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Works with their own pages:
Other Comics
- Archie Comics:
- Non-fans of Archie Comics often assume Betty and Veronica are enemies because they both love Archie. They've actually (usually) been very good friends for decades. They simply like the same boy.
- Jughead being Ambiguously Gay due to his He-Man Woman Hater shtick. Jughead's disdain for women was supposed to be a sign of his immaturity and was more in the vain of Girls Have Cooties than anything. It's also been watered down since the 1960s to the point where he usually doesn't even dislike girls anymore, but instead just is a Celibate Hero more interested in food than romance. Jughead has been depicted as being attracted to girls, but he's not that into dating. Jughead was later canonized as asexual and aromantic in the Archie Comics (2015) reboot, but that only applies to that continuity thus far.
- The Betty/Archie/Veronica love triangle is often misremembered as "Archie and Veronica are a couple, while Betty's love for Archie is unrequited." Actually, Archie dates both girls, has said on several occasions that he loves them both equally, and always fails when they try to make him choose between them. Although this is partly a case of Depending on the Writer and Characterization Marches On, as Archie ignoring Betty in favor of Veronica used to be a more common plot line.
- Similarly, it's often claimed that because a story set in the future showed Archie marrying Veronica, it's canon that he ends up with her. This leaves out the fact that this is explicitly only a potential future, and there's another story where he marries Betty, and another where he marries Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats.
- Hellboy is often said to be the world's most popular superhero who isn't from Marvel Comics or DC Comics. In reality, this is pretty debatable. While his series is quite popular among superhero fans, Dark Horse Comics classifies the series as "Horror", and Hellboy doesn't consider himself a superhero. Officially, he's just a government agent who happens to be a demon. He doesn't wear a costume, and "Hellboy" isn't a codename—it's the only name that he has, and he got it when he was just a baby, since the soldiers who found him in the 1940s didn't know his real name. note
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- Everybody knows that the turtles wear color-coded headbands so that the audience can tell them apart, with Leonardo wearing blue, Raphael wearing red, Donatello wearing purple, and Michelangelo wearing orange. While that might be true of the cartoons and the live-action films, it most definitely isn't the case in the original comic book that started it all. In that series, they all wore matching red headbands, and only their differing signature weapons let the audience keep them separate from each other. And it would be pretty damn odd if the artists gave them color-coded accessories in that series, considering it was in black and white. As a reference to this, the IDW series had them originally wearing identical red headbands before being given individual colours by Splinter.
- Everybody knows that Hamato Yoshi (Splinter) and Oroku Saki (The Shredder) are lifelong rivals and enemies continuing a blood feud from Japan on the streets of New York City. Once again: this is true in the movies and the cartoons, but not in the original comics. In the comics, Yoshi's rivalry was actually with Saki's older brother Oroku Nagi, who fell in love with Yoshi's beloved Tang Shen and tried to kill her when she chose Yoshi. Saki was only seven years old when Yoshi killed Nagi to protect Shen, and he didn't get a chance to avenge his brother until he was an adult; Yoshi had almost no interaction with him before that. For simplicity's sake, though, many adaptations combine Saki's role with that of his brother. To date, Nagi has never appeared outside of the Mirage comics.
- Krang is often confused for being part of the Utrom race (the aliens responsible for the mutagen that turned the TMNT into what they are now) mainly because he bears a strong resemblance to them (he was inspired by them visually, which explains it). However, he has little else in common. Krang is an interdimensional being, not strictly an alien, and lost his original body rather than having it from the start. The Utrom race originated in the comics, while Krang wasn't made until the animated series. Because of this, for the sake of simplicity, Krang is made into a proper Utrom in various adaptations, but that is not the case in the comics. The IDW version splits the difference, being a Utrom and a resident of Dimension X.
- It's commonly assumed that since the Shredder was Killed Off for Real very quickly in the original Mirage Comics, he was never a major presence in that continuity. This is not true: in fact, he was arguably more important after his death. The Foot Clan remained a major presence, and multiple clones of him menaced the turtles and others.
