Comic Books Are Real



In some works of fiction, the characters have their own favorite Television shows or favorite comic books. Usually, most of the cast reads these comics and they are generally favored. One day, the characters are minding their own business and then out of the blue, it's revealed to them that their favorite comic book hero is real! This usually results in a superpowered team-up from time to time.

On another note, sometimes the stars of the Show Within a Show are known/revealed to exist, and this also falls under Comic Books Are Real.

This usually overlaps with the Literary Agent Hypothesis and/or Recursive Canon. If it goes both ways - the "real world" characters have their own comic book in the "comic book" universe - then the two worlds are Mutually Fictional.

Also see I Wish It Were Real and Refugee From TV Land.

Anime and Manga

 * In Digimon Tamers the Digimon is thought of as nothing more than a media franchise including a TV series akin to, but separate from, the first two seasons of the anime. Then Guilmon and the others come to the real world and everything changes.
 * In Bleach, this happens, but just to Ichigo. He thinks that Don Kanonji's show is fake and that he can't really kill ghosts, but then it is revealed to him while fighting a Hollow that Don Kanonji actually does have powers...sort of.

Comic Books

 * The Silver Age Flash read adventures of the Golden Age Flash, then discovered he really existed in a parallel universe.
 * There's a homage to this in Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, where there's an issue where Captain Carrot discovered that his favorite comic book heroes really existed in a parallel universe.
 * And the episode "Legends" of the animated Justice League, in which Green Lantern discovers that the heroes from his favorite comic as a boy really ... etc.
 * Our universe exists in the DC multiverse; we're Earth Prime. We get comics based on other universes, like everybody else, which raises the question of if what the writters put in comics affect other verses, or are they just story tellers?. We have only one native superhero (a Superman, which makes sense since, every Universe seems to have one.), left to help with the Crisis on Infinite Earths before he was scheduled to go public. He's become a bit of a Jerkass Straw Fan in the decades since, being the last piece of the Silver Age Of Comics the heroes tend to forget him inbetween appearances. (He believes that the writers cause the events in the comics to happen, but that could just be to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.)
 * Incidentally, Earth Prime was one of the worlds destroyed in said Crisis on Infinite Earths. Linkara quite deservedly mocks this when running down the event.
 * In the Marvel Universe, some heroes license their likenesses for charity comics published by... Marvel.
 * Marvel went so far as to have Captain America's civilian identity become the artist for his own comic!
 * Stan Lee in general liked to fuel the perception in the readers' eyes that the comics they were reading depicted real events, often inserting himself and Jack Kirby into the story as cameos, and setting the stories in real places like New York. This may be one reason why modern-day Marvel is so obsessed with Recursive Canon.
 * An Astro City comic addressed the hazards of writing superhero comics when the heroes and villains depicted within are real: the publisher is beaten senseless at a convention by a villain who didn't like the way he was depicted. While in the hospital, he decides to switch the focus to cosmic entities, reasoning that they're so far above human affairs they "won't give a gnat's fart" about the comic. It didn't work out that way.
 * A Flash comic by Mark Millar made a similar point. Millar's Author Avatar wasn't actually threatened by villains (although maybe that's why he lives in Coatbridge, far away from Keystone City), but had to deal with problems like "So if the kid's a minor, we'd need to get his parents' permission to use him, and if they're still in the 30th century..."
 * In Alan Moore's Tom Strong series there is a parallel Earth far away across the galaxy, Terra Obscura. It has numerous 'science heroes' (the series term for superheroes). Tom Strong travels there on several occasions, the second time he has found out that the heroes of Terra Obscura are featured in numerous comic books on his own world, much to the amazement of his Terra Obscura parallel Tom Strange. On the long trip back after saving the world he puts his feet up and reads them all.
 * The Terra Obscura characters are all pre-existing out-of-copyright characters created by Nedor Comics. Including Tom Strange himself, who was originally Doc Strange.
 * In one Calamity James strip, James buys a huge stack of Mega-Man (nothing to do with the video game character comics) and promptly has them fall on top of him. Fortunately, the real Mega-Man suddenly swoops in and saves him... but then James offers him a jelly baby in thanks, forgetting that jelly babies are the one substance that can defeat his Mega-powers.
 * Mitchell Hundred, protagonist of Ex Machina, is a DC comics fan as a kid before becoming the world's only superhero. He's also seen as an adult visiting comic book stores selling issues of The Authority and Planetary, titles published by Wildstorm - the DC imprint that also publishes Ex Machina.
 * Science Dog, a comic book character in Invincible, suddenly appeared at the door of Mark "Invincible" Grayson's house. Mark was understandably surprised by the visit of the non-human being but it turned out to be an alien using Science Dog's form to make the encounter easier. Bad idea.
 * The Authority themselves, in an abortive Grant Morrison series, found themselves on our Earth, where they encountered the comics in which they had made their first appearances.

Film

 * In Condorman, the creator of the titular comic book hero is so obsessed with being realistic that he refuses to write anything that he can't do himself in real life. Sure enough, when the CIA ends up sponsoring his antics in order to rescue a major Soviet defector, they build all of the gadgets he's invented, leading to a hilarious Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys? speech from the Big Bad.
 * In the Hellboy film, Hellboy is only known to the outside world as an urban myth and the star of a series of comicbooks. When John Meyers meets the real HB, he complains that the comics never get his eyes right.
 * In Captain America: The First Avenger Steve Rogers is being dressed up and paraded as the mascot "Captain America" as a way to boost the morale of the troops. They not only make films about the fictional character, they also make a Captain America comic-book series.

