10 Indie Heroes That Changed Comics

Indie comics have changed a lot over the decades. There was a time when the indies were where a creator started, but now the indies are where A-list creators go when they want to tell the kind of stories they want to tell and can’t at the Big Two. Companies like Dark Horse and Image Comics changed how the indie market worked in the 1990s. Since then, the indie comic marketplace has undergone a renaissance, with amazing stories and characters debuting every month.

While big-name creators sell books, characters are what keep readers coming back. Indie comics have starred some amazing heroes, and many of those heroes have had a huge effect on the comic industry. They’ve changed the way fans look at comics, and many of them have allowed the indie market to flourish in ways it never has before.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been in the mainstream spotlight for so long that it’s easy to forget that they were an indie comics sensation in the mid-80s. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the team as a way of lampooning the gritty comics of the 1980s, specifically Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Uncanny X-Men, down to the Turtles’ origin playing off the accident with toxic waste that gave Matt Murdock his powers. They also played into the popularity of ninjas in comics and pop culture, and it wouldn’t be long before they jumped from violent black-and-white comics to the small screen and toy store shelves. Since the Turtles have also had movies and video games, all while starring in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics at various companies, all of whom are willing to pay top dollar for the license.

Leonardo, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Donatello were the first indie sensations that went as far as they did. Within three years of their debut, they were on TV, and a year after that, their first toy line sold like hotcakes, making a billion dollars between 1988 and 1992. The Turtles showed just how popular a group of indie heroes can get, proving that not every hero needed a Marvel or DC logo in the corner to become an icon. The Turtles aren’t as popular as they used to be, but they’ve left an indelible mark on pop culture.

9 Youngblood Launched Image Comics

Rob Liefeld became a superstar on books like New Mutants and X-Force as an artist, but he started his career on indie books years before. Liefeld created many characters over the years and had planted the seeds of Youngblood years before their Image Comics debut in small press books like RAMM #1 and Megaton Explosion #1. Work at DC and Marvel put that on hold, but when Liefeld and Todd McFarlane led Marvel’s most popular artists away to form their own company, Youngblood would rise again in Youngblood #1, the first comic from Image Comics.

Youngblood isn’t groundbreaking because of brilliant writing or art but because it showed something Marvel and DC didn’t want to admit back then – that creators themselves could be draws, not just the characters. Image Comics would become an indie powerhouse, a role it still holds. Youngblood #1 sold like hotcakes and is the comic that is often credited with setting off the speculator boom of the 1990s when many started buying comics as investments. The team itself – Shaft, Vogue, Diehard, Combat, Sentinel, Brahma, Photon, Psi-Fire, and Riptide – aren’t important as characters. Still, their impact on the comic industry, both positive and negative, can’t be denied.

8 Marv Made Sin City Into The Biggest Crime Comics Of The 1990s

Frank Miller made a name for himself with landmark stories starring Daredevil, Batman, and Wolverine, combining superhero comics with a gritty neo-noir style. Miller was partly responsible for the maturation of the comic medium with The Dark Knight Returns and would leave the Big Two behind to explore comic styles beyond superheroes. Miller was already using noir elements in his comics, so in 1991, he went whole hog and gave readers the first Sin City story, “The Hard Goodbye,” starting in Dark Horse Presents: 5th Anniversary Special and continuing in Dark Horse Presents #51-62.

Miller was enough of a draw on his own to get readers to pick up the story, but the real reason they stuck around was Marv. Marv was a massive mountain of a man, a freelance enforcer in Basin City, trying to survive the corrupt municipality in any way he could. Marv became the mascot of Sin City, appearing in A Dame To Kill For, Just Another Saturday Night, and Silent Night. Sin City may have been a success regardless, and Miller created many great anti-heroes in its pages, but none were as popular as Marv. “The Hard Goodbye” brought crime comics back to the fore, carried on Marv’s massive square shoulders.