- Volto is an obscure Golden Age superhero who appeared one-page comics meant to advertise Grape Nuts Flakes. He's an alien from Mars who recharges his powers by eating Grape Nuts Flakes. Several online sources, such Volto Archive, claim the other Martians eat human flesh. However, the comics never say this. In fact, Volto says Martians eat cereal grains.
Other
- Many non-comic fans believe that comic books in general adhere strictly to Status Quo Is God, that any change will be reset instantly and nothing has any real impact. The reality is that things do change in the comics continuity, and while things reset they aren't often as instant as one would think. Examples:
- The Robin that everyone knows is Dick Grayson, who has been Nightwing since 1984 and unlike other examples of the Legacy Character, he has never returned to being Robin. This is why he is never considered the main Robin, just the first.
- Batgirl is Barbara Gordon. Except she wasn't for 23 years after The Joker paralyzed her, and she became the non-combat support Oracle (a rare instance where she was not portrayed as being Inspirationally Disadvantaged because of it). In the meantime, there were two different Batgirls: Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown. It was only after the New 52 relaunch that Barbara reassumed the title of Batgirl, but that wasn't until 2011.
- The Flash that kicked off the Silver Age was Barry Allen, who made the Heroic Sacrifice in 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths and stayed dead until 2009. During that time, his successor Wally West was the Flash that an entire comic book generation knew and grew up with.
- On the Marvel side, the entire Ultimate Marvel universe was killed off (with the exception of Miles Morales and much of his supporting cast) in 2015. They were eventually resurrected at the end of Spider-Men II storyline, though.
- People assume that Spider-Man is a Kid Hero who will never grow up or finish school. This hasn't been the case since the '60s, and he's gone through many arcs (the most notable being Gwen Stacy, who died and stayed dead) until this point. His last confirmed canonical age is 28, as of 2014.
- A very deeply entrenched talking point that comes up when discussing the Silver Age is the notion that Marvel invented the idea of well-rounded comic book characters who experienced angst and realistic emotional turmoil, in contrast to DC's heroes, who were a bunch of smiling goody-goodies with no real problems or interesting personal lives. Alan Moore once summed up this notion by joking that DC's Silver Age heroes were one-dimensional and had no personality outside of doing good, while Stan Lee's major innovation was introducing two-dimensional characters. While this is largely true, and Marvel definitely popularized the concept of superheroes with relatable character flaws and personal problems, the idea that this sort of thing was completely absent from DC's comic books is untrue. As author Sean Howe noted in his book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Superman, despite often being thought of as a flawless, perpetually-smiling Big Good and the complete antithesis to Marvel's approach to heroism, actually displayed a fair bit of angst during the Silver Age. In the 60s, it was not uncommon to see Superman long for the destroyed planet of Krypton or lament both his status as Last of His Kind and the fact that he never got to know his biological parents. Some of the Prequel stories told in Superboy also depicted the young Clark Kent as somewhat resentful of the way his powers and responsibilities set him apart from the rest of humanity and kept him from being with Lana Lang, an internal conflict that wouldn't have felt out of place in Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko). This is also evident in early Green Lantern stories, which featured similar levels of angst, with the Loves My Alter Ego tension being played to the hilt. The difference is that these sorts of stories tended to be the exception for DC's output rather than the rule, while the Marvel Universe was practically built on this sort of character-driven melodrama.
- Similarly, a common charge is that while Marvel's Silver Age characters often experienced growth and change (like the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm in the pages of Fantastic Four (1961), or Peter Parker's graduation from high school in The Amazing Spider-Man (1963)), DC's characters were comparatively flat and stagnant, with Status Quo Is God in full effect. Again, while it could be argued that this was generally true, it ignores that there were genuine instances of characters growing and changing, such as when Aquaman and Mera got married (before Reed and Sue, by the way) and then had a child together.
- Critics of the whole concept of superheroes often describe them as being just vigilantes who beat up criminals with no due process or anything. While this is technically true in a lot of cases, most superheroes don't go around beating up shoplifters and other petty criminals, as such people are usually implying but spend most of their time fighting other supervillains, who have superpowers of their own and are thus way beyond the capability of the police to deal with. It's also not usually true that most superheroes are just "judge, jury, and executioner" when dealing with villains; indeed, in most incarnations of Batman (who is the hero most often accused of this for whatever reason), he turns villains over to the authorities once they've been defeated and lets them have a trial just like normal criminals. The closest thing to a straight example of this would probably be The Punisher, and he was always intended as an Anti-Hero (or straight up villain, in some cases) rather than a traditional Superhero.
