Comic books began as cheap reprints of newspaper strips and grew into something museums now collect. These tiles follow the heroes and villains, the writers and artists who dreamed them up, the publishers who fought over them, and the moments that changed everything: a censorship code, a twelve-year lawsuit, a convention in a hotel basement, and a comic book found in a California attic.
Every tile in a Comic Books game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Heroes and Villains
nine stories
1Superman could not fly until animators changed him
On the tile: Superman1941
When Superman first leapt onto the page in 1938, he did not fly. He leaped an eighth of a mile, which is why the old line promised a hero able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then the Fleischer studio animated that leap for a 1941 cartoon, and the Man of Steel looked like a grasshopper or a kangaroo bounding down the street. The animators asked National Comics for permission to let him fly instead. They got it, and the comic books followed the cartoons.
Batman earned a title of his own in 1940, and the first issue introduced both the Joker and Catwoman, billed there as the Cat. It also ran a story in which Batman used a machine gun to shoot monsters. Editor Whitney Ellsworth read that and decreed that Batman would no longer kill or use a gun. DC calls the ruling a crucial tenet of who Batman is, one that remains part of his persona today. An editor's objection to a single story became the line the character has not crossed since.
3Captain America hit Hitler before America entered the war
On the tile: Capt. AmericaDecember 1940
Captain America Comics No. 1 reached newsstands in December 1940 with a March 1941 cover date, nearly a year before the United States entered the war. Jack Kirby drew the cover: the new hero landing a right hook on Adolf Hitler's jaw. Kirby, the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants, later served in the U.S. Army. A Holocaust Museum curator says that at a time when many Americans disapproved of the Nazis but were reluctant to fight in Europe, Kirby used a symbol of America to raise awareness of the threat.
In 1940 the publisher Max Gaines hired a psychologist named William Moulton Marston as a consultant, hoping he would help defend comic books against critics who were calling them a national disgrace. Marston held three Harvard degrees and is generally credited with inventing the lie detector test. His answer was not an essay. He created Wonder Woman, and his authorship stayed quiet until 1942, when the publisher sent newspapers and radio stations a release announcing that a famous psychologist was writing the series.
5Marvel gives Spider-Man's debut two different dates
On the tile: Spider-Man1962
Marvel gives Spider-Man's debut two dates. Amazing Fantasy No. 15 went on sale June 5, 1962, while Marvel's own catalog dates that same issue August 1962. Stan Lee wrote the story and Steve Ditko drew it: a kid named Peter Parker, a run-in with a radioactive spider, and the death of his uncle. The issue is now one of the most valuable comics in the world. A copy sold for $3.6 million in 2021, a record price at the time.
Billy Batson was a boy who spoke one magic word and turned into a grown superhero. Created by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker for Fawcett Publications, the original Captain Marvel arrived in Whiz Comics No. 2, dated February 1940. In his heyday he was the best-selling superhero in comics, moving more than a million copies a month and outselling Superman. Fawcett built a whole family around him, including Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Uncle Marvel and a rabbit named Hoppy.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced T'Challa in Fantastic Four No. 52, published in July 1966, several months before the Black Panther Party was founded. The comic came first, but Marvel grew uneasy about the overlap, and in Fantastic Four No. 119 the king of Wakanda announced that he would now be called the Black Leopard. Writer Roy Thomas said Lee told him to try the new name and he did as he was told. No other comic used it, and T'Challa was the Black Panther again within months.
In December 1965, years before Luke Cage and months before the Black Panther, Dell Comics put out a western called Lobo, starring a heroic Black gunslinger with his name on the cover. The creators, like almost everyone making comics then, were white. The book lasted two issues. Lobo has been nearly forgotten while the heroes who came after him became household names, but for a moment in the mid-sixties a Black hero carried a title of his own on American newsstands.
The Batman television series that premiered in January 1966 was a ratings hit, and sales of the Batman comics climbed with it. About a year in, executive producer William Dozier asked DC for a young woman to join the cast, and he already had the idea worked out: give Commissioner Gordon a daughter who decides to become Batgirl. Editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox took it from there. Barbara Gordon debuted in Detective Comics No. 359, dated January 1967, drawn by Carmine Infantino.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were sons of Jewish immigrants who became friends at Cleveland's Glenville High School and spent years trying to sell a character nobody wanted. Publishers told them a strongman who arrived by rocket was not relatable. When Detective Comics finally took Superman, the pair signed away every right connected to him for a total of $130. Action Comics No. 1 went on sale on April 18, 1938, and Superman became one of the best-known characters on earth.
Under the original 1939 deal, Bob Kane received sole official credit for Batman. Bill Finger, who came up with the name Bruce Wayne, named Gotham City and co-created Robin and Catwoman, died in 1974 with no credit at all. Kane admitted in his 1989 autobiography that Finger never got the recognition he deserved. In September 2015, DC Entertainment and Finger's family announced an agreement, and his name began appearing on Batman television shows and films.
