superheroes

Welcome to Give ‘Em Elle, a weekly column that hopes to bridge the gap between old school comics fandom and the progressive edge of comics culture.

This week I’ve been thinking about superheroes universes, and what it means to have a whole population of costumed characters running aro…

Kenny Keil is one of our long-time favorite artists here at ComicsAlliance. He first grabbed our attention a few years ago, when he published a series of drawings mashing up superheroes and classic Hip-Hop album covers to incredible effect, and since then, he's gone on to co-create and illustr…

Comic readers are often annoyed by the outdated assertion, “but comic books are for kids!” As those of us within this culture know, comics today are usually made for and marketed to adults, especially single issues and superhero comics. However, comics, as a medium, should and can serv…

Two weeks ago we ran an article on ComicsAlliance looking at body diversity and superheroes. We asked four artists to rank male and female superheroes by size and describe which athletic types they resembled. The aim was to see if an unspoken consensus exists about what superheroes should look like …

There are certain phrases that have a special resonance for a Marvel kid like me. "Pocket dimension." "Lift (press)." "Marital status: unrevealed." This is the language of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and I used to pore over the …

Ordinary men and women blessed with extraordinary abilities who fight for what they believe in no matter the consequences aren't exclusive to superhero comics. Catholic saints also possessed such powers as levitation, flight, extra-sensory perception and the ability to communicate with animals …

New Era is no stranger to superhero and pop culture hats, but there's some extra iconography going on in the recent Cabesa series, which pops the embroidered faces of everyone from Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Deadpool, Cobra Commander, Optimus Prime and more front and center on a color-coordi…

We see relevant pop culture alphabet redecos on a pretty regular basis around these parts. Why, who could forget Sean Murphy's awesome Wolverine ABC's or Brandon and Emma Peat's "A is for Ackbar" series of Star Wars letters? It's hard to suffer from any kind of design fatigue, though, when…

Earlier this week, we decided that the only way to deal with the exploding celebrity Death Star that is Charlie Sheen was to take his spectacularly hubristic comments and put them in the mouths of superheroes, with the help of Chris Haley and Curt Franklin of the webcomic Let's Be Friends Again…

It looks like the ultimate goal of psychology it to let parents know there is no way to be sure they're bringing up their kids right. On the heels of two much-talked-about studies about how modern superheroes and their non-stop aggression are bad for adolescent boys, MSNBC...