What Standard Fantasy Setting and Standard Sci-Fi Setting are for Fantasy and Science Fiction, this is for Super Hero genre: a setting of the sort in which most (though not all) superhero comic books and other narratives take place. Though the genre dates to the 1940s, the clear and definite rules for generic superhero settings weren't really solidified until The '60s, when Marvel Comics and DC Comics started making full use of their Universes. See also Superhero Prevalence Stages.

Common ingredients:

• Big Applesauce: An incredible amount of super hero stories are set in either New York City or a fictional metropolis that strongly resembles it. If not, there will in all likelihood still be a City of Adventure out there.
  • Superhero Capital of the World: When a specific location in a superhero narrative is used long enough, its character roster of heroes and villains becomes so saturated that the location In-Universe and out becomes synonymous with hero-villain activity.
• Comic-Book Time: Expect characters to last for decades without aging at all. ^note  Though comics that are not Long-Runners usually either avert this one, or justify it.
• Status Quo Is God: Prevalent, with heroes preserving status quo and all changes being mostly cosmetic or temporary. Even in books that avert it, there's often a period of relative stability/routine adventuring, either in the Backstory, or the first act.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Most times, a generic Super Hero world has everything from gods to angels and demons to Eldritch Abominations, from wizards and vampires to mad scientists and aliens to Zeppelins from Another World. Every mythical creature may appear at some point.
  • Crossover Cosmology: Usually one mythological pantheon running around is not enough.
• Secret Identity
  • Bruce Wayne Held Hostage
  • Loves My Alter Ego
• Shared Universe: Most times, the setting is built around many comics sharing the same world or acting like there are others.
• The Cape: There is usually one of those, who inspires others and is seen as an example to follow. Nine cases out of 10, it's a Superman Substitute, though sometimes may be replaced by Captain Patriotic.
• The Cowl: Street-level vigilante, most times based on Batman, not the nicest of superheroes, usually serving as Foil for The Cape.
• Distaff Counterpart: There are usually several female heroes inspired by and/or related to male heroes who strive to become renowned heroes on their own, usually following the model codified by Supergirl and often overlapping with the Sidekick.
• Super Team: Expect one main and biggest, working on global scale, and several smaller and local ones to appear here and there.
• The Golden Age of Comic Books: If there is a definite time period when superheroes appeared for the first time, it will usually be in the 1940s, though the very first superhero may have shown up in 1938, the year the first Superman comic was published. Occasionally, earlier heroes will be recognized, but even then, expect this era to be a turning point, one way or another.
• The Silver Age of Comic Books: Most of the time, The '60s will be noted as the time of the biggest superhero boom in history.
• The Bronze Age of Comic Books: The time when superheroes began getting flaws and tackling more serious problems in the world. The '70s are the go-to decade for this age.
• The Dark Age of Comic Books: On a similar note, if a decade is singled out as darker and filled with Anti-Heroes, it will probably be the The '90s, or less commonly The '80s.
• Super Power Lottery: People are probably getting all kinds of superpowers everywhere.
  • Required Secondary Powers: In later years, it has become more common to make use of this trope.
  • Flying Brick: At least one will certainly be there, most often the Cape.
• Let's You and Him Fight: It's hard to tell a situation where two superheroes meet and don't start beating each other.
• Crossover
  • Bat Family Crossover
  • Crisis Crossover
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers, Lightning Can Do Anything, Touched by Vorlons, The Chosen Many: Classic origin stories.
  • Phlebotinum du Jour may occur in case of long-running universes.
  • Meta Origin, Mass Super-Empowering Event: Getting more and more popular.
• Super Heroes Wear Capes
• Super Heroes Wear Tights
  • Not Wearing Tights: If they don't.
• The Unmasqued World: The variation where fantastic elements have always existed- in a superhero setting, magic and aliens are not a secret- they make the evening news.

The following may be removed if the setting falls in certain values of Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, or due to other Implementation Details:

• Beware the Superman: Superpowers aren't always a good thing, and can sometimes be a source of fear if the one bearing them does not have your best interests in mind.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Villains who make no bones about their evil-ness and actually revel in it. Often seen in many idealistic works.
• Clark Kenting: Concealment of a Secret Identity by means of a Paper-Thin Disguise that everyone just goes with.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: A villain uses their powers and gadgets to commit robberies when they could easily use their gifts to get money the legal way.
• Death Is Cheap: Superheroes and other characters die all the time in comic books, only to be brought back.
• Deconstruction, Reconstruction, Decon-Recon Switch
• Hero Insurance: Who's going to pay for all the damage done by superhero battles? Often done in more cynical works.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: A character cannot use their amazing inventions to better the world around them, because Status Quo Is God.
• Smug Super: Some supers have massive egos to match their powers, and aren't shy about rubbing this in the faces of others.
• Super Hero School: A school that teaches young people with superpowers how to be superheroes.
• Super Registration Act: A law requiring those with superpowers to be registered with the government in a national database or face penalties. If it's not a villainous plot to get rid of superheroes, it is often the subject of more cynical stories.
  • Cape Busters: Normal humans who combat super-beings with technology, smarts and ruthless tactics. Can be heroes or villains depending on the work.

Examples:

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics:
  • Marvel Universe, one of the two Trope Makers, as it set the usage of Big Applesauce and Superhero Capital of the World.
  • Ultimate Marvel was intended to be a more modern one of these with the various super-powered forces only recently appearing, as opposed to the lore heavy mainstream comics.
• DC Comics:
  • DC Universe, being the other of two Trope Makers. Many a setting uses A Cast of Expies of the Justice League and other heroes as part of the worldbuilding.
• Image Comics Universe which is a mix of several smaller, that may or may not be in one continuity, depending on whatever the writer feels like. Most of them (Spawn is a little debatable), fit this trope.
• Astro City, as a Decon-Recon Switch of the genre, hits most, but not all, of the above.
• Irredeemable, though usual Status Quo has been thrown out of the window at the very beginning.
• The Boys is a far darker one than most, with most of the "heroes" being just as evil as the villains.
• Wanted used to be one of those, until the villains altered history to make it into a mundane world.

Films — Live-Action

• Marvel Cinematic Universe, being based on the comics, is slowly building into this, with the various superpowered aspects of the setting coming into the mainstream and becoming superheroes.
• DC Extended Universe is based around the first appearance of Superman, and the world turning into the DCU we know and love in response.
• While The Incredibles 1 is after the forced retirement and/or death of the world's superheroes, most of the anecdotes of and flashbacks to the glory days seem to show a Golden Age superhero setting with larger-than-life heroes and absurd villains.
• Sky High is set in the school where standard superheroes (or sidekicks) are trained, with the protagonist's parents being traditional superheroes.

Literature

• Wild Cards is something of a subversion. There are people with remarkable powers, and even a rough Golden and Silver Age (an alien viral outbreak shifted the world from nonpowered WWII heroes to superpowered individuals), the overwhelming majority of those afflicted (and more than a few of our protagonists) don't engage in traditional superheroics.
• Super Powereds is based in one of four super hero colleges set up to train future super heroes. The books dig pretty deep into how such a system would actually work, including the various government agencies, licenses, and paperwork that had to be created to handle everything.
  • Corpies is a spin off that focuses on hero and a group of non-heros who do search and rescue work, and the differences between those who got a hero license and those who didn't.
• I Became the Villain the Hero Is Obsessed With: The setting is generic enough, and there are enough references to the status quo in America and how that differs from Korea, one could easily imagine it taking place in the DC or Marvel universes.
• Whateley Universe: While the series as a whole is set in a Superhero School (even if the school administration would disagree on the 'hero' part, as the school is technically a Truce Zone between heroes and villains), the overwhelming majority of Superhero setting tropes have some degree of expression in the series, whether deconstructed or played straight (or often, both). There even were the equivalents of the Golden and Silver ages in the series Backstory.
• Worm is an interesting deconstruction of the setting but takes the opposite approach of most deconstructions; instead of playing all the standard tropes straight and seeing what the world looks like with them taken to their logical extremes, it instead starts with a Standard Superhero Setting and then explores what set of circumstances would have been necessary to generate it.

Tabletop Games

• Mutants & Masterminds is based around replicating comic books, and while it has rules for a variety of possible worlds, the flagship setting Freedom City is very much based around replicating the Standard Super-Hero Setting. The default assumption is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink full of silver-age heroes fighting flamboyant villians in Freedom City, a metropolis-style New York replica.
• Champions is the oldest one of these in Tabletop Games, with a Cast of Expies based on mainstream comic books. It's developed a slightly darker tinge over the years, with supervillian attacks leaving serious death tolls and comic-book magic being the surface level of a more complex occult system, but it's never quite gone into full desconstruction and mostly remains a straight example.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse is a strange metaexample - the premise of the game is that it's a card game based around the (fictional) Sentinels Of The Multiverse setting which took Trope Maker status from Marvel and DC.

Video Games

• City of Heroes is centered around the conflict between the heroic Freedom Phalanx and the evil Lord Recluse, as well as various other smaller teams. The players are new recruits on either side, protecting the eponymous city from Cartoonish Supervillainy or trying to take it over.
• Eternal City: The setting ticks off a lot of checkboxes:
  • No matter the route, you can expect to confront at least one hostile Wielder or even a small army of them.
  • Some aspects of the game's setting are given a deep lookover, and may or may not turn out for the better, coming off as a Decon-Recon Switch of the superhero genre. Issues include how a Wielder's powers affect their surroundings—and their own life—for good or bad or in-between, public fears (which are sometimes justified) of said Wielders using their powers for ill intentions, and a Wielder's life outside of being one which may at times cross each other.
  • There's a Fantasy Kitchen Sink of cultures, genres and powers.
  • The current order of things in the city, and the rest of the world, is being kept by Wielders of the Central Department stopping monsters invading from the Dimension... except by the end of the last day of the week, things'll have gone to hell—until time resets anyway.
  • Artifact Wielders gain their powers from being chosen by said Artifacts. The Black Gate Event itself was what prompted a Mass Super-Empowering Event of humans-turned-Wielders before the current story.
  • The Central Department is effectively the world's Super Team that manages a Super Registration Act.
  • Wielders and the threat of the Dimension are all common knowledge the world over, though it's presumable that there aren't Wielders all over the world at the moment because of how recent (six months) the rise of Wielders is.
• Freedom Force: Through Usage of The Chosen Many. The setting has alien invaders, magic users, supervillains, a Captain Fishman and a Captain Patriotic.

Webcomics

• Bad Guy High, though it's rather played as a parody most of the time.
• Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi, being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between several cartoons from which many are from Super Hero genre or already are examples of this trope, obviously turned out into this.

Western Animation

• Teen Titans (2003) Happily embraced Fantasy Kitchen Sink with a few nods to a Shared Universe.
• Both Dexter's Laboratory with its two sub-shows - Dial M for Monkey and Justice Friends and The Powerpuff Girls (1998). Even more so if you count Canon Welding between them, caused by apperances of superheroes Major Glory and Valhallen in both shows, among many other things.
• Miraculous Ladybug SP01 - "Miraculous World: New York" revealed that Miraculous Ladybug (and possibly other Zagtoon IPs) are set in this type of world, complete with a Super Team and the Big Applesauce.