The creation of Siegel and Shuster’s Superman (1938) and the superhero genre in American comics occurred before and during World War II, when Germany was culturally isolated. If, however, prewar Nazi journalists objected to Superman’s Jewish-American origins and deployment in anti-German propaganda, postwar critics such as Fredric Wertham (1954) saw costumed vigilantes as fascistic themselves. Europeans agreed, yet continued to regard superheroes as uniquely American. A failed attempt to publish Superman in German in 1950, for example, demonstrated the difficulty of transplanting the genre.

Even by the 1960s, when American superheroes began to appear regularly in German editions, critics like Alfred C. Baumgärtner (1965) feared that these “muscle-bound show-offs” presaged a resurgent fascism. Yet superheroes remained marginal on the German-language market, bouncing listlessly between publishers even as sales of translated French bandes dessinées took off. Indigenous superheroes existed only as parody of the American model, such as the Austrian Kurt and Wenzel Kofron’s beer-bellied Flattermann (1981-83). The rejection of the strongman crimefighter seemed ingrained as a fundamental difference between individualistic American and corporatist European mindsets.

This dynamic was altered, however, by the global success of Hollywood superhero films: the 1980s Superman and 1990s Batman films led into a 21^st century dominated early by the X-Men (2000- ) and Spider-Man (2002- ) franchises. These properties became profitable on the German comics market at last; and local superheroes began to appear, starting with Ralf Paul’s Cologne-based Helden (Heroes, 1997- ) and its spinoff Dorn (2001- ). By decade’s end, the Swiss had entered the fray with David Boller’s Tell (2010- ). Then came Jörg Buttgereit’s Captain Berlin (2013- ) and Andi Paar, Harald Havas and Thomas Aigelsreiter’s ASH: Austrian Super Heroes (2016- ).

In all these cases, local identities are foregrounded, often explicitly in the series’ title and/or the hero’s name. At the same time, however, the “American” superhero model is constantly referred to; no longer as parody, but nonetheless using the readers’ knowledge of the genre in a tongue-in-cheek fashion that emphasizes the inherent absurdity and thus defuses the political danger of superheroic action on central European soil.