How to Write About Superheroes

Abstract

AbstractEighty years after the first Superman comic, scholars are catching up to the importance, and to the popularity, of superheroes in comics and in other media. Recent monographs and edited collections examine racial politics, disabilities, other identities, and reception history across a range of decades and of superhero characters. Most of these worthy works remain within the limits of critique, judging the comics on how well they handle one or another theme; the result is a picture of superhero comics that cannot do justice to the genre. To them and to their like, the academic critics of the future might add—what vernacular comics critics already contribute—additional attention to what one or another character does best, to the transformative potential of even minor superhero work, and to how commercially produced superhero comics at their best handle narrative form.One superhero symbol can work many ways, as Neal Curtis’s examination of Truth and other Captain America stories shows: Cap has repeatedly fought off right-wing doubles, alternatively costumed versions of himself who aspired to make America white again.