of where they were from as did a lot of the early creators I mean Bob Kane was of a Jewish background and his parents fled where they were from because of problems I talked about the publishers of some national comics they both came from different countries to the states when that they were young and they fled because their parents thought that they could have a much better life in this country and one of the creators want to talk about later Jack Kirby he was from New York and his parents were also immigrants and they came to America because of a better life and Stan Lee was was born Stanley Lieber and he was of a Jewish background too so I mean a really large portion of the early creators were from Jewish backgrounds and were people really understood how things could go wrong in places other than the US and they came to the US really wanting a better life by the end of the 1930s in the early 1940s there were literally dozens if not hundreds of knockoff comic book superheroes I mean people like the Black Hood Cat Man Sub-Zero Man Hydro Man Voltron the Human Generator the Phantom Lady Major Victory the Human Bond and Vapoman are you know some of the great names that come out of that era but I mean there were also some that were really successful one of the most successful one is on Shazam or Captain Marvel as he's known sometimes who came out of Wiz Comics number two and 1940 and he was a Superman ripoff but he was done in this very safe very cleansed and a very easy read so Shazam who was created to look just like Superman but he's given these much more child-friendly adventures where there was nothing violent or nothing that parents could feel bad about their their children reading and he was highly popular he outsold all superheroes including Superman for a while but then he was such a Superman knockoff that DC sued Fawcett and then they won eventually but by the time the courts had dragged out this was in the 1950s when that his sales had dropped so much that the effect of DC winning the court case really didn't matter so by like 1940 and then early 1941 you have this mass of superheroes right dozens of publishers who are publishing hundreds of different superheroes who all share some of the same elements being super powered and wearing bright costumes and fighting crime they're selling millions of copies across the boards of these issues and then you have World War two come about and you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story of how well how our comic books came to be in America and again it started with two teenagers in Cleveland and the next thing you know from Superman we had a very different character from the same company Batman when we come back more of this remarkable historical look at America through the lens of comic books here on Our American Stories week after week Xfinity Flex unlocks access to premium networks and apps so you can try fresh entertainment for free each and every week catch the season premiere of outlander from stars journey through the sounds of black music month with pics from Lifetime movie club and revolt 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heart to see if diversifying with gold and silver is right for you that's Goldco.com slash I heart brought to you by Nissan designed to thrill the art and science of designing a vehicle involves many stages some of which include cutting-edge technology but at the very start there's a step that has been around since the beginning of design itself the two-dimensional sketch and the designers at Nissan know that this involves much more than a technical drawing the early finished sketches can be abstract they might give a sense of shapes and colors of lines and reflective surfaces they're there to impart a feeling that this car was meant to go fast or this car is meant to take you on an adventure ideally the sketch marries form and function it looks like the type of vehicle that will take your breath away but also be perfectly suited for its intended purpose brought to you by Nissan designed to thrill and we continue with our American stories and with Jeffrey Johnson who's a World War two historian at Pearl Harbor and he's also the author of super history comic book superheroes and American society let's pick up where Jeffrey last left off and then you have World War two come about in everything within American society as a general and for comic book superheroes in particular changes and I mean you know you have this war effort where that everything becomes about the war right I mean Americans start to ration servicemen are sent to war and so because of this these superheroes necessarily have to change I mean you can't have Superman taking on the police or the government at some time as he did there in the 30s now that you're at war so I mean these heroes become super patriotic and they become part of the war effort and they sell war bonds on the covers of their issues and then on the covers you see them fighting Hitler one of the early issues has Superman trying to enlist in the military and his x-ray vision malfunctions so he reads the eye chart in the room next to their room through the wall and he's not actually allowed to join because he's 4f and so he decides that the American service person could actually fight the war far better than he can and they don't need him and so he'll stay at home and he'll fight their wars and the crime that is here at home so there was a look magazine article in the early part of the war with it I mean he basically it's like a two or three page story in which Superman basically goes and he captures Hitler and Stalin and he takes them to the League of Nations and he turns them in and he you know ends the war which is a great story but it's hard to keep telling that story when that you have you know people are actually at war for a prolonged time and then on the 20th of December 1940 of this other comic book come out it's called Captain America number one let me stress this is December the 20th 1940 this is a year before Pearl Harbor basically this is before the u.s. is officially entered via war and you have this cover of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw and taking on the Nazis which doesn't seem that incredible now because we know how the war ended and we