This conventional explanation of why superhero comic books enjoyed a much longer run than pulps and comic strips relies on the simple argument that comic books didn’t just go out of print. As far as this standard, slightly misleading argument goes this is the usual answer. Look at the run of The Phantom strips which started in 1936. It’s still running ninety years later, even though the original author, Lee Falk, died in 1999. Mandrake the Magician ran as a daily from 1934 to 2013, seventy-nine years. Dick Tracy started in 1931 and is still syndicated. Popeye is nine years older than Superman. Little Orphan Annie ran from 1924 to 2010. Blondie has run daily since 1930. If it was mere staying power, the Phantom would be the one printed in the lunchbox and Superman would merely be a sentence or a footnote.
The comic strips themselves survived and even prospered. However, what they lost was the center of popular culture. But why did comic book superheroes occupy and keep this center even if comic strips have longer and even grander publishing premieres?
There are six reasons for this. (1) an image that the law can shield, (2) characters designed with strong visual icons, (3) a communal, expanded universe to catch a stray character, (4) periodical publication and an endlessly renewable hero sustained by the direct market, (5) parents “passing down” a character to a child, and (6) each successive generation reconfiguring the hero around its current fears and desires. The pulps have one and a half, the strips have two, radio has one and the serial films have a little less than one.
Trademark Power
The first benefit is trademark power, which of the six is arguably the most ignored and most misunderstood category. Comic companies were not the only ones who could claim trademarks as opposed to pulp operations. Both sides registered trademarks. King Features owns Popeye, the Phantom, Mandrake, Blondie and Flash Gordon. Tribune Content Agency holds Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie. Condé Nast has held Doc Savage and the Shadow since it bought Street and Smith in 1959. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. has policed the Tarzan marks for a century. The difference is how strong the marks were and how easy they were to keep alive.
At the outset, the law gives stronger protection to an image than to a word. Trademark law is designed to safeguard marks such as a logo, a shield, or the shape of a costume. In Action Comics #1, Superman wore the S on his chest. Batman appeared with the bat silhouette in Detective Comics #27. By his second issue, Captain America had the circular shield, having used a triangular one in his first issue. The pulp heroes did not create an image of that sort.
A trademark is kept active through use. When a mark goes out of circulation and once its rights are not exercised, a trademark goes into steady decline. In the case of monthly comic books, for instance, the mark is kept alive every month without the owner even having to think about it. With a pulp on the other hand, the mark has to be proactively maintained. No new Doc Savage story was published from the last pulp installment, in 1949, until the first Bantam Paperback in 1964. In the meantime, the mark stayed alive through licensing to other companies, and Condé Nast has had to go to court to defend it, for instance in 2006, against a website that was distributing free online copies of the older books.
Thirdly, the comic-book publishers controlled the entire bundle. For decades, the pulp and the literary estates wrangled in courts, but those battles were over copyright and contract rights. These disputes concerned who had the ownership of the underlying stories and who is legally entitled under 304 of Copyright Act to terminate their prior assignment. The Howard estates and the Burroughs estates are classic examples. By contrast, the trademarks were generally straightforward and remained with the publisher. Still, a trademark that is uncontested is of limited value if no one can agree on who is entitled to produce a new film. Despite most of the stories having entered public ownership, the Sherlock Holmes estate continued to claim certain elements of the popular detectives’ character so it would still require a license from the estate if one wanted to adopt his adventures. Superman and Spider-Man, however, were housed at Warner Bros. and Marvel, later Disney, without that kind of dispute. In 2025 Popeye’s first comic strips entered the public domain in the US. The name still can’t be used as a brand, and the later strips are still under copyright, because copyright and trademark are different things. King Features retain the mark, and the mark tends to be what sells the t-shirts.
