Expy/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Marvel Comics' Donyell Taylor, originally codenamed Bandit, is an Expy of Marvel's own Gambit, a fact exploited shamelessly by an issue of Gambit's eponymous series when Bandit turns out to be romantically involved with Gambit's ex-wife Belladonna.
  • In the series The Invisibles, one of the main characters, Ragged Robin, is similar to another character created by the same writer during his run on Doom Patrol, Crazy Jane (According to Morrison himself, they're the same person in a different universe). More of this on The Other Wiki
  • Lee, the main character of Peter David's Fallen Angel is an Expy of Linda Danvers, protagonist of David's previous run on Supergirl. In fact, David did his best to fuel speculation that the characters were one and the same until the book's second volume, in which he chronicled Lee's origins. Later on, he introduced Lin, yet another expy of Linda Danvers, who can in fact be considered Linda in everything but name. Likewise, the God figure in the series is a small girl dressed in a tennis motif and carrying a tennis racket, which makes her an expy of Wally, the god figure in David's Supergirl who was a young boy who carried a baseball bat.
  • Conan the Barbarian: Janissa the Widowmaker for Red Sonja in the most recent Dark Horse Comics series.
  • John Byrne's college newspaper strip Gay Guy! had a villain called Charisma, whom no man could resist except... well, guess. Byrne liked the character concept so much that Karisma showed up on the Fantastic Four's doorstep a decade and a half later.
  • In recent X-Men comics, Hellion has become an Expy of Quentin "Kid Omega" Quire; Both have very powerful psychic abilities and inflammatory personalities to begin with, but Hellion's adopted Quentin's signature striped sweater-vest and started hanging out with Glob Herman, one of Quentin's old flunkies (and the only living member of the Omega Gang to still have his mutant powers). He's also spouting mutant supremacist rhetoric and telling baseline humans to "get back to your caves, apemen!"
    • There's also Onyxx and Rockslide, two X-Men who have roughly the same powers (being giant rock men) and only a few strong physical differences (different colors, Onyxx has a helmet and is slightly bulkier, slightly different costumes). It's to the point that, seeing them on the same page, you could think one was an artist/colorist error meant to represent the other. This is lampshaded a few times when they're shown to be casual acquaintences who think highly of one another.
  • Planetary by Warren Ellis contains a large number of Captains Ersatz, but the minor character of Jack Carter undergoes a remarkable transformation during the story in which he appears. He is initially introduced as a Captain Ersatz for John Constantine (who Ellis had written but did not create), but in the final panels of the story mutates into a true Expy of Spider Jerusalem from Ellis's Transmetropolitan (who himself is a No Celebrities Were Harmed of Hunter S. Thompson).
    • Credit for this actually goes to the artist, John Cassaday. According to Ellis, he only told Cassaday to draw Jack Carter with a shaved head and tattoos, and it was Cassaday who decided to draw him *exactly* like Spider Jerusalem. This makes Carter one of the rare Expies created as a prank.
  • Archie was a smash hit for Archie Comics, and inspired many Expies:
  • Jeremy from the Angel/Spike comics is an Expy of Jim from The Office.
  • When Alan Moore began work on Watchmen, the plan was to use all of the characters DC purchased from Charlton Comics, but editors ultimately put the kibosh on that, so he had to create new ones. In a great sense of cyclical cosmic irony, The Question was a little known C-Stringer who inspired Moore's Rorschach, who then in turn inspired JLU's version of The Question, which worked so well it turned him into a major player again.
    • Similarly, Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D features Captain Adam, an alternate universe version of Captain Atom who's a clear Expy of Dr Manhattan, Watchmen's Captain Atom Expy.
      • The Comedian is meant to be Peace Maker.
        • Night Owl II is meant to be Blue Beetle.
          • Ozymandias is meant to be Thunder Bolt.
            • And Silk Spectre II is mean to be Nightshade.
  • One story in The Maze Agency featured a detectived named Senor Lobo, whom writer Mike Barr has acknowledged was a deliberate homage to Hercule Poirot.
  • Kirk "Man-Bat" Langstrom is to Curt "The Lizard" Connors. Really, regardless of where each character ended up, the only difference between their origins is the specific ailment they were trying to cure and the specific animal they were working on.
  • Queen and Country is, as writer Greg Rucka fully acknowledges, heavily influenced by The Sandbaggers. Not every character is an Expy, but Paul Crocker and Tom Wallace are especially obvious as expies of Neil Burnside and Willie Caine, respectively.
  • In a probably deliberate example, since the character is a Redeeming Replacement for on of Spider-Man's worst enemies, but Phil Urich the heroic Green Goblin suggests an expy of Peter Parker. Ulrich is an Unlucky Everydude who works for the Daily Bugle and even has an Uncle Ben just like Peter (although Urich's doesn't get killed). In the Spider Girl series, the two characters are close friends.
  • In a rather unusual example, in Marvel's Incredible Hercules and later, in Incredible Hulks, Zeus served as an expy for God. That is, the Judaeo-Christian God. Zeus, previously portrayed as distinctly unimpressive, especially next to his intelligent and scheming wife, became considerably more imperious - and when put on trial, threw the "angry at God" argument back into the faces of his accusers. When the Hulk confronted Zeus, the context was somewhat awkward if Zeus is taken as himself, but perfectly logical when read as God.
