Curated playlist
DC Comics characters with superhuman strength
- SupermanThe first Superman was a homeless man tricked into taking a drug. Jerry Siegel wrote him as a villain in 1933.
- Wonder WomanWonder Woman's creator invented a device crucial to the lie detector.
- DarkseidDarkseid, the stone-skinned tyrant of the planet Apokolips in DC Comics, has a name that fans have never fully agreed how to say. Mark Evanier spent several years as assistant to the character's creator, Jack Kirby. Evanier says the name…
- DeathstrokeDeathstroke wears a mask split between black and orange, and it covers a right eye that is missing. He is Slade Joseph Wilson, a mercenary and former U.S. Army soldier. Within the DC Universe he is regarded as the greatest and deadliest…
- HomelanderGarth Ennis, who created Homelander together with the artist Darick Robertson, offered a blunt way to picture him. In Ennis's words: "It might help to think of the Homelander as having all the self-control of… let's say… a…
- Billy ButcherBilly Butcher hunts gods, and he does it with no superpowers of his own. He is a fictional character, one of the two main protagonists of the comic series The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. He leads a group of…
- Harley QuinnHarley Quinn, the DC Comics character, first appeared on screen on the 11th of September 1992, in the 22nd episode of Batman: The Animated Series. The episode was called Joker's Favor, and she was supposed to appear in it once and never…
- Doctor ManhattanDoctor Manhattan, the blue-skinned superhuman of the graphic novel Watchmen, wears a mark that nobody assigned to him. Military planners prepared a hat for his public unveiling, decorated with crossed ellipses meant to suggest an atom. Jon…
- Martian ManhunterMartian Manhunter, whose Martian name is J'onn J'onzz, first appeared in Detective Comics #225, dated November 1955. Writer Joseph Samachson and artist Joe Certa created him for DC Comics. He went on to become one of the seven founding…
- Shazam (DC Comics)Shazam, the comic book hero also called Captain Marvel, headlined an issue, Whiz Comics #2, that sold over 500,000 copies. The hero at its center is a boy who becomes a towering adult by speaking a single word. Yet this same character…
- ClayfaceDetective Comics #40, cover-dated June 1940, introduced a murderer called Clayface, and the man under the costume was a B-list actor named Basil Karlo. Nobody could have guessed what the name would grow into. Over the following decades it…
- Black NoirBlack Noir is the name shared by three characters in The Boys, a story created in comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Eric Kripke later developed it for television. In both versions, Noir belongs to the Seven, a hedonistic and…
- Bane (DC Comics)Bane, the DC Comics supervillain, got his name from an insult. At the age of eight, a boy inside the Peña Duro prison on the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca stabbed a criminal who was trying to use him to learn the prison's secrets. It…