Recognizable Visual Icons
The pulp heroes had such distinctive names but not concretely specific visual designs. Everyone knew their names like Tarzan, Zorro, the Shadow, Doc Savage. But those characters didn’t have a defining visual identifier that every artist agreed on. Tarzan has had 100 years’ worth of books and movies to work with, and the only element of his costume ever consistently depicted (and impossible to trademark) is a loincloth. Zorro has the mask, hat, cape, and the letter Z, but the use of those features on the pulps, screen, and television varied widely as it rarely did for the S shield or the bat-logo on a man’s chest. Doc Savage’s look was a canvas which varied drastically from cover artist to cover artist, starting with Walter Baumhofer in 1933 and going through James Bama’s Bantam paperbacks of the 1960s before moving on to Fred Pfeiffer, Boris Vallejo and Bob Larkin. The torn shirt and the exaggerated widow’s peak currently associated with Doc came from Bama, not from author Lester Dent.
Since a comic book communicates the story through pictures, a character had to remain visually identical from frame to frame and panel to panel, otherwise the reader can’t tell who’s who. Pulp covers were advertisements for whatever this issue’s story was. That story was printed as text, so the artist could arrange the cover however he liked.
The slouch hat and the cape are as close as a pulp hero got to a graphic sign, and they were derived from George Rozen’s pulp covers, not from radio. Radio gave the name popularity but made the Shadow not so much visible as vocal. The most recognized version of the Shadow served only to confirm the name and the voice and contributed nothing to the visual. Which resulted in a mark more powerful than Doc Savage’s mark and considerably less powerful than that of a comic book hero’s. The picture of a hero is what travels between countries and generations. A reader in São Paulo who speaks no English can identify the bat symbol. Captain America’s shield is interpreted as American heroism by many in nations not familiar with the comics tradition. A trademark is only as valuable as what lies in back of its picture, and comic book figures were designed to be perceived, and identified, from the very first appearance.
Shared Publishing Universe
The shared universe can reuse old characters and give them another chance and winning the public over and Captain America is the clearest case. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America Comics #1 was cover-dated March 1941 but went on sale December 20, 1940, with Cap punching Hitler on the cover almost a full year before Pearl Harbor. The book sold close to a million copies an issue by 1943. After the war the genre collapsed. Cap’s title ended in 1949, and an anti-communist revival at Atlas in 1953 and 1954 lasted less than a year. By pulp logic that should have been the end. Doc Savage Magazine ran from March 1933 to summer 1949, 181 issues, and ended four years before Cap’s failed revival. The two characters died at almost the same time.
The thing that saved Cap’s hide was that Marvel already had an existing place for him. In March of 1964, he was fished out of the ice and brought onto the Avengers, a team that was already established within Marvel mythology, with the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk. This way, Cap could be supported by other characters. All the success in the series that followed with great writers that built him up like Jack Kirby, Steve Englehart, and Ed Brubaker benefited from that decision.
The pulps didn’t have that. Philip José Farmer published the Wold Newton books, the first one being 1972’s Tarzan Alive. It joined Doc Savage, Tarzan, the Shadow, Holmes and decades of fictional characters onto a single-family tree connected via a single meteor strike which occurred in 1795. It was ingenious and yet publishers hadn’t followed up. Marvel and DC published their universes intentionally (Justice League of America #1 in late 1960, Avengers #1 in September 1963) and the crossovers multiplied (Spider-Man meets the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man meets Daredevil, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Secret Wars). The Shadow and The Spider came from competing publishers and never met until comics and pastiche writers paired them decades later. A shared universe props up the characters who can’t stand on their own.
Including Cap, three of Timely’s characters created in 1939–40 show why it mattered. Namor, who was created by Bill Everett in 1939, returned in Fantastic Four #4 in May 1962 as one of the bad guys hurled against the new heroes. He would lose titles sporadically over the years before and after that but has never been out of print in some capacity in Avengers, X-Men, Defenders or other team titles. He finally showed up in Wakanda Forever in 2022 after being 83 years around the block, all because he had 60 consecutive years as part of the shared universe that kept his brand alive and relevant. The third is the original Human Torch, the android created by Carl Burgos. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived the Human Torch concept in Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, the name went to Johnny Storm. The android was briefly brought back in 1966 then went unused again, and then returned in Avengers West Coast in 1989.
