STAND STRAIGHT. PLANT your feet wide. Puff out your chest. Make two fists and hold them at your sides. Do you feel like a superhero? Even if you can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, you know what superheroes look like. Their V-shaped torsos, broad shoulders, tight waists, and caked glutes are as universally known as some of their origin stories.

Adjacent to the comic book medium that created superheroes are superhero cartoons. Only three years after the debut of Superman in 1938’s Action Comics #1, the animated Superman from Fleischer Studios hit theaters in 1941. From Saturday morning TV to streaming, the decades since Fleischer’s Superman took flight have seen generations of superhero cartoons tell tales that astonish the imagination.

Central to everything from SuperFriends to the new Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which just wrapped up its first season on Disney+, has been the coveted superhero bod, an amorphous concept that represents the zenith of human potential. Although cartoon superhero bodies have an arc not dissimilar from comic books, nuances inherent to animation, the ever-changing consensus for peak physical health, and the individual visions of leading artists ultimately decide the shape of superhero bodies in our favorite cartoons.

Motion, for instance, makes a major difference between comics and cartoons. “Comic art can be detailed because it’s an illustration. It doesn’t have to move,” Derek Charm, character designer for Batman: Caped Crusader, says. “The thing about animation is you have to simplify it as much as possible. Every line has to be drawn over and over and over again.”

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

“We call it pencil mileage,” Simon Racioppa, showrunner of Invincible, says. “It has to be something people can draw reasonably well and will look good, even if they’re drawing it 20,000 times. They don’t have time to spend on a panel like in the comic books.”

While simplicity is key, it’s still crucial for superheroes, quite literally, to embody our ideals. One glance is all it takes to believe a man (or woman) can fly–and we yearn to believe.

“You’re talking about your main characters,” Rick Morales, supervising producer on DC’s Creature Commandos, says. “You’re talking about the most front-facing thing people latch onto. [Bodies] portray so much of the power and the stature that characters within the project hold.” To Morales, if Batman simply doesn’t look like he has any strength, the show falls apart. “People understand body language, even if they don’t know anatomy. You understand on a base level.”

While comic books have long been the birthplace for superheroes, animation is where they really spring to life. The human physiques of superhero cartoons literally embody our expectations for what “heroism” looks like, as the artists shaping them emulate real-world athletes or exercise their own artistic vision. For this piece, Men’s Health spoke with a half-dozen animation professionals from some of television’s most popular shows in the genre on the ever-evolving shape of superheroes in motion.

SOME AMAZING HEROES with amazing bodies even predate Superman. In Robert E. Howard’s 1934 short story “A Witch Shall Be Born,” Howard describes the pulp-era character Conan the Barbarian as “almost a giant in stature” with “knots and bunches of muscle” on “massive arms.” But the success of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s brainchild, now a central mascot of DC Comics, inspired an overnight race for publishers to cash in. The first true superhero boom introduced more icons into the canon, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Captain Marvel, and Captain America.

In 1941, Fleischer Studios created the first superhero cartoon in Superman. Just as Shuster and Siegel found design inspiration in early wrestlers, circus strongmen, and gymnasts–thus explains the blue spandex and red underwear–so too did Fleischer’s animators. Rotoscoping, an industry technique in which animators create movement by drawing over live-action footage of actors, was minimally used, but used nonetheless, on Superman.

Superman (1941)

In 2012, documents surfaced that confirmed Karol Krauser, a Polish professional wrestler, was the original model for Superman at Fleischer. His wide torso, toned chest and shoulders, and defined biceps provided a lasting, literal impression onto Superman, and consequently onto all superhero bodies. “For a long time, the Fleischer Superman was the only credible version of a superhero in motion,” Jake Wyatt, co-showrunner of the series My Adventures with Superman, says. “Their Superman’s physique was grounded because, like Snow White, they were drawing over to get motion and proportions correct.”