7 Usagi Yojimbo Birthed A Legion Of Anthropomorphic Heroes While Using Japanese Folklore To Tell Decades Of Stories

1984 was a big year for anthropomorphic indie comic heroes. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles weren’t the only ones to debut, as another character with a rather big effect on the comic industry would also debut – Usagi Yojimbo. Unlike the Turtles, Usagi Yojimbo wasn’t playing off the trends of the day or anything like that. Rather, creator Stan Sakai wanted to use the character to tell stories set in Japan’s Edo period, basing the titular character on famous swordsman Miyamoto Mushashi. Sakai initially meant for the book to be about humans, but after drawing a topknot as rabbit ears, he decided to go in an entirely new direction.

Usagi Yojimbo isn’t as popular as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the character still had a huge impact on the comics industry. Usagi’s stories are a cornerstone of anthropomorphic indie heroes, and its success over the decades was yet another example of an indie creation surviving outside the orbit of the Big Two. Stan Sakai also helped popularize Japanese folklore among American audiences, presaging the manga and anime boom decades before it began.

6 Invincible Gave Readers A More Realistic Teen Superhero And Had A Landmark Marvel Crossover

Writer Robert Kirkman created many genre-defining characters while doing indie work, and several creations became cultural phenomena. Kirkman and artist Cory Walker teamed up in 2003 to create an all-new superhero that would birth an entire universe of related characters in Invincible. Mark Grayson thought he was the typical legacy hero, working with his father, Omni-Man, the greatest hero on Earth. However, he soon learned a terrible truth – Omni-Man was the tip of the spear for an invasion by the alien Viltrumites. Soon, Invincible was embroiled in a war unlike anything he had experienced; he and his friends were battling a force more powerful than they could imagine.

Invincible took the Superman trope – a powerful alien hero protects the Earth – and flipped it upside down. The book is known for high-octane, bloody superhero battles, with Invincible facing off against foes in realistic superpowered brawls. Invincible was the first big-time indie superhero of the 21st century, something that hadn’t really been popular since Image launched in the early ’90s. Later indie superhero universes like the Massive Universe owe their existence to Invincible’s success. The character was even part of a crossover with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up, which hasn’t happened before or since with any indie hero. Invincible became so successful that the character even got an Amazon Prime animated series, bringing its story to life for a new generation of fans.

The Walking Dead quickly became an indie comics juggernaut. Zombies were never as popular as vampires, especially in comics, but The Walking Dead changed everything. Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, who drew the book’s first story arc, and Charlie Adlard, who drew the rest of the series, brought zombies to the front of the horror heap, and they did so by concentrating on the people affected by the zombie apocalypse, led by former sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes. Rick Grimes was a brilliant character, anchoring a massive cast of characters and doing his best to lead them through a world where the remnants of humanity were even more dangerous than the undead hordes.

Rick was easily the most popular character in The Walking Dead comics, and that popularity soon extended to the TV adaptation of the series, where Andrew Lincoln portrayed the character. Rick is a huge part of what made The Walking Dead so popular. Readers had been with him since day one, and his leadership kept his group going through some terrible times. The Walking Dead wouldn’t have been nearly as popular without him, which would have changed the comic industry in subtle ways – zombie horror wouldn’t have reached the same fever pitch, Image wouldn’t have had a sales juggernaut that helped fuel the Image renaissance of the late-’00s to mid-’10s, and many Big Two books that played off the zombie horror revolution never would have happened – making Rick the most important horror comic character of the 21st century so far.

Erik Larsen was one of the Image Seven and was widely considered the second-best Spider-Man writer/artist of the early ’90s after Todd McFarlane. Larsen and Rob Liefeld have something in common, as both first debuted versions of their Image characters years before their Marvel work made them popular. Larsen created Paul Dragon for Graphic Fantasy #1 in 1982, with a similar character appearing as Savage Dragon in 1986’s Megaton #2. However, it wouldn’t be until 1992 that Larsen would finally bring these disparate versions of the character together for The Savage Dragon #1, which followed the titular character through his life as a member of the Chicago police force and superhero. Over the next thirty-two years, Larsen would create an expansive saga for the character, creating an entire universe of heroes and villains, even introducing legacy versions of the Savage Dragon to take their father’s place.

