"Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and ...thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre’s utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre’s overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists’ radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation—human to machine, human to animal, human to god—are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how? Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre’s meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy—often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile—between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in “black and white” conservatism or in a “rainbow” of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power."
Comic Book Women Robbins, Trina; Davis, Blair; Brunet, Peyton
01/2022
eBook
The history of comics has centered almost exclusively on men.
Comics historians largely describe the medium as one built by men
telling tales about male protagonists, neglecting the many ways in
...which women fought for legitimacy on the page and in publishers'
studios. Despite this male-dominated focus, women played vital
roles in the early history of comics. The story of how comic books
were born and how they evolved changes dramatically when women like
June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée are placed at the center rather
than at the margins of this history, and when characters such as
the Black Cat, Patsy Walker, and Señorita Rio are analyzed.
Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the
golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous
genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built
their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality,
the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science
fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and
industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide
range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and
others. This revisionist history reclaims the forgotten work done
by women in the comics industry and reinserts female creators and
characters into the canon of comics history.
From Superman, created in 1938, to the transmedia DC and Marvel universes of today, superheroes have always been sexy. And their sexiness has always been controversial, inspiring censorship and moral ...panic. Yet though it has inspired jokes and innuendos, accusations of moral depravity, and sporadic academic discourse, the topic of superhero sexuality is like superhero sexuality itself—seemingly obvious yet conspicuously absent. Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero is the first scholarly book specifically devoted to unpacking the superhero genre’s complicated relationship with sexuality.Exploring sexual themes and imagery within mainstream comic books, television shows, and films as well as independent and explicitly pornographic productions catering to various orientations and kinks, Supersex offers a fresh—and lascivious—perspective on the superhero genre’s historical and contemporary popularity. Across fourteen essays touching on Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and many others, Anna F. Peppard and her contributors present superhero sexuality as both dangerously exciting and excitingly dangerous, encapsulating the superhero genre’s worst impulses and its most productively rebellious ones. Supersex argues that sex is at the heart of our fascination with superheroes, even—and sometimes especially—when the capes and tights stay on.
Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Shuri, and Black Widow. These four characters portray very different versions of women: the superheroine, the abuse victim, the fourth wave princess, and the spy, ...respectively. In this in-depth analysis of female characters in superhero media, the authors begin by identifying ten eras of superhero media defined by the way they portray women. Following this, the various archetypes of superheroines are classified into four categories: boundary crossers, good girls, outcasts, and those that reclaim power. Modern superheroines fall under any of the categories and with the push from the feminist movement, superheroines are becoming more powerful and independent.
Recent retellings of Indian epics draw upon science fiction. This article discusses an Indian superhero comic based on the Ramayana in which Rama, the central figure in the epic, is portrayed as the ...superhero Nagraj. The story uses the figure of the avatara (reincarnated one) to align the world of the epics with the contemporary world by incorporating science-fiction elements into their stories. It may seem that these retellings are drawing on strategies within science fiction to update the epics for the present so as to make mythic figures equivalent to superheroes. However, these strategies are not new. Parallel compositional techniques within folk epics prefigure these science-fictional strategies. This is borne out by the fact that Nagraj is an avatara of Rama, said to be reborn in the dark Kali age to fulfil unfulfilled desires from the past. In other words, instead of being for the sake of the present, superheroes are in the present to complete a quest from another time, drawing the present within the ambit of the mythic. There is a juxtaposition of a cyclical view of time associated with myth with the eventful linear time of superheroes, reorganising assumptions about chronicity in both superhero comics and epics.
