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Superhero comic books are traditionally thought to have two distinct periods, two major waves of creativity: the Golden Age and the Silver Age. In simple terms, the Golden Age was the birth of the superhero proper out of the pulp novel characters of the early 1930s, and was primarily associated with the DC Comics Group. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman are the most famous creations of this period. In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics launched a completely new line of heroes, the primary figures of the Silver Age: the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man, and Daredevil. In this book, Geoff Klock presents a study of the Third Movement...
What do you get when you combine CSI science, the medicine of ER, and an acerbic, pain pill addict with a cane? House MD. In House Unauthorized: Vasculitis, Clinic Duty, and Bad Bedside Manner, the entire cast of the show is on the exam table: Wilson, Cuddy, Foreman, Cameron, Chase and particularly the cantankerous, but brilliant Dr. House. What makes House tick? Why did he really hire Foreman, Cameron and Chase (and why is it so easy to believe he's actually subjecting them to some sort of bizarre psychological testing)? What would House be like as a heating and plumbing repairman? And why doesn't Wilson just stop talking to him already? Answers to these questions are presented by a team of writers as talented as the team of doctors in House, MD. The prognosis? One heck of a good read.
An assessment of the achievement and aesthetic of one of America's brightest comics innovators
In late 19th century England, Oscar Wilde popularized aestheticism, also known as art-for-art’s-sake – the idea that art, that beauty, should not be a vehicle for morality or truth, but an end in-and-of-itself. Rothko and Jackson Pollock enthroned the idea, creating paintings that are barely graded panels of color or wild splashes. Today, pop culture is aestheticism’s true heir, from the perfect charismatic emptiness of Ocean’s Eleven to the hyper-choreographed essentially balletic movements in the best martial arts movies. But aestheticism has a dark core, one that Social Justice Activists are now gathering to combat, revealing the damaging ideology reflected in or concealed by our ...
Containing thirteen articles, this book makes the case to philosophers that popular culture is worthy of their attention. It considers popular art forms such as movies, television shows, comic books, children's stories, photographs, and rock songs.
Since the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, there has been a pronounced surge in alternative uses of the computer term ‘reboot,’ a surge that has witnessed the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices, involving politics, fashion, sex, nature, sport, business, and media. As a narrative concept, however, reboot terminology remains widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted across popular, journalistic, and academic discourses, being recklessly and relentlessly solicited as a way to describe a broad range of narrative operations and contradictory groupings, including prequels, sequels, adaptations, revivals, re-launches, generic ‘refreshes,â...
An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives. For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration—idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir—examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning. Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not onl...
Over the last several decades, comic book superheroes have multiplied and, in the process, become more complicated. In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation. As superheroes and their stories have grown with the audiences that consume them, their formulas, conventions, and narrative worlds have altered to follow suit, injecting new, unpredictable and more challenging characterizations that engage ravenous readers who increasingly demand more.
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 o...
While much of the scholarship on superhero narratives has focused on the heroes themselves, Batman’s Villains and Villainesses: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Arkham’s Souls takes into view the depiction of the villains and their lives, arguing that they often function as proxies for larger societal and philosophical themes. Approaching Gotham’s villains from a number of disciplinary backgrounds, the essays in this collection highlight how the villains’ multifaceted backgrounds, experiences, motivations, and behaviors allow for in-depth character analysis across varying levels of social life. Through investigating their cultural and scholarly relevance across the humanities and social sciences, the volume encourages both thoughtful reflection on the relationship between individuals and their social contexts and the use of villains (inside and outside of Gotham) as subjects of pedagogical and scholarly inquiry.