Look at Wolverine becoming popular in a similar way. He showed up again and a Hulk comic as a guest antagonist, which was enough to get invited to the X-Men a year later for good. His solo books have sold wonderfully since the 1980s, and succeed now whether leaning on other X-Men or not. That popularity was fostered by the team book first. The Wolverine films exist because Hugh Jackman can command an ensemble, and on his own, he’s an aggressive hero with claws.
Character Reinvention
The strips live on forever and change hardly ever because readers just do not want change. Blondie remains married to Dagwood, Charlie Brown keeps missing when he tries to kick Lucy’s football and Dick Tracy still works as a police detective with a wrist radio, on the job since 1931. Supporting characters have changed, technology is updated, but Dick Tracy’s underlying persona is a constant.
Batman has been re-imagined at least half-a-dozen times in his 87-year existence and consistently performed well with readers. The first DC comic version of Batman from 1939 came equipped with a gun that he occasionally used for murder, and he worked alone. In 1940 the gun was removed from the ensemble of tools and Robin was integrated into the operation. Then in 1966 the hero was re-interpreted for comedic purposes in the person of Adam West. Frank Miller reinvented the brooding superhero in 1986, Tim Buron made him a gothic legend in 1989 and Matt Reeves brought him back in a recent noir iteration starring Robert Pattinson in 2022. There is a Bat on each version’s chest, but the man underneath is different every time.
The ability to reinvent does not apply just to individual identities, but to narratives as well. Issue #75 of Superman sold 6 million copies throughout its print run and lured numerous former fans back into comic book stores who had not set foot inside one in years, thanks to his apparent death. The following year, Batman’s back was snapped in the “Knightfall” storyline and he was subsequently replaced by a more brutal iteration of himself. The 1990s Spider-Man “Clone Saga” severely tested readers’ patience and for a short time said that we were reading the clone the whole time. The 2017 “Captain America is a Hydra agent” event captured the country’s attention and for a short time, had everyone take another look at Captain America. Each of these storylines offered a new readership a compelling new angle for the stories.
None of it makes any sense if the books can’t continue to be published, and in the 1970s the newsstand-based business was on the verge of extinction. The direct market is what rescued the comic books. Back in the early 70s, agreements struck by Phil Seuling allowed comic stores to purchase books from publishers on a non-returnable basis at a bargain rate, and in the latter half of the 80s the comic shop and the direct market replaced the newsstand as the primary vehicle for delivering super-hero stories. A comparable lifeline doesn’t exist in the history of the pulps. When Street and Smith shuttered Doc Savage Magazine in 1949, there was no specialized shop poised to act as a safety net, no mainstream collector community or retail consortium that relied on the presence of pulps in stores. Once those newsstand copies stopped appearing, that was the end of it. And as a side benefit of the direct market’s viability as a sales model, longer-form, more complex narratives began to make economic sense, laying the groundwork for graphic novel sales to bookstores in the aughts, then the manga boom, and most recently the young-adult graphic novels that have become the best-selling books in the field.[13]
Family Tradition
The fifth advantage was inheritance, from parent to child. Boys and young men tended to read Doc Savage and the Shadow. They outgrew the publications, and they didn’t put them in front of their children. Pulps were adult-themed and made to be disposable, and the magazines were junked long before those initial readers were grandfathers. A strip was considered part of adult breakfast reading, although you could stand and look over your father’s shoulder while he read the latest Dick Tracy. Superhero comics enticed the child on purpose, they raised the child, they were visual art worth keeping, and then that child handed the heroes off to his own kids.
Adam West’s viewer in ’66 took his child in ’89 to see Tim Burton’s Batman. His child in turn took his own children in ’08 to The Dark Knight, and those children took their children to The Batman in ’22. Captain America’s thread is longer, as the character needed some salvaging first. The boy reading Captain America in ’42 gave the ’64 revival to his children, and they took their own kids to The First Avenger in ’11. The parents viewing The Avengers in 2012 had grown up on Spider-Man cartoons bought by their own parents, who had read the comics. This franchise, if nothing else, was handing something down. The Phantom was able to manage this in some overseas markets in children’s formats, which helped it thrive abroad, and Peanuts was targeted at children from the start. Steady parent-to-child handing-off, through multiple print and on-screen formats, has only ever been the steady hand of superhero comics.
