Secret Identities Research Articles

Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities (review)

Reviewed by: Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities Karen Coats Jung, Mike . Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities; illus. by Mike Maihack. Levine/Scholastic, 2012. 308p. ISBN 978-0-545-33548-5 $16.99 R Gr. 5-8. Vincent Wu lives in a town with its own superhero, Captain Stupendous, who has been fighting monsters, robots, and supervillains since before Vincent was born. He and his friends, Max and George, form the most knowledgeable (and also the nerdiest) of the four Captain Stupendous fan clubs in town, so when something goes wonky with Captain Stupendous, the superhero comes to the boys for help. They are surprised to discover that the superhero is really Vincent's longtime crush, Polly, who recently became Captain Stupendous when the superhero's former alter ego transferred his powers to her just before he died. Even more surprising is that Stupendous' latest foe is Vincent's father's high school rival, who has turned into an evil genius named Professor Mayhem. When the professor kidnaps Vincent's mother, Vincent not only has to help Polly learn how to be Captain Stupendous, but he also has to figure out a way to defeat Professor Mayhem and save his mom. This classic fanboy fantasy hits all the right notes as Vincent uses his wits to overcome some pretty formidable odds. Not only must he outmaneuver a dangerous foe, but he also has to fight for his place in his trio of friends and figure out how to handle sweaty palms and a first kiss; there's even a little side plot about learning to accept a new boyfriend in his mother's life as well. The dialogue is witty, the plotting clever, [End Page 250] and the sentiments are right on target for the age group; fans of Cody's Powerless (BCCB 2/10) and readers who enjoy stories about superheroes, underdogs, and friendship skirmishes will all find something to like here. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A complete history of American comic books

This book is an updated history of the American comic book by an industry insider. You'll follow the development of comics from the first appearance of the comic book format in the Platinum Age of the 1930s to the creation of the superhero genre in the Golden Age, to the current period, where comics flourish as graphic novels and blockbuster movies. Along the way you will meet the hustlers, hucksters, hacks, and visionaries who made the American comic book what it is today. It's an exciting journey, filled with mutants, changelings, atomized scientists, gamma-ray accidents, and supernaturally empowered heroes and villains who challenge the imagination and spark the secret identities lurking within us.

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero by Danny Fingeroth. Foreword by Stan Lee

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and Creation of Superhero Danny Fingeroth. Foreword by Stan Lee: New York: Continuum, 2007. If we accept Hebrew Bible as historical source, persons of identity have forever debated how that identity is or should be parsed into its components of ethnicity, nationality, and religion. In past decade, writers have renewed this dialectic through a sharpening focus on ethnicity as a strand of superhero comics. Michael Chabon's novel, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) explored angst and feelings of impotence over Hitler's Europe. Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow (2005) roots birth of comics not only creators but also somewhat shadowy enterprises of Harry Donenfield and Jack Liebowitz. Rabbi Simcha Weinstein's Up, Up, and Oy Veh! (2006) sifts through superhero comics to celebrate story analogues and religious impulses. Danny Fingeroth, who knows comics scholarship well, brings to this ethno-religious arena unique background that informed Superman on Couch (2004), which explained appeals and evolution of different story types superhero comics. Like his earlier book, Disguised as Clark Kent shows a deep familiarity with principals and particulars of comics as a trade involving many hands and minds. Fingeroth's previous career at Marvel, creating stories for Dark Hawk, Hulk, X-Men, and serving as Group Editor for SpiderMan Comics, lends his treatments a rare authority. How many authors can cite, as Fingeroth does, precisely relevant interview materials with seminal figures like Will Eisner? A reader also finds here a personal dimension rare comics scholarship. Fingeroth, self identified as a New York Jew with eastern European roots, is trying to reconstruct culture of persons from a recently lost world of immigrants foreign and so strange as to take on air of fairy tales (22). Rather than listing important Jews comics as a tribal celebration, Fingeroth aspires to present superhero fantasy's Jewish inflections, as he puts it, trying to separate them from elements found predecessors such as Gilgamesh, Hercules, Zorro, or Lone Ranger. He realizes that this story is strongly interpretive rather than straightforwardly factual. Even Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber), who writes book's Foreword, emphasizes that Fingeroth's attribution of ethnic values is speculations and conclusions (11). Lee and his cohorts felt in front of our minds that we were just trying to make best action-adventure comics we could (10-11)-not attempting to portray or project Jewishness and certainly not noticing it. In other words, they saw themselves as assimilated and making popular American stories process. Conceding this sort of resistance, Chapter 1, Secret Identities, collects a number of these denials by creators. As regards their creative intent, is relevant to mark a difference, employed by Fingeroth, between portrayalwhere there is congruency between creator's conscious intention and creative product-and expression, where symbolic values (and symptoms) may be projected absence of, and perhaps contrary to conscious purpose. Jules Feiffer made point well his New York Times obituary for Jerry Siegel, The Minsk Theory of Krypton, suggesting it wasn't Krypton that Superman really came from; was planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw (qtd. Disguised, 24). At time of Superman's genesis, Siegel likely saw himself stretching Utopian science fiction (published his own magazine, Science Fiction: Advance Guard of Civilization), but Feiffer and Fingeroth argue for psychic layers of secret superhero birth linked to existential fears shared by 1930s Jews. Siegel himself gravitated toward such a perspective 1975 when he spoke of his great urge to help downtrodden masses, who included the helpless, oppressed Jews Nazi Germany (qtd. …

“You’re not a Freudian, Are You?” Secret Identities in the Lives of Working Clinicians

INTRODUCTION: MEETING THE QUESTION The woman and I are meeting for the first time to discuss whether or not she might like to pursue psychotherapy with me. She is a woman in her forties, with three teenage children and two insane men, her ex-husband and her live-in boyfriend. As the men have become more and more insane, and her concerns about her children have grown accordingly, she has begun to wonder if she, too, is insane. She is having episodes of blind rage in which she smashes things in the house. She thinks she might want to take poison. She is afraid she might need to kill her boyfriend to prevent being killed by him. ‘‘Holy cow,’’ I say to myself. ‘‘Do I need this?’’ She has been referred, as so many of my patients are, by a friend, or a friend of a friend’s friend. So she knows very little about me, about how I work, except that I am rumored to be a good therapist. Toward the end of this first hour, then, I give her the opportunity to get to know me a little better before we begin. ‘‘In order to help you decide whether you want to work with me,’’ I say mildly, ‘‘is there anything you need to know about me?’’ She fixes me with a glassy stare and says, ‘‘What kind of therapist are you?’’ ‘‘Well. I’m not sure what you want to know, but in terms of clinical practice, I describe myself as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.’’ She leans forward. ‘‘Psychoanalytic? You’re not a Freudian, are you?’’

Secret Identities

Secret Identities