understand exactly what everything was but a year before the u.s. entered the war you have a comic book character who's punching a world leader in the face in a magazine meant for children it's pretty incredible and it shows you how creative and also how fearless a lot of these comic book creators were the people who created Captain America one were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby he was Jewish and he had grew up in the streets of New York but he was this rough-and-tumble street kid who used to get into fights it was this little bitty guy but he was you know fearless and rough-and-tumble there's this great story that while they were working at what was then called timely but would later change his name to Marvel Comics they got a phone call that there was somebody down in the lobby who said that he didn't like what Captain American Comics was saying about Nazis and he was gonna bomb the building and Kirby immediately picked up than the phone and he said wait down there because I'm gonna come down there and that beat the stuffing out of you that's Jack Kirby fearless and it's really telling that I mean what's like Superman and what's like the other creators Kirby was this immigrant whose parents knew about oppression and knew about all of these terrible things that had happened to them in the place they came from but the problem was after the war there really was nowhere for a lot of these comic books to go because I mean you have these incredibly powerful heroes who are fighting societies wrongs and they became very patriotic during the war and then once the war is over people want to move on I mean you have this generation basically from 1929 to 1945 had only known depression down times in war suddenly the war is over and the u.s. is the one country who comes out of the war really prosperous suddenly for the first time in a lot of these people's lives they have stability they have quiet they have peace they have all of these things they had dreamed about in their whole life which is really great for the country and really great for a lot of people but it's bad for the people have to write stories for these superheroes and sales drop tremendously a lot of these publishers go out of business Captain America they tried to turn him to this anti-communist hero his comic book has changed from Captain America to the title of Captain America commie smasher but you know it doesn't work so in the early 50s Captain America is canceled as is a lot of these heroes Superman and Batman still continue to sell well what Superman and Batman begin to do is they start to mirror this 1950s stereotypical working man you know has a family in the suburbs and you know they certainly don't have a job in the way that I'm talking but I mean they take on extended families I mean Batman gets Robin and then Superman gets this incredible extended family whether you know he's got Lois Lane Jimmy Olsen he gets a cousin from Krypton named Supergirl and he gets this whole zoo of pets crypto the super dog streaky the super cat comet the super horse and my favorite Beppo the super monkey that's very different from the 1938 1939 version of these social Avengers who were trying to affix society now they want to make sure that nothing changes in society so basically from the end of World War two to the early 1960s you just have an era of where that people really just want their comic books to be child-friendly and safe enough to make everybody feel good about how life is going in the u.s. so there's this great story that the person who was head of DC at that time Jack Liebowitz he was playing golf with Martin Goodman who was the head of Marvel Comics at that time and Jack Liebowitz says to Goodman that he had just started this new superhero comic called the Justice League of America where that they put all of the superheroes together on one team and they were super surprised at how well it sold so once Martin Goodman gets finished with this golf game and then he goes back to Marvel and he talks to his nephew who had been working for him since the early 40s who had been this guy who had been there the whole time and it would basically kept the company running and this nephew of his whose name was Stanley Lieber by birth but he changed his name to Stan Lee because he didn't want people to know what his real name was because he thought that he could be this great American writer at some point and he very much wanted to save his real name for the real novels he was going to write he goes back to Stan Lee and he says I want us to do superheroes again and you know Stan Lee who's at this time just tired of it all he says superheroes are no good no one ever reads superheroes I don't want to do superheroes and Martin Goodman's like no there's money in superheroes we're gonna do them for a couple years and then we'll move on to the next thing and Stan Lee decides then that he's gonna quit because he's had enough and so he goes home to his wife and he says to her I'm gonna quit I can't take this anymore I'm gonna go into advertising I'm gonna write my novel I can do something else and she says just this one time write the superhero story that you would like to read and then Stan Lee says yeah that's what I'll do I'll blow it up on my way out and then I'll be finished with it so Stan Lee goes back and he writes Fantastic Four number one it's almost impossible to overemphasize what a sea change this was and County book storytelling Stanley created these characters along with Jack Kirby that had real problems that fought among themselves that actually had things that really made their lives terrible at some points and my goodness what storytelling and to think that Stan Lee was out the door and it was his wife just like Steve McQueen who convinced Steve McQueen to do the Thomas Crown Affair and did it in really interesting ways it was Stan Lee's wife his bride who said hey out the door just write that comic book you would have always wanted to write before you write the great American novel and indeed that's how Fantastic Four number one comes to creation when we come back more of this remarkable look at American history through the prism of comic books and how our society changed and the writers well they changed right along with us more with Jeffrey