The Boys and Invincible are clearly kind of copycats of Superman, especially with Homelander and Ryan. My question is: how have Amazon, Garth Ennis, or Robert Kirkman not faced a lawsuit by DC yet? I know Viltrum is not Krypton, but come on—it’s a straight-up Superman story. Viltrum = Krypton, and the Viltrumites even have Kryptonian powers, minus the cold breath, X-ray vision, and heat vision.
Homelander and Ryan straight up have all of Superman’s powers, and Homelander even looks like Superman. How have they not faced a severe lawsuit yet?
Like, if I wrote a story about a kid named Kendall Knight and he’s bitten by an alien spider which gives him spider powers, and he lets a mugger go who then goes on to kill his girlfriend—and this motivates him to become a superhero named ‘Arachnid Man’—couldn’t I face a huge lawsuit, especially when he has Peter Parker’s powers?
They are fairly diffent origins, viltrum is a conquering empire sending agents to other planets to conquer them, superman is the last son on a world that no longer exists and whos powers are stronger because of earths smaller yellow sun. Homelander was created by humans in a lab for marketing and profiting off of. On top of that it probabl also counts as parody.
There are a lot of superheros with similar powers or similar origins, but i dont know of any that are similar enough to win a lawsuit.
One that comes to mind is when DC sued over the similarity of captain marvel to superman But it was settled out of court and im not aware of any more recent ones.