Random DC Character

The range hiding in this list

Most people hear this publisher's name and picture bright, primary-coloured superheroes: the flying man in the cape, the grim one in the cowl, the warrior princess. They are here. But scroll further and the list turns strange and dark, into characters who belong to a completely different kind of comic: a personification of Dream, a personification of Death drawn as a cheerful young woman, a fallen angel, a broken masked vigilante from a story that was really about how broken masked vigilantes would actually be.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• Superman
• Wonder Woman
• The Flash
• Martian Manhunter
• Dream
• Death
• Lucifer Morningstar
• The Comedian

How does one company contain both the cheerful flying hero and a somber personification of Death? Because a comics publisher is not a single kind of story. It is a place where very different kinds of story are made under one roof, and this list, which puts a caped crusader a few names away from the King of Dreams, is the proof.

Drawing a character

1. Press Generate for one character.
2. Ask for a few to build a team, or an unlikely crossover.
3. Type into Contains to search the names.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these come from

Characters from across this publisher's universe, gathered and checked by hand, from the founding superheroes to the darker and stranger figures of its more adult imprints. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The three who invented the template

Start with the famous ones, because they are more historically important than their familiarity suggests. Three characters at the head of this list are among the very first superheroes ever created, and between them they more or less invented the entire form.

The flying strongman came first, at the end of the 1930s, and he is essentially the original superhero, the one from whom the whole genre descends: the secret identity, the costume, the powers, the mission to help. Almost every superhero since is a variation on the template he established. The armoured detective arrived soon after as his deliberate opposite: no powers at all, driven by trauma rather than duty, working in shadow rather than daylight, proving that a superhero did not need superpowers, only a mission and a will. And the warrior princess followed, one of the first great heroines, created partly to prove the genre did not belong to men.

Between them, these three set the boundaries of what a superhero could be: the god-like alien, the human who compensates with will and intellect, the outsider warrior. Nearly every hero invented in the eighty years since falls somewhere in the space those three defined. When people talk about this publisher, they usually mean these characters and their descendants, the bright, mythic, aspirational core of the superhero idea, and that core genuinely started here.

The comics that grew up

For a long time superhero comics were understood as children's entertainment, simple stories of good defeating evil. Then, in the 1980s, that assumption was deliberately broken, and this publisher was where much of the breaking happened.

A small number of landmark works took the superhero and asked adult questions of it. One asked what costumed vigilantes would really be like if they existed in the actual world: damaged, frightening, morally compromised, some of them close to fascist, none of them the clean heroes of the old stories. Its characters, the broken masked men on this list, were created specifically to interrogate the whole idea of the superhero, to show the darkness the cheerful version had always glossed over. It was violent, complex, politically serious, and unmistakably for adults, and it changed permanently what a superhero comic was allowed to be.

This mattered beyond comics. These works were among the first to make the wider culture take the medium seriously, to force the recognition that a comic could be as sophisticated, as dark, as worthy of adult attention as a novel or a film. They did not abandon the superhero; they turned its own tools against it, using the familiar figure of the caped hero to say difficult and grown-up things. The bright mythic heroes at the top of this list and the broken deconstructed ones further down are the same idea, examined first with hope and then with suspicion, by the same publisher, a few decades apart.

The corner where comics became literature

Then the publisher did something that produced the strangest names on this list. It created a separate imprint, a sub-label with its own identity, dedicated to comics for adults that mostly left superheroes behind entirely, and moved into horror, fantasy, myth and literary fiction.

The flagship of that imprint was a series about the personification of Dream, one of a family of siblings who are the embodiments of fundamental forces: Dream, Death, Destiny, Desire and the rest. This is where the cheerful young woman who is Death comes from, and the King of Dreams, and the fallen angel who runs a nightclub. These are not superheroes in any sense. They are closer to figures from mythology or literary fantasy, drawn from folklore, religion and legend across every culture, woven into stories about stories, about mortality, about the nature of change. The series is widely regarded as one of the finest works the comics medium has produced, and it has almost nothing in common with a man in a cape punching a villain.

Yet it came from the same company, which is the whole point. A comics publisher is not a genre. It is a house that can contain a children's adventure serial, a dark adult deconstruction, and a literary fantasy of gods and dreams, all at once, under different labels. The distance on this list between the flying strongman and the King of Dreams is not a mistake or an inconsistency. It is the range of an entire medium, gathered under a single name, and it is exactly as wide as the range between a comic strip and a serious novel, because comics can be both and this publisher published both.

What the whole list proves

Step back and this list makes an argument, the same one that gets made about animation and about video games: the thing you are looking at is a medium, not a genre.

People persistently confuse the two. They hear comics and think of one kind of story, the superhero, the way they hear cartoon and think children, or hear video game and think toy. But a medium is only a way of telling stories, in this case with sequential drawings and words, and it can carry any kind of story at all. This publisher's own output is the demonstration. It contains the founding myths of the superhero, the adult works that deconstructed those myths, and the literary fantasies that abandoned superheroes for something closer to the great myths and legends. One medium, every register, from bright children's adventure to some of the most sophisticated storytelling in any form.

So the value in a list like this is partly in the surprise of it, the moment you notice that a personification of Death is keeping company with a caped crusader, and ask how that can be. The answer is the answer to a much larger question. It can be because comics are not one thing. They are a medium as broad as film or prose, capable of the silliest and the most profound work, sometimes from the same publisher in the same decade. The names that seem not to belong together are the best evidence of how much room the form actually has.

Questions people ask

Why is a character called Death on a superhero list?

Because this publisher produced far more than superheroes, including a celebrated adult imprint of horror, fantasy and literary comics. Death there is a personification, one of a family embodying fundamental forces, drawn from myth rather than the superhero tradition, and she shares a publisher with the caped heroes but almost nothing else.

Are these really the first superheroes?

Three of the most famous are among the very earliest and most influential, created around the end of the 1930s and shortly after. Between them they established the core templates, the powered alien, the driven human, the warrior heroine, that nearly every later superhero varies, so the genre genuinely traces much of its shape to them.

When did superhero comics stop being just for children?

The decisive shift came in the 1980s, when landmark works asked adult questions of the superhero and were unmistakably written for adults. This publisher was central to that change, and those works did much to make the wider culture take the whole medium seriously.

Are comics a genre or a medium?

A medium, meaning a way of telling stories with sequential images and words, capable of carrying any genre at all. This publisher's range, from bright superhero adventure to dark deconstruction to literary fantasy, is a clear demonstration that comics are as broad as film or prose, not a single kind of story.

References

1. Watchmen, on the 1980s work that deconstructed the superhero and helped the medium be taken seriously by the wider culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen
2. The Sandman, on the adult imprint series about Dream and his siblings, widely regarded as among the finest works in the medium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(comic_book)