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Curated playlist

DC Comics shapeshifters

  • 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…
  • Brainiac (character)Brainiac made his debut in Action Comics #242, cover-dated July 1958, as a bald, green-skinned scientist who shrank Metropolis and sealed it in a bottle. Writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino created him for DC Comics. Few readers that…
  • 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…
  • Spectre (DC Comics character)The Spectre first appeared in More Fun Comics #52, dated February 1940, and his debut opens with a murder. A New York detective named Jim Corrigan is on his way to his own engagement party when thugs stuff him into a barrel, fill it with…
  • 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…
  • Swamp ThingSwamp Thing, the mound of living vegetation that guards nature in DC Comics, got his name because his creator never gave him one. Writer Len Wein later recalled: "I didn't have a title for it, so I kept referring to it as 'that swamp thing…
  • Guy Gardner (character)In 2025, Nathan Fillion played Guy Gardner in the film Superman, giving a famously abrasive Green Lantern a place on the biggest screen yet. That same year, DC Comics gave two comic book creators full credit and royalties for reinventing…
  • MetamorphoMetamorpho, the DC Comics hero, begins as a mercenary named Rex Mason who takes a job to steal an Egyptian artifact called the Orb of Ra. For a man who sells his skills to the highest bidder, it should be a routine theft. Instead it sends…
  • Lucifer (DC Comics)Lucifer Morningstar ruled Hell for more than ten billion years, and the sentence that put him there lasted far longer than his crime. According to the comics, he rebelled against Creation for just three seconds. This version of the Devil…

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