DC and Marvel Comics are the two American publishers that, starting in the 1930s, created and developed the concept of modern Superheroes, with the appearance of Superman—the modern Hercules—in 1938. Issue #1 of Action Comics, the first issue featuring the orphan from the planet Krypton, is now considered a collector’s item, valued at up to fifteen million dollars, depending on its condition. This demonstrates the cultural and artistic interest surrounding the vast universe of Superheroes.
Starting out as humorous strips following the news in newspapers, comics emancipated themselves from the 1930s onwards and became independent comic books mainly geared towards children. From mass product to sequential art, comics evolved into a narrative media with enormous potential. Some of the great moments and events of the superhero comics, in original American and Italian editions, are collected and displayed in this section, in an unmissable roundup of events in the narrative of a modern epic that is approaching one hundred years of life and showing no signs of fatigue.
It is no coincidence that some of the most important exponents of Pop Art such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol drew heavily on the narrative and aesthetic archetypes of comics, blurring the boundaries that define what is art and what is not.