Super Heroes
Super Heroes
A Modern Mythology
The superhero has been the staple of the modern comic book since the late 1930s. The phenomenally successful movies Superman and Batman have made these two comic book superheroes as familiar worldwide as any characters ever created. Yet to relatively few aficionados are they known at first hand from their appearances in comic books.
Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology explores the origins of the superhero by documenting how heroes emerged from the comic book genre and are defined both by its history and by audience expectations.
To show some of the most influential and paradigmatic figures, this study focuses on the texts of three comic books in the genre—The X-Men, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen. It examines ways in which the comics mythologize both the role of the hero and the nature of consensus, authority, and moral choice.
Blending academic scholarship with specialized knowledge of the comic book medium, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology will have appeal for several audiences. Since most of the academic scholarship published on comic books has focused on history rather than on cultural analysis, this book will be of immense value to scholars of popular culture.
The X-Men, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen take center stage in an academic study of the rise of the superhero in modern popular culture. Traces the developments from the 1930s, identifies the seven laws of superheroes, and provides a rare cultural analysis to complement the many histories of comic books.
Richard Reynolds teaches at Central Saint Martins in London, where he is Course Leader of the MA Applied Imagination course and Joint Head of Academic Support for the college. He is also a former publisher and occasional broadcaster. He has written, lectured and broadcast widely about aspects of the superhero, the comics medium and their context since 1991. Currently, his research interests focus on the relationship of the superhero and superheroine (or superwoman) to issues of gender and sexuality, and on the superhero’s relationship to the philosophy of excess and the omnipresence of the superhero in contemporary culture.
