Chatter among NPCs is not new to games by any means, and Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2 is full of phone calls, awkward first dates, chatty mascots, and more. It’s background noise that makes a ...

But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials notes—enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter ...