The composition of a comic book character often has interesting real-life influences. Given the strong connection between insects and human beings, it is not surprising that they have inspired many fictional characters. We conduct an inventory of the characters that somehow have been inspired by insects, considering only the two major American comic publishers, DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Such characters have had their features compared with the morphology, biology and behavior of living insects from the real world. The overall of 232 characters were obtained, 119 of DC and 113 of Marvel. There is no significant statistical difference between the two publishing houses in relation to number of characters. Despite insects have bad reputation for being injurious, there was no statistical difference between the amount of villains and heroes, considering the total number of characters of both publishing houses. The significant majority of groups of insects which served as inspiration for the characters belong to orders framed in Holometabola group.