Shannon Tindle, an animation veteran and director of Netflix’s Ultraman: Rising, says all super physiques come from even further back in history; superhero artists are forever indebted to the ancient Greeks. “American superheroes are our mythology. But a lot of that mythology was taken from Greek and Roman statues, where you have these idealized forms,” she tells Men’s Health. “You could almost lay a superhero body over Greek statues, and it would probably match down to a millimeter.”

Wyatt echoes Tindle. “The early Superman is, deliberately, Nietzschean. The Ubermench: super man,” Wyatt says. “You look at Greek sculptures and you’ve got a lot of those same idealized proportions. This is what power looks like. It’s a guy with all the power you’ve ever wanted and some sort of ideal moral code. It’s the same reason knights wear shining armor instead of rusted armor: they embody our virtues and we want to see our virtues as powerful.”

Karol Krauser’s marble-like physique is still the stuff of envy, a bod many grinding it out in the gym hope to achieve even now in 2025. But the overall standards for health and fitness have leapt forward since a Soviet wrestling heel modeled for Superman. Diet and nutrition, standards of living, the progression of science, and other forces factor into our shared understanding of peak human health in any given era. If such generations are lucky to have superhero cartoons, the bodies in them are a pretty revealing barometer for where the culture and kinesiology stand.

“Superhero stories are about the physical ideal,” Robert Kirkman, creator of the Invincible comic book series and executive producer of the Prime Video TV adaptation, says. “We’re trying to tell stories featuring characters who are larger than life. The way to incorporate that visually is to have bodies that are beyond peak condition. When you’re trying to tell stories about feats of amazement, you tend to push the envelope quite a bit into, I’ll say, ridiculous areas.”

Invincible

Kirkman, along with other animation pros interviewed for this story, says that superhero bodies evolve “neck and neck” with real-world fitness as animation artists continue to take their design cues from athletes and bodybuilders. “Superman in the ’40s looked very much like a boxer from the ’40s,” Kirkman points out. “Not a lot of tone definition, but a strong barrel chest shape.”

Now, the Superman in My Adventures of Superman hasn’t sacrificed mass, but he’s neither a brawny boxer or a wrestler. According to Wyatt, the Superman in My Adventures is a hybrid of firefighters and swimmers. “We basically tried to make him look strong, but huggable,” he says. “He’s an emergency responder. So we wanted him to have that firefighter calendar vibe. Superman is a shield. You want to be held by this man rather than hurt by this man.”

Swimmers were a reference, too, for their “balanced musculature” that “feels safe.” “Nobody sees a swimmer and is like, ‘Oh man, look out!’ But Michael Phelps looks strong. He’s got width. You need to frame that S. We looked at swimmers, and also at weightlifters.”

After Fleischer’s Superman, post-war economic prosperity brought TV sets into homes in record numbers. Television soon became the medium where superhero cartoons thrived. By the ’60s audiences tuned into cartoons like Space Ghost and Birdman and the Galaxy Trio. The 1970s and 1980s saw a greater number in similar media like SuperFriends, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. Gatchaman, a popular superhero anime imported from Japan, was dubbed in English and retitled in America as Battle of the Planets.

Wyatt says the physiques seen in this era of cartoons were indeed muscular, “bulky” even, but not to the freakish degree they would be in a few short years. “They’re like a Hemingway idea of strength,” he says. “The ’80s introduces steroids. You can really see the difference from Christopher Reeve to the early ’80s with Conan the Barbarian. You’re like, Whoa! Body standards changed so fast.”

Superhero bodies across comics and animation swelled during the years of Reagan’s America, influenced by the rock-hard biceps and oversized chests of stars like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme. Superheroes beefed up to keep pace with The Terminator and Rambo.

“As we move into the ’80s, we’re seeing Superman and Batman start to have more muscle definition than ever before,” Kirkman says. “New characters start getting introduced who are much larger and much more physically built.”

Batman: The Animated Series

That led directly into the ’90s. That decade in superhero comics is remembered for its extreme physiques that boldly defied realism. “Everything was exaggerated,” says Rick Morales, who designed characters like Rick Flag and Frankenstein on Creature Commandos, who jokes that artists layered on “muscles on muscles that didn’t even exist.”