    • Mocked by Zeus himself. Hulk's reason for confronting him was that he wanted Zeus to help his family. As Zeus comments "Offering yourself as a sacrifice. Dying for other people's sins. Wrong religion." *bitchslaps*
  • DC's All-Star Squadron featured the Young All-Stars, who were meant to replace the Golden Age versions of Superman (Iron Munro), Wonder Woman (The Fury), Batman (Flying Fox), Aquaman (Neptune Perkins, Tsunami), and Green Arrow (Tigress) Post-Crisis, because they, you know, weren't active back then anymore. They had Nazi-created evil counterparts called Axis Amerika to contend with, which were also retrofitted Expies of the vanished Earth-2 heroes: Ubermensch (Superman), Gudra the Valkyrie (Wonder Woman), Grösshorn Eule and Fledermaus (Batman and Robin), Usil (Green Arrow) and Sea Wolf (Aquaman). Part of the reasoning was that, metaphysically speaking, iconic characters like Superman and Wonder Woman were "too big" to be replaced by just one new (and inevitably "lesser") character. The Token Japanese member of Axis Amerika, Kamikaze was an expy of Fawcett's Bulletman.
  • Marvin, a supporting character for Millie the Model, had much the same characterization as Archie Comics' Jughead.
  • When the teen supervillain Kid Karnevil attempted to infiltrate the Justice Society of America, he did so by posing as a patriotic superhero named the All-American Kid. All-American Kid's costume and backstory were extremely similar to those of Bucky, the sidekick of Captain America (comics).
  • Not too long ago, during Marvel's Dark Reign event, the "Sinister Spider-Man" title(Mac Gargan's Venom posing as Spider-Man) introduced us to Doctor Everything, a pretty blatant expy of Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan, right down to his....disturbing penchant for nudity.
  • Volstagg of the Warriors Three from The Mighty Thor is heavily based on Shakespeare's Falstaff.
  • Maximum Press characters Law and Order bear a strong resemblance to Marvel's Cloak and Dagger.
  • Happened all the way back during the creation of the X-Men by Stan "The Man" Lee himself. When creating the original team of five, Lee decided he wanted to re-use the character of the Human Torch, but with ice powers instead of fire.
  • In the Catwoman story "Selina's Big Score", Stark is a blatant Expy of Parker, Villain Protagonist of a series of crime novels by Richard Stark. He also looks like Lee Marvin, who played Parker (renamed Walker) in the film adaptation of the first novel, Point Blank. (Darwyn Cooke, who wrote and drew the story, later went on to officially adapt the Parker novels to the comic medium.)
  • Spider-Man villain Sergei Kravinoff AKA Kraven the Hunter is an expy of General Zaroff of The Most Dangerous Game. While Hunting the Most Dangerous Game has become a widespread trope, it's no coincidence that the comic book villain shares the Russian aristocrat background of the original.
    • In a further case of literary expiness, The Chameleon was revealed as Kraven's illegtimate brother, and was given the name Dmitri Smerdyakov- taken from two of the siblings of The Brothers Karamazov, and like Smerdyakov of the novel, Chameleon is illegitimate and a Manipulative Bastard.
  • Witchfire from Alpha Flight is a terribly obvious example, ripping off the concept of the New Mutants character Magik (except that she's the actual daughter of Belasco), as well as aspects of DC's Raven. It's hard to tell which character she's directly ripping off more, but it's clear that writer James Hudnall just wanted to write those characters, but wasn't allowed to at the time.
  • When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon took over DC's Sandman book, they immediately made him more like their old assignment (Captain America), right down to giving him an Expy of Bucky in "Sandy the Golden Boy."
  • During the Golden Age, Green Arrow was given many similarities to Batman, right down to the Arrow-Car, Arrow-Cave, and a teen sidekick in Speedy (who is really just like Robin only a junky).
  • Rob Liefeld is infamous for those. During his run on New Mutants and X-Force, he created Thornn and Feral- Wolfsbane Expys, Kane- A Cable Expy (which he also created) but younger, and Copycat- a Mystique Expy. Many many of his Image Comics characters are blatantly ripping off various Marvel characters as well, including ones he himself created.
    • Most notable is Deadpool, who was intended to be an Expy of Teen Titans villain Deathstroke, but was re-tooled into the lovable maniac he is now.
    • He's even admitted that Youngblood was simply a rejected Teen Titans pitch, right down to the redheaded archer Shaft being Roy Harper/Arsenal and Diehard being a S.T.A.R. Labs android.
  • Number 13, a strip about a supernatural family of monsters in the Anthology Comic The Beano was pretty much The Munsters. Also Kat and Kanary is pretty much Sylvester and Tweety from Looney Tunes. The character Joe Jitsu from the 00s seems to be an expy of an earlier chracter entitled Karate Sid from the 80s.
  • Ghost Rider villain Skinbender is plainly designed to heavily resemble Sailor Venus; true to this inspiration, she falls in love with Ghost Rider when they meet.
  • Batman himself started out as this to pulp-hero, The Shadow. Fortunately, he evolved into his own unique character.
  • Pat Mills's The Punisher 2099 seemed a bit similar to an earlier character co-created by Mills when he was introduced. When he was put in charge of the Punishment Police, this identification became certain.
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