Why the Comics Took Over
Popeye, Dick Tracy, the Phantom and the surviving pulps carried on strongly into the 1950s and started fading in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exactly when Spider-Man and Marvel were rising. But something about the timing was on the side of the new heroes and it was nothing that the logo or the universe could provide.
The old heroes emerged out of the Depression and war, and what they sold was certainty. A hero would defend the weak. A detective would catch the criminal. A masked wanderer would rescue the townspeople from danger. No one inquired if our heroes could manage. The bad guy would stay bad, and by the final page, everything would be okay. When an actual war was being fought, the point of the refuge was exactly that: escape. Doc Savage perhaps exemplifies this concept better than any other character, an infallible adult, disciplined, always ready, always thinking, always getting the outcome and always certain he would. Dick Tracy’s morality never wavered and he never seemed less than adequate and capable. Popeye always ate his spinach and then punched bad men. The Phantom imposed justice in the jungle. Our heroes assured us that the system was functioning.
The baby boomer generation matured in the context of war, civil rights struggle, assassinations, Watergate, and an ensuing loss of trust in U.S. institutions. Baby boomers, who ranged in age from four to 22 in 1968, were the biggest cohort of young people in U.S. history. They did not want a figure who told them the system was just and equitable, but rather a figure who had questions in their mind about it.
DC had already rebooted its heroes. The Silver Age started with the new Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956, when Julius Schwartz’s writers changed their characters from magical origins to scientific ones. Think of the police chemist hit by lightning, or the test pilot handed a ring by an alien as he dies. But Barry Allen, Hal Jordan etc. are reliable, self-assured protagonists, as unchanging as Doc Savage. Science was fresh, but certainty was not. What Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did at Marvel, between 1961 and 1964, was introduce doubt, and that’s the content that saw Marvel through the late 1960s and 70s while the old heroes wavered.
Spider-Man can’t pay rent, can’t make the girl love him, fights with his aunt, can’t show up when expected, loses fights, can’t always save everyone and ponders if the whole thing is worth doing. The Incredible Hulk is anger with a body, followed by shame. The X-Men are a despised minority harassed by the very institutions that exist to protect them. The Fantastic Four is a damaged family. Tony Stark produces weapons and walks about with shrapnel next to his heart. Daredevil is a blind lawyer seeking justice during the day in court and on patrol at night. None of these characters fit in Doc Savage novels or Dick Tracy strips. They were created for people who no longer believed in perfect and absolute authority.
What the old heroes gave them simply wasn’t something the coming generation wanted to buy. They devolved into a kind of Dad-bait, and Dad-bait stinks up anything that’s meant for the kids. Pulp was worse off. The impeccable, competent American man defending the American way of life simply hadn’t a clue who he was talking to anymore, in an era brought on by the Pentagon Papers, the assassinations and Kent State that made us see American ways in the clear light of day. Doc Savage had become either some kinda joke or some kinda antique, or both at once. The ’75 movie gave us camp, and camp wasn’t the ticket because the audience wanted more nuance than that.
DC was a lot slower in arriving at the table. The ’60s Batman took camp and ran, and while it managed to keep the property in circulation, it was more for ironic adult consumption than a child’s identification. The show was more of a survival strategy than a creative one. While Marvel wrote characters who worried about what a fan worried about, DC waited until 1970, when Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams set the pair of Green Lantern and Green Arrow off on the road so that they could fight over issues of race and drugs. Steve Englehart took Watergate into Cap in 1974, which shocked Cap into a crisis of citizenship, causing him to abandon the costume and adopt the name Nomad.
Spidey is the first true mainstream hero whose civilian side of life is the more prominent half of his adventures. The Shadow and Doc Savage barely had one. Clark Kent was the disguise of Superman (and was then given a life of his own in later comics). Bruce Wayne is merely Batman in a costume. Peter Parker is the real person, Spider-Man is the costume, and his aptitude for wearing the latter is directly dependent upon how the former is going. This flipped the fifty year old world of adventure and got at the problem the children already understood: themselves at home vs. at school. The early Marvel characters’ anxieties are about rent money, parents, dates and employers, etc., with super heroic efforts being another task in that set of challenges. None of this was prevalent in the comic strips and pulps, and it allowed the age group that was going to take over fifty years’ worth of America to identify with the characters.
