The Superhero Reader CharlesHatfield, JeetHeer, and KentWorcester, Editors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Abstract

The Superhero Reader Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester, Editors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.As a follow-up and companion piece to Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester's A Comics Studies Reader (2008), their new collaboration with Charles Hatfield, The Superhero Reader, aims to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated or influential commentary on superheroes, and.. .to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical (xvii). Although such a description could be applied to an anthology of cultural criticism on virtually any other topic, the editors acknowledge that part of their mission is to legitimize the critical analysis of superheroes, the red-caped stepchild of pop-culture academia. Although there have been single-author books concerning superhero comics before this, nothing quite like The Superhero Reader has been published before. The text that comes closest is Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan's also newly-published collection, What Is a Superhero f (2013). That anthology, however, takes only relatively recent criticism and commentary in its varied attempts to answer the title question. With Hatfield, Heer, and Worcester's mix of book excerpts and articles from both decades past and the twenty-first century, they perform admirably in conveying the rich, evolving intellectual heritage of superhero studies.Similar to A Comics Studies Reader, The Superhero Reader is helpfully divided into discrete sections, each featuring eight essays. The first concerns the cultural roots and early years of superhero comics. In the second, varied writers apply folklore and cultural studies in attempts to define the genre of superhero comics. The third and final section features essays analyzing the superhero figure through the lenses of gender, race, and sexuality, among other approaches.Perhaps the greatest strength of this collection is its integration of modern academic essays with the works of public intellectuals from the earliest days of superhero comics to the present. For instance, in the first section, contemporary comic book writer Gerard Jones's excerpt from Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004) is followed immediately by a passage from Philip Wylie's Gladiator, a 1930 novel about a man with superhuman strength. The texts perfectly complement one another, allowing readers to learn about and then see directly one of the precursors to the superhero genre. …