In responding to the often vapid print adventures of his competitors, Mr. Lee was incredibly canny in the way he shaped comic-book heroes and subverted the idiom.
On the other hand, all the siblings did generally agree on what was funny, implying that their shared environments shaped their comic sensibilities.
Mr. McKay has helped shape the comic sensibility of a generation: on television as the head writer of "Saturday Night Live," in comedy clubs as a founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade and on the Web as one of the minds behind Funnyordie.com, one of the few successful collaborations between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Marcello Mastroianni's performance in "Divorce, Italian Style" (1961) is a feat of overstated understatement, a primer on how to shape a comic character by arching your eyebrows just so, or allowing your eyelids to droop at precisely the right angle.
He was a fan of Mad magazine from an early age, which helped shape his comic sensibility.
On the day I visited Baltimore's Jewish Museum, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein was there promoting his 2006 book, "Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero" (Leviathan Press).
Rabbi Simcha Weinstein's book Up, Up and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero, says that Superman is both a pillar of society and one whose cape conceals a "nebbish", saying "He's a bumbling, nebbish Jewish stereotype.
The longer this saga goes on, the more it is shaping up like a comic and post-modern version of a Tolkien epic.
Yiddish-inflected New York culture and an immersion in comics shaped his future.
I agree that the UK and US were not necessarily shaped by their comics heroes.