Johnson and the story of comic book superheroes here on Our American Stories. week after week Xfinity Flex unlocks access to premium networks and apps so you can try fresh entertainment for free each and every week catch the season premiere of Outlander from stars journey through the sounds of Black Music Month with pics from Lifetime Movie Club and Revolt celebrate Pride Month with stories from out TV and hear TV then kick back with nature scenes from music choice relax and jam all June with I heart radios songs of the summer radio discover new shows and movies for free no strings attached say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote listen the last time the economy looked like this the stock market tanked 50% the US dollar lost 46% of its value and the price of oil quadrupled yet while the US economy collapsed and unemployment ran through the roof the price of gold shot up 1300% and silver rocketed over 2400% so if history repeats itself we could see it happen again can you afford to miss what could be the biggest gold and silver boom of our lifetime that's why I want you to visit goldco.com slash I heart because when you do you'll not only get the chance to protect your retirement savings with gold and silver you could get up to $10,000 in free silver just for doing it this is a rare opportunity so don't miss what could be your best opportunity to protect your retirement savings visit goldco.com slash I heart that's goldco.com slash I heart brought to you by Nissan designed to thrill the art and science of designing a vehicle involves many stages some of which include cutting edge technology but at the very start there's a step that has been around since the beginning of design itself the two-dimensional sketch and the designers at Nissan know that this involves much more than a technical drawing the early finished sketches can be abstract they might give a sense of shapes and colors of lines and reflective surfaces they're there to impart a feeling that this car was meant to go fast or this car is meant to take you on an adventure ideally the sketch marries form and function it looks like the type of vehicle that will take your breath away but also be perfectly suited for its intended purpose brought to you by Nissan designed to thrill and we continue with our American stories and author Jeffrey Johnson and his book is super history comic book superheroes and American society let's pick up again where Jeffrey last left off Superman and Batman and all of the DC heroes they fought crime and they had these really fun lives and you would love to be them the Marvel heroes always had such problems and such often horrific things happen to them that you felt bad for them these were heroes who had flaws and who were human in a way that heroes had never been before I mean there's a popular culture commentator Pierre Comptos who says of the Fantastic Four here's the book that neatly divides the history of comic books in the two era everything that came before and everything that came after Fantastic Four became a hit it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and then pretty quickly Lee and Kirby create other superheroes to fill out the Marvel Universe you have the Incredible Hulk that comes out in May 1962 you've got spider-man who that the some scrawny teenager who has all of these home wife issues and you know problems the fascinating thing about spider-man is that Martin Goodman the head of Marvel absolutely did not believe the spider-man would work Stan Lee had to beg him many times to let him publish spider-man because he was a teenage hero and teenagers weren't heroes he didn't think kids wanted to read about teenagers they wanted to read about adults so I mean you know you have all those and you have you know Ant Man Thor Iron Man the X-Men eventually come out and then at some point he puts together a Justice League of America type team called the Avengers and then they bring back Captain America he becomes a member of the Avengers the Marvel comic books of the 1960s were often really irreverent and really fun and then towards the end they start to take on some of the social issues of the day some of the 1960s and the Vietnam protests and things like that but they begin to get more and more serious and then as the 1970s hit there's this sea change not only in American comic books but also in the American society in general it seems like there are these films that come out in the day like you know death wish or the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies right where that show this like backlash against what seemed as crime being rampant and this lack of a structure that can take care of them right I mean you know that's the late 1970s and then you know right about that same era you also have the Punisher who's this Vietnam veteran who doesn't have superpowers just you know he shoots and kills a lot of people and you know he goes after drug lords he goes after street crime he does all of these things there's a great quote by one of the people who wrote him Mike Baron that I want to read Baron in 1988 when he was talking about the Punisher wrote the Punisher embodies the voice of conservative Americans who see their quality of life threatened by criminal behavior and the confused thinking of liberals this average citizen is concerned with getting through the day and protecting his family the police and the courts may constantly disappoint us but the Punisher never does so read and enjoy and don't let liberals make you feel guilty the Punisher knows what's right it's quite simple when you think about it just don't forget to shower afterwards now heroes aren't just protecting society within societal rules they're actually setting their own rules and the point that this becomes the most apparent is when by the mid-1980s Frank Miller writes this four issue miniseries called Batman and Dark Knight Returns and it's his take on this older Batman who had been retired for a while who then comes back to this Gotham City that's overrun by crime and and so Batman is the only one who can take care of this and so this keeps going to in the 90s and there are a lot of different stories trying to figure out what comic books should be for a while Marvel asked to go into bankruptcy actually and they're