Abstract
The Marvel comics film adaptations have been some of the most successful Hollywood products of the post 9/11 period, bringing formerly obscure cultural texts into the mainstream. Through an analysis of the adaptation process of Marvel Entertainment’s superhero franchise from comics to film, I argue that militarization has been used by Hollywood as a discursive formation with which to transform niche properties into mass market products. I consider the locations of narrative ambiguities in two key comics texts, The Ultimates (2002-2007) and The New Avengers (2005-2012), as well as in the film The Avengers (2011), and demonstrate the significant reorientation towards the military of the film franchise. While Marvel had attempted to produce film adaptations for decades, only under the new “militainment†discursive formation was it finally successful. I argue that superheroes are malleable icons, known largely by the public by their image and perhaps general character traits rather than their narratives. Militainment is introduced through a discourse of realism provided by Marvel Studios as an indicator that the property is not just for children.
 Keywords: militarization, popular film, comic books, adaptation
Highlights
Nick Fury, head of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D) tells his team of assembled superheroes: “there was an idea... called the Avengers Initiative
Militainment is not propaganda, which works to deactivate the questioning citizen, but works instead to integrate the citizen into a military-entertainment complex (Stahl, 2009). This shift follows Bacevich’s (2013) theory of the “new aesthetic” (p. 23) of war, where the mass armies of prior wars were replaced by soldiers to be seen as talented specialists who represent idealized American morals using high end technology, creating a gap between the soldier and citizen that had not existed in prior conceptions of the military
The New Avengers are the traditional Marvel model of independent loners who overcome their personal problems to stand up for a greater good while S.H.I.E.L.D. takes its inspiration from the Bush era foreign policy and the Ultimates, with its own team of heroes, the Mighty Avengers (Bendis & Cho, 2007), who use force to solve problems
Summary
Nick Fury, head of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D) tells his team of assembled superheroes: “there was an idea... called the Avengers Initiative. Militainment is not propaganda, which works to deactivate the questioning citizen, but works instead to integrate the citizen into a military-entertainment complex (Stahl, 2009) This shift follows Bacevich’s (2013) theory of the “new aesthetic” 23) of war, where the mass armies of prior wars were replaced by soldiers to be seen as talented specialists who represent idealized American morals using high end technology, creating a gap between the soldier and citizen that had not existed in prior conceptions of the military. The New Avengers (2005-2012), as well as in the film The Avengers (2012) as the site for textual analysis to demonstrate the significant reorientation towards the military of the film franchise
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