7 Uncomfortable Superhero Origins That Sorely Need Updating

7. Luke Cage

The first black superhero to get his own major live-action series, Luke Cage will be hitting Netflix some time in 2015 or 2016, and that's quite a milestone for Marvel. A relatively low-profile, street-level character in the Marvel U until recently, Cage started out running Heroes For Hire with Iron Fist before breaking out on his own and later fathering a child with Jessica Jones and leading the Avengers for a spell. Not bad for a guy whose only real power is having unbreakable skin, right? But how did he get that skin? By being subjected to prison experiments that were trying to rip off Captain America's super soldier serum, that's how. Cage was created in 1972, a time when blaxploitation movies were all the rage and Marvel wanted to jump on the bandwagon. So they created a black former criminal hero with thick skin and a streetwise attitude, which is just a little too on the nose. Cage is actually pretty lucky: he's an interesting enough character (pragmatic but also heroic, a family man but also a badass) that his somewhat cynical origin story doesn't harm him too much.