on the brink of closing down it was a really dark time both in the storylines of comic books and the way that comic books are produced and the way that they were sold they do catch a little more of their footing by the 2000s as far as the 9-11 attacks and then the post 9-11 world comic books become a very fearful place where that it's hard to trust heroes and then the people around them there's a storyline called I'm Civil War by Marvel where that Captain America and Iron Man basically disagree about should heroes have to register with the government Captain America's against it Iron Man is for it and they basically fight it out and they basically bring heroes on to their sides and then at the very end Captain American basically loses he's in and arrested at the end so you have this image of Captain America in handcuffs and there's this great quote by one of the writers where that he says you know basically what this story is about is where do we draw the line between safety and freedom I mean you have stories like that you have the death of Captain America where that he briefly dies and you know he dies as this sort of a story about who can be trusted in America and have things shifted so much that things don't make sense anymore I mean you know these stories were really a lot of creators trying to come to grips with what the world meant after the 9-11 attacks and then all of the aftermath of that it's hard to talk about comic books now as just comic books in the last decade or so because you have this merging of outside media and comic books starting in 1978 you've got this I'm Superman movie that's probably the first time where that people really took superheroes seriously as a storytelling device and as a way to tell stories and then you also after that have this 1980s Tim Burton Batman movie which is this big budget with big stars movies right I mean so you would definitely have that and you know the a 2000 x-men movie and the 2002 spider-man movie and you know Punisher and Fantastic Four but the really big changes as far as how American society views comic books as this larger mythology seemed to be the Christopher Nolan Batman films in 2005 2008 2012 which were you know critically acclaimed and did huge box office numbers and then in 2008 you have this Iron Man film that comes out from Marvel and it's the first of what's called the Marvel Cinematic Universe now you know there were Marvel films before but all the Marvel films before had been produced by studios that weren't Marvel they were Fox or Sony had bought the rights back when Marvel was bankrupt and then they were the ones that put on the films but Marvel starting with Iron Man in 2008 and then the Iron Man 2 in 2010 and then Thor and Captain America and the Avengers and so on created this universe of storytelling that really mirrors what comic books have done I mean each story is a unique story but they also fit together to create this bigger universe so I mean you can add films in like Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther and Ant-Man and it all becomes part of the same universe there were really no films that had done that before and it's really following one of the tropes of comic book storytelling so you now have this reality where that superheroes aren't comic books anymore if 40,000 people read an issue of you name the hero but they watch his film he's a film star now instead of a comic book star that's a really interesting development that has now created this world popular culture that now has seen this art form that started in the 1930s as these street level characters that were mostly produced by these immigrant kids who you know wanted to be part of society who were outcast and who didn't know how to get the things that they thought they wanted and so they created these narratives where that these ciphers of theirs could do it for them have now become this worldwide industry and this mythology that I would dare say I think I think most people know a lot about the Marvel Universe and about the DC Universe now in a way that I think maybe superheroes have outgrown comic books and you know maybe comic books are gonna exist as a niche art form for a long time but it feels like film and television is now their new outlet and it feels like a lot of people like that and a lot of people really respond to that and it's created this mythology that now is just keeps growing and growing and growing and a terrific job on the production by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Jeffrey Johnson who's a World War two historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu Hawaii he's the author of super history comic book superheroes and American society get it at your local bookstores or wherever you buy your books and it all started with two Cleveland teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster the Fantastic Four as Jeffrey noted that was the dividing line everything before and everything after as we got much more complex characters and then came the trilogy the Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan which changed everything and those films my goodness three of my family's favorites and soon thereafter Marvel steps in to make their own movies Warner Brothers did the Nolan films but Marvel stepped in and said these characters are ours and now comic books are sort of like secondary to the movie business itself and these superheroes brought on to the big screen the story of comic book superheroes here on our American story okay Russell Westbrook let's pump the brakes a bit you shouldn't have to think about outfits get a pair of bird dog stretch khaki shorts they look amazing go with everything but feel just as good as your gym shorts you never have to think about what to wear again because you can wear them anywhere the ultra breathable fabric keeps you cool and the built-in liner is an added layer of support plus they look incredible hit the bar the golf course or the pool stop thinking about what to wear and wear what you want for a change go to bird dogs comm slash summer and get a free Yeti style tumbler with your order you wouldn't settle for watching a blurry TV would you so why settle for just ok TV sound upgrade your streaming and 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