Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury. Lee and Kirby would also expand the "superhero as outsider" metaphor with other creations, such as 1963's X-Men. Featuring a group of superpowered mutants who tried to help the very people who feared and loathed them for being different, X-Men was a potent allegory for being "born different." And in the late 1970s, Jewish comic book writer Chris Claremont would introduce openly Jewish characters into the X-Men like Kitty Pryde, who often wore a Star of David necklace. Claremont would also provide a new back story for the X-Men's arch nemesis Magneto, explaining that the villain's hatred of humanity resulted from his childhood spent enduring the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Graphic Novels

By the mid-1980s, the novel-length comics narrative,or "graphic novel," was riding its first wave of mainstream popularity in part thanks to Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking work Maus. A memoir in comics form about Spiegelman's father's experiences during the Holocaust, the book also involved a frame story about Spiegelman's dysfunctional relationship with his father in the present day. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Maus is that the characters in the book are drawn as animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats. In 1992, a year after part two of Maus was released, Spiegelman's work won the Pulitzer Prize, the first such honour for a graphic novel or comic book.

Of course, Spiegelman wasn't the first person to popularize the graphic novel; Will Eisner, creator of the 1940s comic strip The Spirit, created the graphic novel A