But how did we get from Gilgamesh, Samson, Hercules, and Achilles to Superman, Captain America, Iron Man, and the Green Lantern?
Before Avengers: Endgame, before the DCEU, before comic book superheroes became billion-dollar box office stars, they were inspired by stories four millennia old.
The answer can be found in a hero who emerged in sub-Roman Britain, a figure who became the template upon which superheroes are built, and the collective unconscious behind the entire genre: King Arthur.
Ryan Gorcey's From King Arthur to Captain America: The Shared Origin of Comic Book Superheroes is the culmination of 20 years of research. With a foreword written by world-renowned King Arthur expert John Matthews, this book will take you on a 4,000-year journey through the history of heroic storytelling as you discover how the legendary warrior shaped the myths of yesterday and today.
It started with a notebook
As a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley in the fall of 2005, I began studying a medieval manuscript that prompted me to re-examine the way I looked at King Arthur, whose story was the manuscript's main text. As I sat on Sproul Plaza, I began drawing a Venn diagram in my blue spiral notebook, with King Arthur, Alexander the Great, and King David — the three kings central to the manuscript — overlapping not just with each other, but with the comic book superheroes of my youth. There was something more there, something deeper than just surface similarities. Two and a half years later, I finished a 189-page senior honors thesis, arguing that King Arthur, in both form and function, was the first character identifiable as what we know today as a superhero. Twenty years and two careers later, longtime Batman editor Jordan B. Gorfinkel encouraged me to turn it into this book, which has been read, edited, and endorsed by two of the titans of comic book studies and Arthurian legend — Peter Coogan and John Matthews. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