Creators
- Jack Kirby:
- Everybody knows that he exclusively wrote and drew for Marvel Comics until the 1970s, when his infamous falling-out with Stan Lee drove him to DC Comics. In fact, Kirby's association with DC went back many years, and was quite a bit Older Than They Think; he was working for the company as far back as the 1940s, and he drew several issues of The Sandman, Green Arrow, Boy Commandos, House of Secrets and House of Mystery long before his split with Marvel. Notably, he and Joe Simon also created the minor DC heroes Guardian and the Newsboy Legion shortly after they created Captain America; both of them still sporadically show up as supporting characters to this day.
- By a similar extent, while him leaving Marvel and joining DC is a pretty legendary part of his life (to the point that many have cited it as the beginning of The Bronze Age of Comic Books), people tend to be less clear on what happened next, or broad-brush it as the remainder of his career. The truth is, Kirby's run with DC only lasted six years, with him leaving in 1976 due to DC's messy position at the time, friction with other creators, and the perception that his books were poorly promoted or cancelled quickly (by his own account, "it was like escaping a slave ship for the Titanic"). He then spent another three years at Marvel, which yielded The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, a run on Captain America and The Falcon, and his famously offbeat adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, before he spent the rest of his life as an independent creator mostly working in animation. He did do some more work with DC afterward and seemed to be on better terms with them, but his DC work tends to essentially be treated as his entire post-1970s output. Part of this is likely due to his creation of Darkseid, but his role as the overall Big Bad of the DCU wouldn't be established until over a decade later.
- Stan Lee:
- There's a misconception that Stan only ever wrote for Marvel. Actually, like with just about any comic book writer, he wrote for multiple companies — and that includes DC. Famously, he wrote the Just Imagine... Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe series, where he reinterpreted the DC heroes. But he also wrote the #1 issue of Detective Comics Presents: Superman in 2004. The most oddball thing he made was Heroman, a legit shonen manga that was made for Japanese audiences... and got an anime adaptation. Also, when looked at outside of comics, he wrote the adult animated comedy Stripperella, which is every bit as risque as it sounds.
- Stan Lee also wasn't the one who founded Marvel. He was the most famous driving force, and is responsible for what Marvel would become today, but he didn't start the company — it was pulp writer Martin Goodman, who isn't nearly as well-known. Back then, it was actually founded under a different name, Timely Comics.
- Geoff Johns is usually described, fondly or derisively, as a guy who is mainly motivated by a childhood nostalgia for The Silver Age of Comic Books. This is flatly impossible, as Johns was born in 1973, at which point the Bronze Age was in full swing. Indeed, if one looks at the things that would have been popular around when Johns was eight to twelve (the final seasons of Superfriends, Steve Engelhart's Green Lantern, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Paul Levitz's Legion of Super-Heroes, the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans, All-Star Squadron, Alan Moore's various DC works), you get a pretty solid reflection of the stuff Johns's career tends to focus on. Much of this is because Geoff Johns tended to bring back continuity and characters established in the Silver Age (most famously Hal Jordan and Barry Allen), but many of those elements were still around and prominent well into the 80s, or even the 90s. DC's status quo up until the late 80s didn't tend to change much, which is part of why Crisis happened to begin with.
- It's often claimed that Frank Miller hates Superman, and wrote the rather unflattering portrayal of him in The Dark Knight Returns as a hatchet job or Writer on Board moment. Miller has gone on record
that this isn't true, and that he simply wrote Superman in that manner "because it's Batman's book"—that is to say, neither character was written as especially likeable, and Superman just looks worse because he's the antagonist. Several other stories written by Miller have tried to redress this— Superman is much more overtly sympathetic in the sequels to The Dark Knight Returns (mainly Dark Knight III: The Master Race onward), and Miller went on to do his own take on the character in Superman: Year One.