Cartoons followed suit, with shows like X-Men: The Animated Series, Spider-Man, and Spawn: The Animated Series featuring characters who looked inflated with protein. The Tick, an acclaimed satire of the genre, followed a dim-witted superhero whose oversized body was another one of its punchlines.

While most cartoons in the ’90s simply kept up the momentum that had begun with ’80s, one seminal show dared to stand out. Batman: The Animated Series, by animator Bruce Timm, drew reverence for many reasons, not the least of which being its classic art deco-inspired aesthetics. Boldly eschewing the musculatures of its contemporaries, Timm’s Batman had characters with round, smooth features, and a shared anatomy of nacho-shaped torsos and straw legs. Such artistry complimented Timm’s grasp on character and the emotional stories his shows–including spin-offs like Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League Unlimited–often told.

Prime Video’s Batman: Caped Crusader is Timm’s most recent production. Evocative of Batman: The Animated Series, Caped Crusader again throws back to a noir Batman with a 1930s-40s flavor. Derek Charm, who worked closely with Timm on the show as one of its main designers, says there was plenty of attention paid to how Batman/Bruce Wayne could have his physique without 21st century training.

“Our show takes place in the ’40s, so [Batman has] more of a 1940s physique,” he says. “You don’t see abs or defined muscles really at all. It’s like a Charles Atlas body. Big shoulders, barrel chest, thick waist, thinner legs. We wanted to make sure it was as accurate as possible to what would have been possible in the ’40s.”

Batman: Caped Crusader

The prestige of Timm’s work throughout the ’90s provided a stylistic counterbalance to the ripped meat and potatoes of other superhero cartoons. By the time the new millennium rolled around, artists and audiences alike craved something new. Photorealism took root in superhero comics. Meanwhile, animation saw more visible influences taken from anime.

In 2003, when Kirkman launched his Invincible comic series with artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley he strove to swerve from the realism of comics. “Cory and Ryan and myself were trying to work against that trend. The ’90s was just drawing the most insane bulging muscles, and the 2000s were kind of the overcorrection of that era. With Invincible, we were trying to find a middle ground of celebrating the insanity of comics but toning it down a little bit.”

Fitness trends come and go, bodies beef up or thin out. And superhero cartoons will go with the flow of fitness—or dare to chart a new path. All animation professionals interviewed for this story say that while real-world fitness will always be a popular go-to reference, it’s ultimately the story they want to tell that decides how superheroes look in animation.

“Story always defines where you’re going to go with character design,” Tindle says, addings that “who the character is and what they’re about” is as important to consider as their workout routines. In Tindle’s Ultraman: Rising, protagonist Ken Sato (voiced by Christopher Sean) is a world-famous baseball player on a level greater than Shohei Ohtani. That’s in addition to his secret ego as Ultraman, Earth’s shapeshifting defender against kaiju. “This is a guy who’s not just an athlete;he’s one of the greatest athletes in the world of our film. He’s as famous as Michael Jordan. And so he keeps himself in great shape.”

My Adventures With Superman

Story informs not just the physique of the main heroes but their friends and villains, too. The personnel of both My Adventures with Superman and Batman: Caped Crusader tell Men’s Health their shows have similar ideas about height. On either show, no supporting characters are made to be taller than their respective versions of Batman and Superman unless they are deemed an active threat.

“There are only so many characters we allow to be taller than Superman,” Wyatt says.“When we want to let the audience worry, we have someone show up who’s taller than him.”

IT IS JUST scratching the surface to wonder how superhero bodies evolve in animation. In truth, there isn’t one thing that alone shapes cartoon superheroes. It’s everything happening everywhere, seemingly all the time.

“You can’t help but reflect the world you’re in to some degree,” Morales says. “You live in it. These are your references. Even if you don’t intentionally drive them in the artwork, you can’t help but be influenced by what’s around you if you’re living life.”

“Culture, comic books, animation- ” Kirkman says. “It’s all part of an ecosystem drawing on everything.”