Heroic Homage

Superheroes have pervaded public consciousness, both in the United States and internationally. For better or for worse, we know who Superman is, to the point that his original Phrase Catcher "It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman" has been parodied countless times. The same goes for Wonder Woman and Batman, who with Superman are the big three of DC Comics, as well as Spider-Man, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. So it stands to reason that creators take constant inspiration from them.

A Heroic Homage is when a work deliberately uses visual motifs, powers, and theme naming from established mainstream comics. If there is a group of these Expies, expect either a sincere homage or a Deconstructor Fleet.

Some subtropes of such a Homage on the DC side are:

Super Stand-In: Like Superman, he has the cape, the strength, and the ability to fly. Straight homages will keep Superman's good nature, glasses or journalism jobs, while Deconstructions will show the downside of having a charismatic person with all those powers.
Dark Knight Deputy: Someone who is broody, preys on criminals, and protects the innocent. May also be a detective type. Batman isn't always available for copyright reasons, so his deputy will step in from time to time. Often this version is played more for laughs, but can also be played for drama.
Wonder Warrior: She has the Stripperiffic outfit, the tiara, and the heels. But she knows how to fight in all three, with grace and elegance. Some works will undercut her strength if paired with Super Stand-In, while others will focus more on Character Development.
Speedy Successor: They move fast, and red is their color of choice. In some cases their Super Speed is a gift, and in others it's a curse.
Expendable Evildoers: A group of Boxed Crooks doing shady stuff for the government imprisoning them in exchange for reduced sentences or other benefits. Usually C-list and with a high turnover rate.

From the Marvel side:

Captain Copycat: A veteran soldier that has either made it to the present day or represents a period piece. He has Super Strength and a legacy that others can't fulfill. Captain Patriotic optional.
Faux-tastic Four: These characters are often a small group that take inspiration from the Fantastic Four. As long as they're a Four-Element Ensemble, you have your homage.
Makeshift Mutants: This one is harder to pin down, as it refers to a group of people with superpowers that they can't control, and face discrimination from the outside world. You will see some obvious references to the X-Men.
Spider-Spare: This hero takes direct influence from Spider-Man. He or she may have webs, or the motif. Thankfully for the Spider-Spare, he tends to avoid the typical deconstructions.
Armored Avenger: A hero in Powered Armor, built either by himself or another.
Divine Defender: A literal Physical God come to earth to help the poor mortals. Usually a war god of one pantheon or another.
Substitute Sorcerer: A wizard of profound power, protecting the planet against magical threats and the stray Eldritch Abomination.
Weather Worker: A hero who's always welcome at picnics and when you want a white Christmas, the Weather Worker manipulates the weather.

Examples of Heroic Homage include:

Advertising

A Fruit-by-the-Foot candy commercial featured Underwear Man, a clear reference to Superman given his outfit and how he uses X-Ray vision to spy on people while waiting at the bus stop. He then is amazed when a kid shows a new Fruit by the Foot that reveals secret messages on the wrapping paper.

Anime and Manga

My Hero Academia: All-Might, aka Toshinori Yagi, appears to be a Captain Copycat while showing Silver Age traits from his muscular build, hero costume, and overwhelming superstrength.
The Reflection: The titular event has caused people worldwide to become the Reflected, an homage to Makeshift Mutants. This is especially so from how it was co-created by Stan Lee.
In Heroman (created by Stan Lee), Johnny Jones appears as a homage to Peter Parker with his alliterative name, his nerdy hobbies, being raised by an older relative, being bullied by the high school jock, and being granted a superhuman power that he uses for the greater good.
- William Davis, bully to Johnny Jones, resembles Flash Thompson but, when turned into a Skurgg, acts as an homage to Venom. Though, Flash Thompson takes on the Venom moniker in later comics.

