In the early ’60s, when superheroes battled villainy as blandly indestructible paragons of virtue, the comics upstart grew disenchanted with such strait-laced characters as Superman, Batman, and the Flash, who were then flourishing at rival DC Comics. As a result, Lee strayed from accepted tropes to create an interlocking network of heroes with a kind of flawed humanity — a breakthrough dubbed the “Marvel revolution” that would ripple across popular culture for decades.
Unlike so many other caped crusaders of the time, Lee’s heroes tended to be misfits and wisecrackers, teenagers or regular Joes given to fits of pique, self-pity, rage, insecurity, and churlishness. Spider-Man’s Peter Parker, for example, was an orphaned nerd who — when not saving New York City from impending disaster — wrestled with unrequited love, schoolyard bullying, and negative cash flow. The X-Men, meanwhile, captured the zeitgeist as bona fide members of the counterculture. They were superpowered mutants intent on doing good but forced to maintain an uneasy peace with human beings who reviled the “uncanny” crime-fighters as a dangerous subspecies.
