With great power comes great hunger: Marvel Zombies as parody of the superhero trope

Abstract

ABSTRACT There has always been something of the monster baked into the comic book superhero’s DNA. Whether it pertains to the reality-bending powers of superhero soaring through the air, seeing through walls, setting her body aflame or altering her size, or by the more Gothic literary antecedents and ‘science gone amok’ themes constitutive of their origin stories, the comic book superhero treads a fine line between saviour and monster, as often evinced in the oscillating reactions of approbation and fear displayed by the diegetic public’s reaction to them. Marvel Zombies, Marvel Comics’ commercially successful depiction of its beloved superheroes as ravenous, flesh-eating cannibals, expresses one of the more recent and unsettling throwbacks to the monstrous origins and nature of the Marvel superhero. Employing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s methodology of reading culture from the figure of the monster, this article proposes to explore Marvel Zombies as an indictment and parodic criticism of the Marvel Superhero. Just as the double is, per Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, an uncanny reminder of repressed truths and desires, so too does the decaying Marvel Zombie function as the uncanny doppelganger of the Marvel superhero, revealing the stagnant character development at its rotten core.