Comic Books

DC Comics has done this from time to time:
- Batman has started a corporation to assist all his international counterparts with necessary crimefighting resources. Knight and Squire II respectively are an example of the London version of Batman and Robin, with both of them being Lighter and Softer owing to the fact that Knight II was the previous Squire and is like a British Dick Grayson.
- One post-Crisis comic had Batman call out Green Arrow for being a Lighter and Softer copy of him since he had the sidekick, the Arrowmobile and a hideout. And this was after Green Arrow had his Darker and Edgier upgrade with the Bronze Age.
- The Pre-Crisis hero Ultraa was an in-house Super Stand-In with a twist -- an alien child sent to a parallel-universe Earth, where he was found and raised by Australian Aborigines. The first superhuman on his version of Earth, he voluntarily moved to a different timeline when he learned his mere existence would act as a catalyst leading to a flood of superbeings rampaging across his adopted homeworld.
- Since Superman already exists in The Sandman universe, Neil had to use a Stand-in for him when Wanda shows off her favorite comics of Hyperman. The Cuckoo refers to the fact that Hyperman is a Secret Identity fantasy for boys. Later, Barbie leaves an issue of Hyperman at Wanda's grave after spending some time there.
Invincible models the Guardians of the Globe after the Justice League. There's Omni-Man as the Super Stand-In, Warrior Woman as the Wonder Warrior, Darkwing as the Dark Knight Deputy, Blur as the Speedy Successor, and so forth. (Omni-Man's status as a Superman expy was even more obvious in the earliest drafts of Invincible, where he was called "Supra-Man" and had a stylized "S" as a Chest Insignia.) Most of them also die in the first arc, thanks to Omni-Man ambushing them.
The Boys has the Seven modeled after the Justice League. We have Homelander as the Super Stand-In, Queen Maeve as the Wonder Warrior, A-Train as the Speedy Successor, Black Noir as the Dark Knight Deputy. The Deep is an Aquaman substitute. Except as Hughie and the Boys investigate, heroes owned by a corporation aren't that heroic at all. As Annie aka Starlight finds out to her horror, the men are all rapists, with her initiation into the Seven involving sexual acts, and Maeve is apathetic about it.
Milestone Comics referenced this a few times before DC Comics bought them:
- Icon, an alien found in a field by sharecroppers, grows up as a Superman analogue. Unlike Superman, he gets profiled by the police and mistrusted. He lampshades that Clark Kent never had to deal with that nonsense.

Fan Works

Drunkard's Walk: The Warriors, the superteam of which Doug Sangnoir is a member in his home timeline, has several. Shockwave, a former member implied to have passed away, has several times in supplemental material been called Warriors' World's Superman. Wetter Hexe is a German-born Weather Worker. She is also a Divine Defender, being an incarnated weather goddess. Many of the Warriors are also Speedy Successors, with superspeed among their panoply of powers.

Film

The Incredibles has a bit of this with the title characters: Mr. Incredible has Superman's strength and noble spirit, but not the discipline or power of flight. Elastigirl takes homage from Mr. Fantastic with her powers, while Violet can manipulate light (turn invisible and make force fields) like Susan Storm, and Dash can run like the Flash. Jack-Jack is the only anomaly, since he has a near-infinite amount of superpowers as the ending and the short "Jack-Jack Attack" reveals.
Sky High has the Commander as the Super Stand-In, with super strength. His wife and superhero partner Jetstream demonstrates the power of flight. The problem is that he has some Fantastic Racism towards "sidekicks" aka superheroes with little to no powers if not outright useless ones, reacting with denial when his son Will is forced to confess that he never got his powers. He's also not as smart as Clark Kent, with his archnemesis Royal Pain calling him an outright idiot.
2019's Brightburn is about the origin and development of a dark Super Stand-In, and as the film ends, hints are given of other dark counterparts to DC heroes.
Megamind shows what happens when the Super Stand-In gets burnout; Metroman has been the city's hero and Smug Super since he was a baby, and delegated Megamind as his nemesis when they were in grade school. Megamind couldn't even make popcorn without Metroman putting him in the timeout corner. Because of his status, however, Metroman could never figure out who he was outside of the costume, and by the time he's an adult, his heart isn't into beating Megamind. What he does is pretty selfish -- he fakes his death and leaves the city in the hands of Megamind, trusting that his "little buddy" wouldn't destroy things too much. Roxanne reads Metroman the riot act when she and Megamind learn he's alive. That's not even going into how Hal, Metroman's successor, can't live up to the cape owing to his self-centeredness.

Literature

The Marc Brown book The Bionic Bunny Show shows how Wilbur Rabbit does a typical day of filming for the titular show. And yes, they directly reference Superman by showing how they render effects like Bionic Bunny busting through a brick wall and jumping over buildings.
Captain Underpants is a Toilet Humor parody of Superman. George and Harold design a superhero with only one weakness-- stiffening starch-- and have him running around in his cape and underwear. To help him fight his weakness, George and Harold write a comic that's a direct reference to Superman's origin story, showing that Captain was a refugee baby from a planet about to blow-up, and his parents came in ghost form to tell him his failsafe against starch.