That’s why the few who had every other advantage also disappeared. Nobody was reading Popeye for his self-doubt. King Features owns Popeye’s trademark, he never went out of print for long, he has been adapted over and over, and he has been passed down from generation to generation. He slipped outside of the cultural center in the ’70s because Popeye couldn’t be what the new audience needed. Dick Tracy certainly fit virtually every category on the list and failed anyway, as his strip and character never were constructed to hold any doubt. A trademark can keep a character in the display case forever, but it can’t compel anyone to be enthralled. That’s the void the sixth asset fixes and none of the others even get close.
By far the cleanest example of all six advantages in play is Spider-Man. Lee and Ditko instantly had a distinctive full-mask look and web-suit for him from the August ’62 debut; this translated readily to other media. By Amazing Spider-Man #1 in March ’63 he was attempting to join the Fantastic Four, with team-ups with Daredevil and the X-Men following.[1] He was repeatedly remade, with drug issues in ’71, the black suit, the wedding, the Clone Saga, the ’07 retcon ‘One More Day’, Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen. The adaptation chain is arguably the longest uninterrupted one going when considering the cartoon of 1967, the live-action series of 1977, the cartoons of 1981, the 1994 animated series, Raimi’s 2002 trilogy, Garfield’s 2012 movies, the MCU of 2016 with Tom Holland, the Insomniac game and the first Spider-Verse film in 2018. In 2026, parents who saw the animated cartoon of 1994 took their kids to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which became the top-grossing solo superhero film ever. Every generation got its own Peter: the teenager’s suffering under Lee and Ditko, the young adult’s loss under Gerry Conway, the grotesque art of Todd McFarlane, a fresh start with Bendis’ Ultimate series, Miles Morales and now the multiverse.
Sherlock Holmes appears to be a counter-example, but as it turns out, he is evidence for it. Sherlock has almost none of the six attributes. There are no trademarks because he is in the public domain. There is no single characteristic, recognizable visage; there are so many different depictions of the character, including Paget, Rathbone, Brett, Downey Jr., and Cumberbatch, who look nothing at all alike. And there’s no publisher putting out a new Holmes every month, because Conan Doyle’s original series ended in 1927, and there are only 60 canonical Sherlock Holmes stories. There is no company managing his handoff from parent to child and no engine to be run to churn out new stories. Nevertheless, Sherlock Holmes has remained beloved for 139 years, over a series of four distinct periods of popularity: the 1890s, the era of Rathbone cinema in the 1940s, the Jeremy Brett television series in the 1980s and 1990s, and today with the Downey Jr., Sherlock and Elementary incarnations of the legendary detective.
Holmes is purely advantage #6, naked, requiring no support. In and of itself the character is strong enough for every decade to rebuild him more or less as it likes. The character has shifted from the 19th century rationalist, to the WWII Nazi-buster, to Brett’s nut-case obsession, to the action hero, to the misfit of 2010. Enough of the essence remains each time to retain identity, and enough space is left for each era to hang its own neuroses on the structure. Holmes shows a character could exist without the entire stack, but only a character as sturdy as he is could manage it at all.
These parameters weren’t purposely constructed by publishers, but that is why superhero characters in comic books have lasted as long as they have. Siegel and Shuster did not consider the notion of trademark when they designed the S logo. Kane and Finger had no awareness that the bat symbol would eventually be one of the most marketable icons ever created. Simon and Kirby had no idea their most enduring character, Cap, would come back in 1964 and later become the moral heart of a film franchise that would be worth billions. Lee and Ditko were not aware that the initial arrangement of Peter Parker, formed in 1962, would pave the way to his reinvention every ten years for sixty years. The ingredients were found by accident, and once the publishers realized what they had, they safeguarded them as their prized jewels of trade. The characters of comic book mythology were not successful because they were superior characters, but rather because in five crucial ways the comic book industry gifted them the resources they required to stay in production, and then a sixth let each subsequent generation mold them to its own preferences and image.
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