3The Joker's creator fought for Superman's creators
On the tile: Jerry Robinson1975
Jerry Robinson joined the company that became DC in 1939, at seventeen, as an assistant to Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and he is generally credited with creating the Joker the following year. Decades later, with a big-budget Superman film in production, Robinson learned that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were essentially destitute. With fellow artist Neal Adams he led a public campaign that shamed Warner Communications into giving the two men a stipend and crediting them for their creation.
Lily Renee Willheim fled Vienna after the 1938 annexation of Austria, escaped to England on a Kindertransport, and rejoined her parents in New York in 1940. Her mother spotted a newspaper notice that a comic book publisher wanted illustrators, so she took a drawing of Tarzan and Jane to the interview and got the job. She worked up from erasing pencil marks to drawing Señorita Rio, a secret agent for the Allied forces. Her fan mail always arrived addressed to Mr. Renee.
When Ramona Fradon began drawing the Aquaman backup strip in Adventure Comics in August 1951, essentially no women were drawing superheroes in American comic books. She stayed with the feature for ten years and co-created Aqualad. She also co-created Metamorpho, a shape-changing hero she drew in plain tights rather than a costume because, as she explained, clothes would only get in his way. She later drew the Brenda Starr newspaper strip for fifteen years and took assignments into her eighties.
Will Eisner made his name on The Spirit. In October 1978 he published A Contract with God, four linked stories about immigrant families in a Bronx tenement during the Depression, written for adults rather than children. The book is widely recognized as the first graphic novel, and it helped turn book-length comics into a serious literary form. Eisner preferred to call his method sequential art. The comics industry's annual awards are named for him and he presented them himself for two decades.
Stanley Lieber was hired at Timely Comics as a gofer for eight dollars a week. His first printed writing was a two-page prose story in Captain America Comics No. 3, cover dated May 1941. Such text pages existed only because the Postal Service required actual prose in any magazine mailed second class, and nobody read them. He signed his with a pen name. He expected to write the Great American Novel someday and did not want his real name on silly little comics.
Marie Severin began at EC Comics in the 1950s as a colorist, a job that rarely came with a byline. She earned recognition anyway, for a sense of composition, storytelling and humor that helped define the visual identity of EC and later of Marvel. She moved into penciling and inking, working on Doctor Strange, the Hulk and Sub-Mariner and co-creating the Living Tribunal. In 2001 she was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.
9Mad began as a comic book that mocked comic books
On the tile: Kurtzman1952
In 1952, with the encouragement and backing of his publisher Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman launched a comic book that made fun of other comic books. Mad was thirty-six color pages for a dime, and the gap-toothed face that became its mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, was swiped from popular postcards. Three years later, with distributors refusing to deliver EC's comics and sales flagging, Kurtzman convinced Gaines to turn Mad into a magazine. Gaines agreed, then realized that a magazine was exempt from the Comics Code squeezing the rest of his line.
Marvel did not start out as Marvel. The publisher was a small company called Timely, working out of the McGraw-Hill Building in New York with a comics staff of barely a handful, since most writers and artists worked at home. Its first comic book, Marvel Comics No. 1, reached newsstands on August 31, 1939, carrying five heroes: the Human Torch, the Angel, the Sub-Mariner, the Masked Raider and Ka-Zar. The company was not yet Marvel, but the word was already on the cover.
The publisher of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk ran out of room. In December 1996 Marvel Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Wilmington, Delaware, listing about $1.3 billion in assets against roughly $1.2 billion in liabilities. A takeover fight followed between financier Ronald Perelman and bondholders led by Carl Icahn, and the rescue plan folded a profitable toy company into Marvel to supply cash. Newspapers covered it as Spider-Man heading off to bankruptcy court.
3EC meant Educational before it meant Entertaining
On the tile: EC Comics1950
Max Gaines ran a company called Educational Comics, whose comics told stories of science, animals, history and the Bible. When he was killed in a boating accident in 1947, his son Bill, then twenty-five and majoring in education at New York University, inherited a business he had no interest in running. Then the artist Al Feldstein showed him a portfolio of characters from the teenage comics of the day, and something clicked. In 1950 Bill renamed the firm Entertaining Comics and launched Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror.
The publisher of Superman sued Fawcett almost as soon as Captain Marvel appeared, and the fight dragged on for more than a decade. The trial judge threw the case out, holding that National had abandoned its Superman copyrights through faulty notices on newspaper strips. In 1951 the appeals court reversed. Judge Learned Hand found no abandonment, and wrote that the copying of Superman had been deliberate and unabashed. Facing a new trial as superhero sales collapsed, Fawcett settled in 1953 and canceled Captain Marvel.
Three men founded MLJ Magazines in November 1939 and named it with their own initials: Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John Goldwater. Their early titles were costumed heroes aimed at boys, so Goldwater went after girls as readers with an ordinary freckled teenager instead. Archie Andrews, written by Vic Bloom, first appeared in Pep Comics No. 22 in December 1941. He took over the company so completely that by 1946 it had renamed itself Archie Comics.
Orrin C. Evans was a Philadelphia journalist and the first Black reporter to cover general news at a mainstream American newspaper. In 1947 he and a fellow journalist, Harry Saylor, founded All-Negro Comics, Inc., and published a comic written and drawn entirely by Black creators, meant to give readers positive portrayals of African Americans. It appeared in 1947, and it was the only issue that ever came out. Surviving copies are now kept in university library collections.
