In the ramp up to launching the Kickstarter for the game, I talked about a couple of the primary influences on my design choices for the game. The name Action-Heroes is an homage to a line of characters originally published by Charlton Comics, and now owned by DC Comics. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Charlton was at the height of its publishing (such as it was, unfortunately) they had a line of heroic fiction that was a mix of offbeat revamped costumed heroes from the mind of Steve Ditko, espionage and military comics, and a couple of martial artists that haven't aged well. But, at that time the term "super-hero" was a trademark co-owned by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Dick Giordano, then editor at Charlton Comics, came up with the idea of calling their characters Action-Heroes (with the hyphen) instead. He felt that label fit their characters better since they weren't really mainstream super-heroes, like those published by the other comic companies.