Live-Action TV

The Boys Amazon Prime adaptation of the comic follows the same trend of the comics, only Vought parades them as celebrities more than as superheroes. Stan Edgar, the CEO brought in to clean up Homelander's messes, says bluntly that the corporation cares more about profits than about heroics.
- Homelander is the Superman Stand-In. Butcher notes that Homelander, unlike practically every Supe, doesn't visit shady bars or has murders to pinned to his name. That's because Homelander is careful to destroy the evidence and wipe out witnesses. Homelander also has a Lack of Empathy due to being raised in a lab as a test-tube baby, with no failsafes for his power. Queen Maeve is the only Supe that can match him blow-for-blow, and even she can't hold him down for long.
- We also get Soldier Boy in season 3 as our Captain Copycat, a mashup of Captain America and Bucky/The Winter Soldier. As Vought reported, he went MIA after World War II after returning home as a recorded hero. Turns out that Vought agreed to give him to the Russians, using a CIA mission as a cover, and they killed Grace's men. Soldier Boy also has none of Captain America's noble traits, being misogynistic, racist, and plain mean. His only redeeming qualities are that he doesn't hurt people on-purpose unless they have wronged him, or he loses control of his powers.

Newspaper Comics

Calvin and Hobbes shows Stupendous Man as one of Calvin's alter-egos. Even before his mom sewed him the costume, and started confiscating it on a regular basis thanks to Calvin's mischief, Calvin's Imagine Spots would pay homages to the Man of Steel. One Sunday strip showed him turning back time by reversing the Earth's rotation, a reference to the first Superman movie.
FoxTrot: While DC and Marvel exist in this universe, complete with Jason and Peter having an argument about if Superman or Batman is the better hero, Jason has written a Dark Knight Deputy named Slugman who answers to a Slug-Signal and has a sidekick named Leech Boy.

Puppet Shows

Sesame Street
- The show has Super-Grover in several shorts, where he would try (and fail) to help people with his superpowers. That's because he may be able to fly and have Super Strength, but Grover lacks common sense that Clark Kent has. Such as when he tried to order a hat to fall out of a tree after a little girl has lost it.
- Grover also becomes Iron Monster for a while when his cape needs washing, wearing a laundry iron for a mask. Three guesses for which hero this emulates.
- For Rule of Three, Grover parodied Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in Spider-Monster: The Musical. And yes, the show has just as dangerous for Grover as it was for the actual Spider-Monster actors.

Tabletop Games

Witchwind from GURPS International Super Teams is a classic Weather Worker, probably inspired by Storm of the X-Men.

Web Comics

Evil, Inc. the webcomic features Captain Heroic as the Superman Stand-In, a Legacy Character for his father Commander Heroic. Unlike Superman, however, Cap doesn't have a day job; his wife Miss Match aka Emma brings home the bacon. When she briefly gets fired from Evil, Inc. in the comic's first iteration due to her boss Evil Atom finding out she and Captain Heroic are in a relationship, Captain Heroic reveals he used to be a graphic designer and goes back into the field to pay the bills. It's very frustrating for him, and their son Oscar even asks how his dad avoids punching people at his "other" job.
Love and Capes has all three with the Crusader, Amazonia, and Darkblade. The Crusader has Superman's powers and an extra weakness: sensitivity to high-pitched noises, but he's an accountant. Amazonia is revealed to be the youngest of several sisters and from another dimension. Darkblade's parents are alive, and they hired monks to kidnap him and teach him humility, which was how he became a superhero. The Arachnerd is a direct reference to Spider-Man, complete with him mentioning that he has a hard time paying bills.

Web Original

Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is the Super Stand-in, as the Jerkass superhero with strength and charisma, who gets the girl. Until Dr. Horrible accidentally kills Penny in the climax. Captain Hammer also suffers a Humiliation Conga as a result.
Worm: The Triumvirate represent different aspects of a Super Stand-In. Alexandria is the obvious Flying Brick, with the archetype outright being called the "Alexandria Package" in-universe, but also possesses Super Intelligence even if it is frequently downplayed both in-universe and in Supes's stories, mixed with some Dark Knight Deputy from her dark outfit and attitude. Her weakness is needing to breathe. The civilian Secret Identity is deconstructed as she uses it to double-hat as Chief Director of the PRT as part of her role in the Cauldron conspiracy even though that's a position which is supposed to be forbidden to capes. Legend is the Nice Guy plus Eye Beams expanded into a full-fledged Flying Firepower. Eidolon represents the Silver Age New Powers as the Plot Demands. They used to have an Armored Avenger teammate, Hero, until his untimely death in the backstory. Armsmaster combines traits of an Armored Avenger and Dark Knight Deputy. Jack Slash is a clear Joker Expy, while Doomsday gets decomposited into Crawler (grotesque Adaptive Ability user) and Siberian (Implacable Man who (nearly) kills the Super Stand-In).

Western Animation

Arthur:
- Bionic Bunny is a clear homage to Superman, though unlike Superman he can be tied up and nearly drowned, as season one episodes show. His actor Wilbur Rabbit is a soft-spoken Nice Guy who wears glasses in-between scenes to read his lines.
- Dark Bunny references Batman, and it's explained he is Bionic Bunny's cousin. He often has grim and gritty fight scenes, like being digested by a giant clam.
- In the season three premiere, Arthur has a nightmare that Buster comes from Saturn with all the powers of the Fantastic Four. Buster offhand references flying his spaceship through "cosmic rays".
In Doug, the title character imagines himself as Quailman from time to time, a direct homage to Superman. While Quailman doesn't have Super Strength, he can fly and loses his powers if exposed to Bobinite, an element from his home planet of Bob that is analogous to gold Kryptonite. His occasional partner the Silver Skeeter is a direct reference to the Silver Surfer from Marvel.
The Invincible cartoon, like the comic, has its Deconstructor Fleet The Guardians of the Globe, which take direct inspiration from the Justice League. Sadly, most of the early Guardians are killed in the first episode, thanks to Omni-Man.
- Omni-Man is a dark version of this, as it's revealed that the Viltrumites are not benevolent aliens that help other planets as he told Mark, but intergalactic conquerors that wipe out anyone who defies them or even poses a threat. Nolan was sent to conquer Earth, and tries to beat Mark into submission when he's outed by using his body to wipe out thousands of innocent lives while saying Mark's mother Debbie was only a "pet". Season two showed that Nolan was A Lighter Shade of Black compared to other Viltrumites, who come with an entire army to wipe out the Thraxans and their leaders orders Mark to take Nolan's place as an earth conqueror.
A hilarious subversion: Anansi replies, " I am not that kind of spider" in Static Shock when Virgil in civilian form tells him to use a "web-blast" at Osebo the leopard. His webs create illusions, though he does know hand-to-hand combat.
WordGirl on PBS is a Super Stand-In. She is a baby from the planet of Lexicon, who ended up on a runaway spaceship that her later sidekick Captain Huggy Face was driving, before the Botsfords found and adopted them both. (Somehow the Botsfords don't remember this, and Becky's brother outright laughs at the idea of her being WordGirl.) Funnily enough, the same episode that reveals this also reveals that WordGirl loses her powers if exposed to Lexinite, a reference to Kryptonite.
Batman Beyond‍'‍s Terrific Trio from the "Heroes" episode are a Faux-tastic Four homage. 2-D Man is a counterpart to Mister Fantastic. Freon shows similarities with the Invisible Woman and Human Torch. Magma is a combination of the Thing and Human Torch. Also, there was a scene that directly referenced the scene from the final chapter of Spider-Man's "If This Be My Destiny" through Terry where the machine that trapped is shaped the same.
Justice League episode, "The Terror Beyond," is an homage to Marvel's Defenders through Doctor Fate as Substitute Sorcerer, Aquaman for Namor, Solomon Grundy for the Hulk, and Hawkgirl as the Nighthawk. It's taken further in the Justice League Unlimited episode, "Wake the Dead," where Amazo is a homage to the Silver Surfer.
American Maid from The Tick seems to take inspiration from both Wonder Woman and Captain America.
Batman: The Animated Series shows how this trope can be used for Heartwarming and Tear Jerker effect: "Beware the Gray Ghost" shows that the titular character, a TV persona played by Simon Trent on a goofy TV show, inspired much of Batman's heroic image. In short, the Dark Knight Deputy led to our Dark Knight. Simon Trent becomes the Gray Ghost for real when Batman asks him for help on a case where a criminal is using Gray Ghost merchandise to commit crimes. Much to his surprise, Batman also lets him into the Bat-Cave, and shows him a shrine he made to the show, explaining he used to watch it with his father, one of the few good memories he has before his parents died. Trent, who lost career opportunities because no one wanted to hire a cheesy superhero actor, says, " Then it wasn't all for nothing." Helping Batman crack the case revives Trent's acting career, and interest in the Gray Ghost franchise. (And to heighten the waterworks even more, Adam West, from the 1960s Batman show and had a similar career decline, plays Simon Trent. He went on to have a successful voice acting career.)
The Powerpuff Girls shows a case where a villain pays homage to a hero. Princess Morbucks wants to be a Powerpuff girl and cites that Batman is a hero that "buys" his powers, but her attempts backfire and cause bank robbers to get away. When Buttercup and Bubbles chew out the princess for her stupidity, she decides to become an Armored Avenger and wipe them out by force.