In 1976 Jenette Kahn became publisher of National Periodical Publications at the age of twenty-eight. She renamed the company DC Comics, after Detective Comics, the title where Batman first appeared. She became president in 1981 and editor in chief in 1989, grew the staff from thirty-five people to two hundred, half of them women, and set policies letting creators keep rights to their characters. In 2000 the Library of Congress named her a Living Legend.
In December 1991 three of Marvel's biggest artists told the publisher that creators were not being fairly rewarded for their work, and left. Within weeks they had recruited four more from Marvel's best-selling titles. On February 1, 1992 a press release announced Image Comics, founded by Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino and Whilce Portacio, on the principle that creators keep what they make. Image is now one of the largest American comics publishers.
Dwayne McDuffie joined Marvel's editorial staff in the late 1980s, then went freelance and became a voice in the industry against stereotyped portrayals of people of color. In 1993 he and three colleagues, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis and Derek T. Dingle, founded Milestone Media, whose stated mission was expanding the role of minorities in comics on the page and behind it. DC published their line, which included Static, Icon and Xombi. Static reached Saturday morning television in 2000, and in 2003 an episode about gun violence earned McDuffie a Humanitas Prize.
Eastern Color Printing in Connecticut turned newspaper reruns into a new kind of magazine. Its 1933 one-shot, Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, gathered strips such as Joe Palooka and Mutt and Jeff into a stapled, four-color booklet with a reported print run of 35,000. Librarians call it the precursor of Famous Funnies, the ongoing series that ran from July 1934 to July 1955 and is considered the first regularly published American comic book. The historian Ron Goulart noted that a dime in 1934 bought dozens of characters, all of them from the newspapers.
2Marvel printed three comics without the code seal
On the tile: The drug issue1971
The Comics Code forbade any mention of drugs, in a good light or a bad one. By Stan Lee's account, an official at the National Institute of Mental Health asked Marvel for a story warning young readers about drug abuse; the code rejected the result anyway. Marvel published The Amazing Spider-Man numbers 96 through 98 in 1971 without the seal on the cover. Lee wrote later in his memoir that "the world didn't come crashing down." The code was revised that same year to allow addiction to be shown as a vicious habit.
Marvel abandoned the Comics Code in 2001. Early in 2011 the last two publishers still using it, DC and Archie, left as well, and the Comics Magazine Association of America shut down with nothing left to administer. That September the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund acquired the intellectual property rights to the code's seal of approval and licensed it for T-shirts. The fund's director called it a progressive change: yesterday's symbol of comics censorship now pays to defend the First Amendment.
A Northern California family clearing out their late mother's attic found a copy of Superman No. 1 from 1939. The grading service CGC rated it 9.0, the highest mark it has ever given that issue. On November 20, 2025 the comic sold at auction for $9.12 million, the most ever paid for a comic book, passing a copy of Action Comics No. 1 that had brought $6 million the year before. Superman No. 1 had sold out a first printing of half a million copies.
5A high school teacher changed how comics are sold
On the tile: Phil Seuling1973
Phil Seuling taught English at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and ran comic book conventions on the side. He offered the publishers a new bargain: sell to him at sixty percent off cover price, and he would supply specialty dealers who gave up the right to return unsold copies. Sea Gate Distribution, named for his Brooklyn neighborhood, was running by 1974. That arrangement created the modern comic shop, and the industry still calls it the direct market.
Robert Overstreet collected comic books, coins, fossils and Indian relics, and in the 1960s he started work on a price guide for arrowheads, drawing every point type by hand. Then he noticed that comic prices were climbing every year while the relic market sat still. He shelved the arrowheads and spent years compiling dealer lists and fanzine ads instead. The Comic Book Price Guide appeared in 1970 and sold about eighteen hundred copies. The arrowhead guide finally arrived in 1989.
Art Spiegelman and his wife, the French-born designer Françoise Mouly, founded the avant-garde comics magazine RAW in 1980. Maus ran there from 1980 to 1991, telling his parents' experience of the Holocaust with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats. Pantheon collected it in book volumes. In 1992 the Pulitzer board gave Spiegelman a Special Citation for it. The acclaim was unprecedented for comic art, a form then widely underappreciated, and Maus reshaped how the Holocaust reached popular culture.
In 2026 the National Museum of American History added Action Comics No. 1 and Captain America Comics No. 1 to its collection, both gifts from Brandon Beck, a co-founder of the video game company Riot Games. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired a copy of the Captain America issue as well. Paul Levitz, a former president of DC Comics, noted that the four creators behind those two comics were all first-generation Jewish Americans.
On March 21, 1970 a one-day gathering called San Diego's Golden State Comic Mini-Con drew 145 people to the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel. It was a trial run for a larger convention that August, which drew about three hundred and brought Jack Kirby as a guest. The event kept growing. Recent editions of Comic-Con International have topped 130,000 attendees and spilled out of the San Diego Convention Center into hotels and parks downtown.