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About
Superheroes Bowing refers to an artwork in which DC and Marvel superheroes are bowing to a group of medics walking through a hospital hall. In late April 2020, the artwork gained popularity as source material for edits, with the doctors replaced with various characters.
Origin
On April 20th, 2020, amid the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, the official Telegram channel for the Department of Transport of Moscow posted two versions of an artwork by an unknown author in which DC and Marvel superheroes bow to a group of masked medics walking through a hospital hall (shown below, left and right). On the same day, Russian news website DTF reposted one of the artworks.
On April 22nd, DTF user alex twit posted the earliest known edit of the image.
Spread
On April 22nd, 2020, Twitter user @ononhareket reposted the image, with the post gaining over 1,200 retweets and 19,200 likes in four days. Within one hour, @ComicsBarselona reposted the image, gaining over 3,300 retweets and 8,600 likes. Later on the same day, a thread about the artwork was created on 4chan’s /pol/ board, garnering over 340 replies.
On the same day, Twitter user @BowlcutThanos posted the earliest known viral edit of @alegaxi’s repost of the image, editing in an NSFW image of Thanos into it (censored version shown below, left). The tweet received over 910 retweets and 7,400 likes in four days, marking the earliest viral meme based on the artwork.
On April 23rd, 2020, Twitter user @HenryKrinkle reposted the original image, with the post gaining over 1,300 retweets and 17,600 replies in three days. In the thread, Twitter user @PlutonisIsDead replied with a Big Chungus edit of the image that received over 780 retweets and 5,900 likes (shown below, right).
On April 24th, 2020, an anonymous 4chan user posted a template for the artwork to /pol/ board, with users in /tv/, /pol/ and /co/ posting multiples edits of the image in the following hours (shown below).
In the following days, the format gained significant popularity online, with notable edits being posted on 4chan, Twitter, Facebook and other websites.
Various Examples
Template
Search Interest
Know Your Meme Store
External References
Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/superheroes-bowing