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superhero
An Introduction’s Inevitable Conclusion: Art Spiegelman: Golden Age Superheroes were Shaped by the Rise of Fascism
It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since the Folio Society published Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949 as compiled and edited by Roy Thomas. I saw it as a sponsored Facebook advertisement… [more]
Citizenship 101: The DC Public Service Announcements of the 1950s and 1960s
An unlikely 1949 brown paper schoolbook cover produced by DC Comics and distributed by the Institute for American Democracy (IAD) received a great deal of attention following the violent protests in Charlottesville in August 2017.… [more]
Different Men of Tomorrow: Superman and Providence
Stop me if you’ve heard this story. A mild-mannered bespectacled journalist works at an American newspaper attempting to find a story, having to deal with a senior editor, a wise-cracking coworker, and a troublesome, opinionated… [more]
Panther’s Range: The History of the Black Panther Prior to Christopher Priest
The Black Panther was a ground-breaking character in his 1966 debut. From his first appearance onward, he was seldom absent for long from Marvel Comics publications, whether as a guest star or part of the… [more]
Excerpt from Brett Dakin’s American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and the Battles of Lev Gleason
INTRO: I never met Lev Gleason—he died five years before I was born. My mother would tell me stories about her flamboyant, free-spending uncle from New York City, and I especially loved hearing about Uncle… [more]
Exploring White Privilege in Christopher Priest’s Black Panther: Part 2, Hunter, the White Wolf
Hunter glided into the pages of Black Panther stealthily, first trailing him under a cloak of invisibility in the closing panels of issue #3, before fully appearing in issue #4. Even then, his back story… [more]
Exploring White Privilege in Christopher Priest’s Black Panther: Part 1, Everett K. Ross
It seems shocking that it took more than 30 years for Marvel’s flagship black superhero Black Panther to have a writer who was himself black. This milestone on its own would have made Christopher Priest’s… [more]
Bold, Precise, Experimental: Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers and Their Coming-of-Age Story
Whenever Kieron Gillen and Jaime McKelvie’s excellent run on Young Avengers gets mentioned online, it’s more often than not to talk about how diverse and inclusive is in regards of sexual identity. This is absolutely… [more]
Thor ’77-’78: On the Never-Ending Road to Ragnarok, Part 4
The Mighty Thor #265: This one is truly an ALL BATTLE ISSUE! We left off with The Destroyer, a suit of indestructible-looking armor, powered by someone’s spirit force, crashing into battle with Thor. We find… [more]
Green Lantern’s Burden: Re-Evaluating the Superhero Genre’s ‘Woke’ Moment
At the turn of the new decade, as the euphoric epoch of the 1960s finally withered away, the symbols of American optimism took on new burdens and new crises. The superheroes of the 1970s, now… [more]
With Great Power Comes Great Career Opportunities: A Character Study of Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s Zenith
Colin Smith makes some valid points in his article “He’s Not a Super-Hero, He’s Not Even a Very Naughty Boy: The Case Against Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s Zenith”. Zenith isn’t a superhero. That’s the… [more]
Jonathan Hickman’s New Avengers #1: Memento Mori
If Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers #1 begins with a creation story, his New Avengers starts out with a less hopeful proclamation: “Everything Dies.” Hickman’s New Avengers #1 opens with a one-page prologue providing a recap of… [more]
There is Another World: Postmodernism and Identity in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol
Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol is certainly not an easy book to recommend. On the surface, it’s a very dense work with dozens of different literary references hiding in every corner, and it can… [more]
Judge Dredd and the Rise of the Police State
The dystopian science fiction film Dredd (2012), starring Karl Urban as the titular Judge Dredd and Olivia Thirlby as his rookie-in-training Psi Judge Anderson, adapts the popular British comic strip character originally serialized in 2000AD… [more]
Send in the Clowns: Todd Phillips’s Joker
Coulrophobia. A fear of clowns. It’s kind of an ironic fear when you consider the idea that clowns are humanity’s way of making fun of its own mortality. For the longest time, I actually thought… [more]
Van Jensen on His OGN Two Dead
“In America, no one is more powerful than a police officer,” a character says at one point in Two Dead, the new crime graphic novel from publisher Gallery 13, “a cop can detain you, hurt… [more]
Because I Am the Goddamn Batman: Political Ideologies and Transhumanism in Superhero Comics
Superheroes give us a way to get at the ideologies at work in transhumanism and politics. The genre of superhero comics is a fantastical take on an often dystopian version of our own real world.… [more]
David Seelow on Teaching with Comics and His Book Lessons Drawn
With over twenty-five years of experience in higher education, David Seelow’s career has been defined by his desire to develop new and innovative ways of educating students. In addition to his academic work, Seelow founded… [more]
Academics on the Legacy of Fox’s X-Men Films
Given how fast our current news cycle moves, it is often difficult to remember a time when comic book movies thrived before the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, if we cast our minds to the early… [more]
Hell is Other People: Superheroes, Outsiders, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Part 2
Previously, I explored the themes of Chris Ware’s landmark graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth — specifically the role and function of the superhero in this piece and even beyond in Ware’s… [more]
Hell is Other People: Superheroes, Outsiders, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan
Chris Ware’s seminal graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is a masterwork wherein Ware chronicles the struggles of main character, Jimmy, as he navigates through life, eventually meeting his estranged father for… [more]
Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers #1: An Avengers World is Born!
Hickman begins Avengers #1 like a creation story, the theme of creation being prevalent throughout the three-issue opening arc: “First there was nothing. Then everything.” As we will see, this is juxtaposed against New Avengers… [more]
“I won’t wear one of those damnfool spandex body-condom things. I don’t have the bust for it”: Superhero Costume in the WildStorm Comics of Warren Ellis, Part 3
In How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, Klock applies Harold Bloom’s concept of the ‘agon’ to Ellis’s treatment of superheroes in his work for WildStorm. For Bloom, poets can only escape the ‘anxiety of… [more]
Capes, Cowls, and Purple: How Prince Merged the Worlds of Music and Comics with Batman and Beyond
Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958-April 21, 2016), known throughout most of his career simply as Prince, had been an important part of music since his humble beginnings with the band 94 East in 1975,… [more]
The Road to Vertigo: The Suppression and Eventual Rise of Mature Comics and Their Readers
The legacy of Vertigo recalls the very idea of comics finally being allowed to mature; letting people swear, drink, openly take drugs for recreation, and bringing in some serious ambiguity as to what it means… [more]