The Savage Dragon is an Image icon, despite not reaching the heights of some other Image characters for a simple reason. The Savage Dragon has spent the entirety of its run being written and drawn by Larsen himself. This is a record that no other comic has even approached, the closest being Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which ran for twenty-seven years. This makes the Savage Dragon an extremely important part of comic history, showing how far Image has come in the comic industry.

3 Miracleman Was Alan Moore’s First Major Superhero Work And Remains Among His Best Works

In the 21st century, Miracleman isn’t technically an indie character, as Marvel has published his newest adventures. However, his most important years came as an indie character. Miracleman first appeared in the UK as Marvelman and was basically a copy of Captain Marvel, created by Mick Anglo. Marvelman ran until 1963 and would be forgotten until a young writer named Alan Moore asked if he could revitalize the character for Warrior, a British comic anthology. Moore took the basics of the character – a man who gains powers when he utters the word “Kimota!” and his partners, Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman – and brought them to the ’80s, deconstructing them and making them better than ever. Eventually, Eclipse Comics decided to publish the book in the US, but the name had to be changed. Thus, Miracleman was born.

Moore’s run on Miracleman was his first superhero deconstruction and would become a favorite of fans. Miracleman’s life in the 1950s and ’60s became a trick, part of a supersoldier program that used alien technology to transform humans into gods. Miracleman would end up wrestling with who he is and battling against the mad Kid Miracleman, culminating in a brutal battle in London. Moore’s run ended with Miracleman and his allies creating a totalitarian utopia, after which the writer/artist combo of Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham took over the character. Miracleman is a complex character, a hero who loses his humanity as he realizes the truth about himself. After Eclipse Comics folded, Miracleman became a bone of contention between Todd McFarlane and Gaiman, who believed they owned the rights to the character. Gaiman would win the court battle for the character and give him and his universe to Marvel, where Gaiman and Buckingham reunited to finish the story they started at Eclipse.

2 Hellboy Made Monster Comics Cool Again By Changing The Formula

Writer/artist Mike Mignola made a name for himself at Marvel and DC, working with the best writers in the industry during the ’80s and early ’90s. Mignola drew Doctor Strange/Doctor Doom: Triumph And Torment with writer Roger Stern, Cosmic Odyssey with Jim Starlin, and helped create the Elseworlds concept with Brian Augustyn with Gotham By Gaslight. However, Mignola had more to offer and would leave the Big Two to create his own character – Hellboy. Hellboy was a demon raised by humans, appearing after a Nazi occult ritual was thwarted by the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Professor Trevor Bruttenholm would take in Hellboy and became the BPRD’s chief weapon against the world’s dark forces, battling everything from undead revenants to cosmic horrors.

Hellboy has spawned an entire universe of horror comics and characters, but his biggest contribution is making monster comics cool again. Marvel monster comics were all the rage before the publisher switched to superheroes and have been dormant ever since. Hellboy took tropes from those stories—a dark demon summoned to the Earth for destruction—and tweaked them, making that demon into a hero. Hellboy was basically the king of indie horror for years and is still having amazing adventures thirty-one years later.

1 Spawn Is Image’s Longest Running Title

Todd McFarlane made a name for himself as the artist of The Amazing Spider-Man, becoming a superstar like few others. He was given his own Spider-Man series to write and draw. Still, his desire for control over his creations and better compensation led him to become one of the primary agitators in the departure of the Image Seven from Marvel Comics. McFarlane would write and draw his own series for the new publisher, Spawn. The book starred Al Simmons, a mercenary killed by his allies who made a deal with Malebolgia, a powerful devil, to return to Earth as a Hellspawn. Spawn had great power but only a finite amount, and the moment he used up his power, he would be pulled back to Hell.

That was the premise behind Spawn, a book still running today as Image’s longest-running title. Spawn became instantly popular, cementing his place among the greats of the comics industry. He quickly joined the ranks of Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, and Wolverine when it came to popularity, and the character starred in his own film and animated series. Spawn would become the cornerstone of an entertainment empire for McFarlane, allowing him to start his own toy company. Spawn is Image Comics’ most successful creation and shows that even indie heroes can reach the top of the mountain in the comic industry.