12 Famous Superheroes With Surprising Real-World Inspirations

Kitty Pryde (AKA Shadowcat, Red Queen, and many others) has a name doppelganger who hails from Calgary and is an alum of the Alberta College of Art and Design, just like her creator, John Byrne. This is no coincidence:

I met her, as noted, in 1973, when she was the girlfriend of a former classmate. On hearing her name for the first time, I noted it was a great superhero name, and after her boyfriend, Tom, explained to her why I would say such a thing, she said, "Feel free to use it!" I suspect at that time neither of us thought I ever would. I was not working in comics yet. Certainly there was no "promise" on my part.

About seven years later, Chris [Claremont] and I were working up a new team of junior members for the X-Men, and I came up with the idea of a girl who walks through walls... I jotted down some random ideas, wondering if any might work with the new character, or suggest a different one. One was Kittyhawk, from which my brain jumped to Kitty Pryde, and that became her real name.

I'd had no contact with the real Kitty for at least five years at that point, but through a mutual friend, I arranged to send her the original art for one of the pages on which her namesake appeared.

So what does the real Kitty Pryde, also an accomplished artist, think about her namesake?

She may bear my name, but she wasn't modeled after me. I only wish I had knockers like that.

Although the attention from Marvel fans annoys her, she keeps the original art Byrne signed and sent her in a vault, its value increasing by the day.

Douglas Fairbanks was a superhero before superheroes. This silent film actor lent his talents to Zorro, Robin Hood, Don Juan, and many other fictional heroes, mesmerizing moviegoers across America and Canada. One of those viewers was Toronto-born Joe Shuster, who used Fairbanks as a model when creating Superman with Jerry Siegel.

Superman's costume comes from Fairbanks; his stance comes from Fairbanks; his flying style comes from Fairbanks; even his playfulness (more overt in early comics than recent ones) comes from Fairbanks.

For his alter ego, Clark Kent, Shuster and Siegel drew upon silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, pictured here.

Canadian-bred John Byrne stained many superheroes with his maple syrup-soaked fingers, the most famous of which is Wolverine. While he didn't create the cranky, clawed crusader, he helped turn him into the single greatest Canuck in comic book history. 

Wolverine's popularity has everything to do with his style, which comes from Canada's pastime, hockey. Byrne was watching the 1977 puck picture Slap Shot when actor Paul D'Amato skated on screen. Playing an agitator named Tim "Dr. Hook" McCracken, D'Amato sported winged hair, thick sideburns, and crazed eyes with dark shadows, invoking a ferocious animal. Dr. Hook's aggression and profanity sealed the inspiration. "[That was] my Wolverine," Byrne said. Another Canadian connection is that Wolverine's real name, Logan, was taken from Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada.

Coincidentally, D'Amato, now in his 70s, cuts through snow-capped mountains as a skier and ski boot fitter.

The "Merc with a Mouth" comes from the "Jerk with a Mouth," AKA sardonic stand-up comedian, Denis Leary. In creating Deadpool, Fabian Nicieza differentiated his new character's speech from others in the comic pages by making the bubbles yellow rather than white and putting the words in a rough-edged font.

His goal was to have Deadpool "sound like 1992 Denis Leary in an echo chamber." Considering that, in the early '90s, Leary was famous for a song called "*sshole," Nicieza nailed it.

That's right: Green Lantern is a superpowered version of Aladdin. He not only possesses a magic light-emitting device but his alter ego's name was derived from Aladdin. Initially, creator Martin Nodell and collaborator Bill Finger (best known for co-creating Batman) gave him the name Alan Ladd, which is a near-anagram of the famous Middle Eastern character. However, they changed it to Alan Scott after deciding the other name was too obvious.

Aladdin doesn't appear in the original One Thousand and One Nights (AKA Arabian Nights). Rather, he was added to the first European edition by French archivist Antoine Galland in a tale told to him by Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab.

The Ornithopter is among dozens of contraptions that Leonardo da Vinci devised but didn't build. This flying machine exists as sketches, which fell into the lap of Bob Kane in early 1939. Da Vinci's ornithopter resembles a bat more than it does a bird, where "ornith" derives from, so Kane drew its wings onto one of the earliest conceptions of the Dark Knight, which he called "The Bat-Man." Bill Finger smoothed out the edges of the design, and on March 30, 1939, Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27.

Two other historical inspirations for Batman were 14th-century Scottish king Robert the Bruce and American Revolution hero Anthony Wayne, from whom "Bruce Wayne" was derived.