Fanfic

 * There's a very, very good Power Rangers Fanfic that did this inspired by the crossover between Power Rangers in Space and Ninja Turtles the Next Mutation, where each team thought the other was just an urban legend.

Literature

 * In Lev Grossman's The Magicians the world described in a popular fantasy series titled Fillory and Further turns out to really exist and is visited by the novel's protagonists.
 * In its sequel The Magician King, the world of The Teletubbies turns out to really exist as well.
 * The Captain Underpants series starts off with two boys, George and Harold, being punished by Principal Krupp, for drawing comic books starring their hero, Captain Underpants. In retaliation, they hypnotize Mr. Krupp into thinking he's actually Captain Underpants. Hilarity Ensues when the boys can't un-hypnotize him...

Live Action TV

 * In Heroes, in the clairvoyant's comic book some of the Heroes (like Hiro and Ando) are depicted as characters in it. Most people outside the main cast would assume that it is a work of fiction.
 * This is the premise of Big Bad Beetleborgs, though the main characters become the comic book heroes, instead of them showing up as separate characters.
 * In Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Tori dismissed the Power Rangers as comic book characters and/or urban legends before she and her friends became Rangers themselves. This infamously sparked some fan debate, as it suggested Ninja Storm was an Alternate Continuity, and when the next season confirmed it wasn't, then how could she justify ten years of giant monster attacks as fiction?
 * Inverted in the Supernatural episode "The Monster at the End of This Book". Sam and Dean discover that their lives have been turned into a series of horror novels. Played straight with the writer, who discovers (when Sam and Dean show up at his house) that the characters he thought he'd created are actually real.

Video Games

 * In Psychonauts, Raz grew up reading True Psychic Tales for years before he went to Camp Whispering Rock and trained under the real-life Sasha, Milla and Crueller. In this case, though, it's implied that everyone knows psychics are real, which presumably means the comics are just well-known Psychonauts' adventures marketed to kids.

Web Original

 * In Legion of Nothing, superheroes are real, but comic books like Spider-Man and X-Men are as common as they are in our universe. No doubt some real superheroes run their own comics, too...
 * Played with in The Descendants where the fact that comic books are, by the time of the series, a 100+ year old art form. This leads to an inversion where the media refuses to call them superheroes.
 * One company however, takes full advantage of their Secret Identity issues to publish comics using real heroes in fictional stories without getting likeness rights.
 * Other folks, especially street vendors, make a killing off unofficial merchandise the same way. Whitecoat buys spares of his Nice Hat from them. He also invokes the above inversion this trope in the page quote for te series.
 * Alloy recently got to save the writer and artist of the comic based on the titular characters.

Western Animation

 * The Fairly Odd Parents: The Crimson Chin is real (as real as magic is, anyway - he's been brought to life by fairies so many times it's not even mentioned anymore).
 * It should also be added that Timmy himself is also a superhero, as Cleft the Boy Chin Wonder (see image above) as a result of the Chin. He's got a variety of other alter egos as well, but that would be another entire page.
 * Static Shock: Virgil grows up reading comic books and essay about Superman and the Green Lantern, and eventually meets and teams up with them from time to time. Probably more of a subtle Retcon. Static Shock was originally disconnected from the regular DC universe and the DC characters were fictional in theirs. Then Static and his universe got added to the DC universe, so now Static couldn't have possibly read those comics or everyone should know Superman's Secret Identity as well.
 * An episode of The Real Ghostbusters had a superhero and villain from one of Ray's comics become "real" and clash with the Ghostbusters. Unusually, no explanation was ever given for why the comics characters were able to enter Ray's reality. (This shouldn't be confused with a later episode in which a shapeshifting ghost briefly imitated the same superhero.)
 * A later episode had Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarity show up, and it was explained that the collective belief of their fans was sufficient to make them "come to life".
 * Incidentally, the superhero "Captain Steel" was a Superman Expy while the villain was the pre-Crisis Lex Luthor; their creator was an obvious pastiche of Marv Wolfman of DC Comics, and the cartoon was made during the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic event.
 * In Dexter's Laboratory, possibly Major Glory. The series is part of the show's Three Shorts format, but in universe seems to be portrayed as half real and half fictional, in that Major Glory also apparently exists in Dexter's universe, flies and has super powers.
 * Debatably in SpongeBob SquarePants where Mermaidman and Barnacleboy are real superheroes or actors in a TV show? Or are they superheroes who happen to have a TV show about themselves? They appear to have real super powers and an invisible boatmobile and whatnot, but SpongeBob once defeats one of their enemies using something he learned from their show. /confusion
 * On Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Michaelangelo reads a comic book series about the superhero Bugman, and then discovers that there really is a Bugman.
 * Not restricted to just the 1987 show, this happens in the 2003 show as well, when Mikey tries to get an issue to find out what happened to one of the heroes in the comic, but finds his favorite characters real, but the character he was hoping to have survived, had died.
 * Though in the 2003 show, the superheroes' existence seems to be common knowledge.
 * Rocko's Modern Life has comic book hero Really Really Big Man, who will occasionally drop in and save the day. And perhaps offer you a vision from his Nipples of the Future. Seriously.
 * Robotboy has the Human Fist. The trope is double subverted in the episode The Human Fist on Ice, by first introducing a Camp Gay ferry boat captain, playing the role of the Human fist in a spectacle, then having the real Human Fist show up to beat the crap out of the villain.
 * An episode of Dragon Tales has Max's hero Mondo Mouse turn out to be real, in Dragonland at least. And apparently he can enter and exit the comic books at whim.