When it comes to origin stories of comic book superheroes, the best known are probably Spider Man and Superman.
One guy gets bitten by a radioactive spider thus giving him the abilities of a spider like climbing walls and making webs.
The other guy is born special, as an alien that comes to Earth and just happens to be stronger than humans.
Meh to both of them. They're just bestowed amazing powers. Not to say they don't have amazing stories throughout those comic books and have to face struggles in spite of their powers, but as an origin, they're just not that interesting.
The interesting origin stories are the ones where the hero is forged by hardship and pain from the outset, it gives their purpose for being gravitas.
So here, are just three choices of the coolest comic book superhero origin stories...
Iron Man
The character that got me into comic books as a seven year old in 1992 with issue 281, where as a kid that was into samurai and ninjas, I thought the comic would be about them, given its cover is adorned by samurai looking dudes. Turns out they were the bad guys, the Masters of Silence.
It also contains the first appearance of the War Machine armour, which Tony Stark creates to take on the Masters of Silence before handing it over to James Rhodes to continue the Iron Man mantle after Stark's apparent death.
So that's Mr Zonks' comic book nerd origin story.
As for Iron Man himself though, we look back to Tales of Suspense number 39, from 1963, where we meet Tony Stark, a playboy millionaire industrialist, who gets captured by the Viet Cong (the comic was created during the Vietnam War, where America was squarely anti-communist), after getting hit by a piece of shrapnel by a booby trap whilst in Vietnam testing out new technology.
He is forced into making them a weapon, but instead he secretly develops himself a suit of high tech armour, which keeps him alive (the shrapnel that hit him is dangerously close to his heart), and which he uses to blast out of his prison and take down his captors.
This origin story gets adapted in the first Iron Man movie which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe (yes, hardcore nerds, The Incredible Hulk was the actual first entry in the MCU, but no one knows that, or cares 😀), with Tony Stark getting shrapnel lodged in his chest whilst in Afghanistan testing a new missile. So the story stays true to the comics, just with an update to who the 'bad guys' are at the time in world history.
Batman
Like Iron Man, Batman is really just a dude in a suit. Like Iron Man, he's a dude with exceptional intelligence, and access to millions of dollars. So kinda not the idea of hardship and pain.
However, Batman is spawned by the fact that as a boy, his parents get shot dead in front of him for the sake of the theft of a pearl necklace.
Even a millionaire is not immune to that kind of childhood trauma, and it causes Bruce Wayne to turn into a vigilante that whilst avenging his parent's death, ends up avenging the trouble that the bad guys of Gotham City want to inflict on its populace.
Batman's origin, like Iron Man's, and indeed many of the early Golden and Silver Age comics is not told in a book bearing their name, but in compilation comics. Batman's first appearance is in Detective Comics number 27 from 1939, and his origin story is in Detective Comics number 33, from the same year.
Spawn
Born of darkness, sworn to justice. That's the tagline for Spawn, the superhero that should be as popular as the Marvel and DC panthenon, but is still somehow relegated to being slightly obscure. Perhaps he's just difficult to love with that burnt face of his. In fact, Spawn and Deadpool should do a team-up.
The Spawn comic was born in what I consider the second Golden Age of comics, mostly because it's when I got into comics :), but also because the 1990s were friggin' cool when it came to comics. Created in 1992 by Todd McFarlane who developed his craft at Marvel whilst working on Spider Man, turning the beloved web slinger into a character that had more depth and more physicality in tune with his spider origins, Spawn is a bit of an anti-hero and traces Al Simmons, an officer in the US Marine Corps, who gets burned to death by his supposed friend who gets hired to kill Simmons due to his moral stance which irks the director of the 'US Security Group'.
Simmons gets sent to hell and makes a deal with the devil, agreeing to be the devil's hellspawn in exchange for the chance to see his wife one last time.
Upon returning to the living world, he eventually realises the devil is kinda screwing him, and decides to use his newly bestowed powers to take down organised crime in New York City.