The Kids Raised on Anime Are Rewriting Hollywood’s Favorite Superheroes

The kids who grew up on Toonami aren't kids anymore. They're busy navigating the next era of superheroes these days.

To be honest, they're taking over the entire field. From writing scripts to inking comics and directing movies, the generation is busy. Decades after watching Dragon Ball Z with friends after school, many of these fans are now the creators shaping the future of Batman and Spider-Man.

According to Kyle Higgins, the award-winning creator behind titles like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and Radiant Black, Western superheroes are now in the thick of an anime renaissance. The kids raised on anime are now creators themselves, and they're using series like Mobile Suit Gundam to inform the next generation of comics.

“There's this current generation of up-and-coming writers and artists who grew up on Sailor Moon and Pokémon and Dragon Ball,” Higgins told Crunchyroll's The Anime Effect when asked about anime's impact on Western superheroes.

“Universes like the Massive-Verse and the Absolute books at DC, with self-contained stories in chronological, numbered volumes. We have adaptations like My Adventures with Superman and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I think it's already happened. I fully expect it to continue.”

You don't have to look hard to see the connections tying together superheroes and anime. Following its boom in the '90s, anime has slowly grown into the Hollywood behemoth we see today. Franchises like Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba are pushing into mainstream spaces, and anime's global growth means some of Hollywood's up-and-coming stars are fans themselves. Spider-Man: Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton is living proof, and he'll put these credentials to the test soon with Lionsgate's live-action production of Naruto.

Whether on screen or on the page, anime is changing how Hollywood's biggest superheroes work, and nobody is more aware of this shift than Higgins. Few comic creators intersect with Western superheroes and Japanese pop culture like this writer, after all.

After falling in love with Richard Donner's Superman, Higgins dedicated himself to all things heroic as his career brought him face-to-face with Nightwing and Batman. From Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers to Ultraman, Higgins has used his skill to expand some of Japan's most iconic franchises. His love of tokusatsu and sentai is easy to see, especially thanks to original titles like Radiant Black. And from his seat at the table, Higgins is seeing just how clearly anime is influencing the next era of superheroes.

“The number of insanely talented Italian artists who have all grown up binging anime and manga. I mean, there are so many,” Higgins said. “We work with so many Italians in the Massive-Verse because we love that kind of cel-shaded, anime-influenced look for modern superheroes.”

You only have to look at the success of ***Absolute Batman ***to see how spot-on Higgins is. Scott Snyder's record-setting series is upending the entire comics industry with its unique pacing. The way Higgins sees it, much of Absolute Batman's success stems from its similarities to manga. The series is compact, serialized, and concentrated to perfection. These are all traits manga has trained younger audiences to embrace, and DC Comics has taken note. Rather than trying to make readers ditch manga, superhero comics are now meeting their audience halfway. And the result is Absolute Batman nearing three million copies sold to date.

Manga is changing the way superhero stories are told, and in speaking to The Anime Effect, Higgins says tokusatsu is another well that Hollywood should mine for direction. When asked what Western media should learn from Japan's greatest heroes, the writer did not mince his words:

“Tokusatsu has this long, celebrated, prideful history of practical effects and a focus on building things for real to do in-camera, whether it be the suits or a lot of the larger-than-life work that you see in Ultraman with miniature scale,” Higgins said.

“You look at the success Spider-Man is having right now, and I do think there are, I hate to use the word ‘vibes,’ but there are vibes around that movie that are 100 percent in part due to this narrative of how handcrafted everything is in the movie and how much is done in-camera,” he said.

Of course, practical effects are just one part of the equation Hollywood must solve. Higgins says there is a more fundamental truth hiding within tokusatsu series that Western heroes fail to embrace.

“I think tokusatsu has a much stronger, or much more comfortable, relationship with theme and ambiguity,” Higgins said. “I find, with a lot of the material I watch, almost a spirituality to the storytelling. And some of the themes that they're exploring really resonate for me.”

“I think [tokusatsu] is really, really good at literalizing the metaphorical,” Higgins explained. “And so, by creating threats for characters that are literalizations of fears or of the character arc, there is a marriage between character, story, and theme that I don't think we always really nail in Hollywood superheroes.”

Kids who grew up watching Power Rangers and ***Dragon Ball Z ***know how powerful storytelling is. They spent countless hours avoiding homework to master Goku's Kamehameha and reenact Sailor Moon's iconic transformation sequence. Decades later, these fans are now grown up and creating their own work, dictating what the next era of Western superheroes looks like.

This reinvention comes at the perfect time, one in which brands like Marvel and DC are facing critiques of superhero fatigue. To rewrite the state of comics, creators are digging into the characters who raised them and bringing their anime lexicon with them.

For writers like Higgins, the blending of Western comics with anime and tokusatsu is just beginning. The most exciting creators at Marvel and DC don't see anime as something foreign or niche; it is something foundational instead.

Anime isn't waiting to change Western superheroes any longer. Higgins knows the truth. It already has.